To allow sales people to meet clients in the COVID19 era without travelling, busienss wants to create a virtual meeting room .
The clients will get Oculus Quest as Hololens is hard to procure right now where as business wants to use Hololens on their end.
Will an application /experience created for Hololens using Unity work as is on Oculus Quest or does it make sense to have the same device on both end?
I am new to this area, so not sure if this question makes sense, but is it something like developing 2 versions of code, one for iOS and one or Android and using something like Xamarin to make the process easy ?
Does Unity have features to make applications compatible between Hololens and Oculus Quest ?
MRTK makes it easy to make multiplatform XR applications.
https://microsoft.github.io/MixedRealityToolkit-Unity/Documentation/GettingStartedWithTheMRTK.html
Unity will allow you to run most applications on both Windows on ARM (HoloLens 2) and Android (Quest).
MRTK even has hand tracking support on both platforms.
https://microsoft.github.io/MixedRealityToolkit-Unity/Documentation/CrossPlatform/OculusQuestMRTK.html
Related
currently I am working on a project designed for the Hololens 2 using MRTK.
Now I want to make this app run on a mobile device (more specifially, an Android Smartphone) like any other AR app. Eventually these two should be able to communicate with each other. What would be the best way to go about it? The following ideas crossed my mind:
Copying and adapting the current scene made for Hololens by replacing Hololens exclusive features with ARCore features.
Creating a new project just for the mobile app.
Would love to hear your suggestions and ideas, thanks!
MRTK supports a wide range of platforms, including mobile devices such as iOS and Android. You can use the MRTK API directly on your Android device instead of ARcore. For how to configure MRTK for iOS and Android please refer to this link:Configure MRTK for iOS and Android [Experimental]
We are working on a VR collaboration app where user imports CAD files at run time. Then different users perform operations on it together. We are using Unity.
The challenges:
1. CAD files are very large.
2. Our app has desktop as well as Oculus Rift mode.
Which multiplayer approach should we follow? I heard that OculusPlatform sdk has support for generic networking also. Should we go for it, or rather choose from UNet and Photon?
Any suggestion will be greatly appreciated.
I am trying to understand the VR platform stack of Vive, and how it's games are developed.
I am struggling to understand where exactly does openVR, steamVR and Unity fit into picture.
My understanding so far has been that:
openVR - Hardware independent layer providing APIs for peripheral access.
That is it can provide access to either Oculus or Vive hardware via
a defined interface.
SteamVR - Provides access to hardware to games developed either in unity or
unreal.
Unity3D - A game engine to develop games.
If anyone can correct me, I will be much grateful.
Or if my understanding is correct, then why can't games being developed in unity 3D access hardware directly via openVR.
OpenVR is an API and runtime that allows access to VR hardware from multiple vendors without requiring that applications have specific knowledge of the hardware they are targeting (ref1), SteamVR is the customer facing name that we use for what users actually use and install (for details check this video: Using Unity at Valve)
Also Check to see that can you use the Vive with OpenVR without Steam ??.
Lets finally look all these terms, thanks to Reddit post:
How a Game Appears on your Head Mounted Display(HMD):
A game renders an image, sends it to it's corresponding runtime. The runtime then renders it to the HMD:
Rendered Image using the :
[OVR/OpenVR] SDK -> [Oculus/SteamVR] Runtime -> [Rift/Vive]
SDKs:
SDKs are used to build the games. A game can either implement OVR or OpenVR or both. This means that the game has access to native functionality in it's corresponding runtime. SDKs do not handle async timewarp or reprojection, those are handled by the runtime!
OVR: Made by Oculus for the Oculus Rift. Current version (14th May 2016) is 1.3.1 and can access all features of the Oculus runtime.
OpenVR made by Valve and supports Vive and Rift via the SteamVR runtime
Sidenote to SDK's and Unity games: Unity 5.3 currently has optimizations for VR in their native mode. The native mode supports Rift, Gear and PSVR, but not SteamVR. A game compiled with Unity 5.3 can use those optimzations with the Oculus SDK but not the OpenVR SDK. The OpenVR SDK has it's own optimizations, which may or may not result in similar performance. However, the upcoming Unity 5.4 will support SteamVR natively and performance should be more or less identical. Please note: this is Unity specific and other engines might have similar or different optimizations for some or all headsets.
Runtimes
Oculus Runtime responsible for async timewarp and handles device detection, display, etc. It (the runtime service) needs to be running for Oculus Home to launch
SteamVR Runtime responsible for reprojection and supports Rift and Vive
Software Distribution Platforms
Oculus Home needs to be running for the Rift to work. By default only supports apps from the store (checkbox in the settings of the 2d desktop client to enable other sources). It downloads games and runs them. It also handles the Universal Menu on the Xbox button
Steam/SteamVR technically does not need to run when launching OpenVR games, but highly recommended (room setup and config is pulled from there). Also handles overlay menu on the Xbox button, or when running on the Rift, it launches by pressing the select/start button in the Oculus Universal Menu
Finally worth reading.
I have background in android and have developed few apps of my own. Now I want to explore VR app development for android. Going through forums etc., first thing I understand is that I need to have basic infrastructure like unity 3d sdk, cardboard sdk, cardboard device etc. I am not able to understand roles these individual components play in overall bigger picture.
Like, why do I need unity 3d sdk if I have android sdk and cardboard sdk, and android studio as dev environment?
Then, if I plan to develop for something like Oculus then what all sdks and devices are needed, and which programming language I can work with?
Your options depend on which device you'll target:
Game engines like Unity: You need Unity and some plug ins and of course the device you will target too:
Google Cardboard / Daydream
Samsung Gear VR
From scratch application: Your language is java and you need to download the sdk for your target device:
Google Cardboard / Daydream SDK
Samsung Gear VR, Oculus Mobile SDK
Regards
I think there is a lot of promise in web-based VR. Of course, the app will not be as high fidelity as a native application built in Unity or Java but you get the benefit of being able to target many platforms out of the box. ReactVR is a cool project coming out of facebook that is making it easier and more performant to build VR apps with web technologies.
Here is a cool starter-kit that can help you get started if you are interested: https://github.com/scaphold-io/react-vr-graphql
P.S. GraphQL is a great tool for enriching your VR apps with data no matter if you're building it with React, Unity, or Java.
You can check out A-Frame (https://aframe.io), a web framework for building VR experiences. It's been out over a year and has a strong community and ecosystem. With web-based VR, you get cross-platform support across Rift, Vive, Cardboard, Daydream, GearVR out of the box. With A-Frame, you get all of the boilerplate with a single line of HTML. You just have to grab a VR-enabled browser.
A-Frame's architecture is similar to Unity's, entity-component, but A-Frame makes it declarative and similar to web development. With effort, the fidelity can rival native (https://blog.mozvr.com/a-painter/).
I am going to start my first game on unity which is a real time multiplayer game for android. I want to ask few things.
Do I need to buy pro version or any license for the whole process (from development to submission to play store, I know that splash screen can not be change). My game is almost like 8 pool ball with all multiplayer features (create user profile, play with friends, play with Facebook friends, challenge friends, leader board filters etc etc) like in 8 pool ball. I am planning of using Photon for multiplayer.
I also need the Web and Facebook version as well in future.
I also see few pages about this but I am still confuse.
Thanks in advance.
The Unity3D personal version does NOT support C# sockets on mobile, so no 3rd party realtime plugin, neither Photon nor any other, will work on Android (or on iOS) with the personal version of Unity3D, but they all require Unity3D pro.
There is only one exception to this: PUN+ works even with Unity3D Personal on Android and iOS, because it applies a fallback to use C++ sockets through a native plugin on platforms, on which C# sockets are not available in Unity3D Personal. However, this is only true for PUN+ (Photon Unity Networking Plus), not for PUN (Photon Unity Networking).
Unity in Version 5 has no engine-specific pro-Features anymore. So basically free = pro (besides some services and splash screens). So you can go with Unity 5 free and e.g. Photon.
Regardings costs: It could be that you need some sort of webservice for your game (managing profiles etc.) so the webserver could produce some costs. But for getting started there are many free services out there like https://www.heroku.com/
Furthermore you will need to pay the 25$ fee for Google Play to publish the game.