VR Development Software
@Austin
Overview
The successor to Unreal Engine 4, Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) is Epic Games' latest update to the game development suite which so many use to develop their games for a multitude of platforms. It now carries better support for the latest consoles, but more importantly for this wiki, contains updated support for VR/AR/MR uses. UE5 brings improved 3D texture visuals, landscaping, and lighting while not sacrificing performance. It's able to provide real time lighting and texture effects, which can be helpful for developers, being able to see changes without needing to recompile or rebuild.
@Charles, Updated by @Hiloni
What is Unreal Engine 4?
Unreal Engine 4 is a complete suite of development tools made for anyone working with real-time technology. From enterprise applications and cinematic experiences to high-quality games across PC, console, mobile, VR and AR, Unreal Engine 4 gives you everything you need to start, ship, grow and stand out from the crowd.
What are features and supports?
Unreal Engine 4 is a popular game engine for both 2D and 3D games, including VR games. It supports Oculus Rift, Steam VR / HTC Vive, PlayStation VR, Mac, iOS / ARKit, Google ARCore, Samsung Gear VR, Google VR, OSVR, and Leap Motion.
Photo Rendering in Real Time
Full C++ Code (need to look over this feature)
Blueprints help create a world without coding.
Robust Multiplayer Framework
Full Editor in VR mode
MARKETPLACE
Buy and sell content that you and other developers have built to foster community and allow for the creation of magnificent worlds
Recommended Development Hardware
Desktop PC / Mac / Linux (lengthy install not sure how to yet)
Installation guide for Linux (yet to be tested)
Windows 7 64-bit / Mac OS X 10.9.2
Quad-core Intel or AMD 2.5 GHz or faster
8GB of ram (For good performance 32GB.. the more ram the better)
Supported VR Hardware and Software
Price: FREE!
Installation: (Warning: You have to create an external account)
Install time: 20-30 minutes
Install Unreal Engine- Click on the Library tab -> Select Engine Versions and install Unreal Engine(Warning: The unreal engine 4 will take upto 35 GB and around 30 minutes to install)
Unity 3D
What is Unity?
Unity 3D is a popular game engine for both 2D and 3D games, including VR games. It supports Oculus Rift, Google Cardboard, HTC Vive, (unknown pls someone figure out what that is in the picture), Gear VR, Microsoft Hololens, and Google Daydream. There are third party plugins available as well for additional VR platforms.
Cost
FREE for Personal, $35/month for Plus, $125/month for Pro. Deciding whether you need Unity Pro? Check out this video!
Space
5.9 GB
Supported OS's - for running Unity games
Unity Cloud Build: allows you to build your Unity project for multiple platforms/operating systems - it can run pretty much everywhere!
iOS: player requires iOS 7.0 or higher
Android: OS 4.1 or later; ARMv7 CPU with NEON support or Atom CPU; OpenGL ES 2.0 or later.
Desktop
OS: Windows XP SP2+, Mac OSX 10.9+, Ubuntu 12.04+, SteamOS+
Graphics card: DX9 (shader model 3.0) or DX11 with feature level 9.3 capabilities
CPU: SSE2 instruction set support
WebGL: Any recent desktop version of Firefox, Chrome, Edge or Safari
Unity Web Player (Unity 5.3 and below, legacy versions of Unity only)
Supported OS's - for development
iOS: Mac computer running minimum OS X 10.9.4 version and Xcode 7.0 or higher.
Android: Android SDK and Java Development Kit (JDK); IL2CPP scripting backend requires Android NDK.
Windows Store: Windows 8.1 (64-bit) and corresponding Visual Studio and platform SDK
Supported VR Hardware
Oculus family of VR devices, notably the Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 (DK2)
Consumer edition of the Gear VR (a mobile headset which requires a Samsung Galaxy S6, S6 Edge, S6 Edge+, or Note 5 handset)
Note 4 (previously supported by the first Innovator Edition of the GearVR with lower performance)
Other VR Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) will also work with Unity, such as the HTC Vive
Time to Install
around 20 minutes
Resources
Notes on Unity - (A note for Unity 3D + SteamVR (HTC vive)
Shorter version: Unity provides an asset for SteamVR. For this asset, stay with v1.2.2 for now.
Longer version: The newest update (v1.2.3, 01/10/18) of this asset throws out errors: invalid matrix & failure to render controllers with Unity 5.6 and later. If you update to v1.2.3 accidentally and use a newer version of Unity, please go to vive's Github , download v1.2.2, and use it to replace v1.2.3 manually. I'm not very sure about the compatibility of an early version of Unity with v 1.2.3.
-- Fumeng (01/30/18)
Cryengine
Cryengine is a popular game engine for 3D games, including VR games. Cryengine is know to support Playstation VR, HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.
Currently several games including "The Climb," and "Robinson: The Journey" have been built in Cryengine with VR support.
Cryengine is free to use and has a "pay what you want" model.
Lumberyard
Lumberyard is a new game engine for 3D games, including VR games. There is not much information on the official website as to the VR platforms it supports (someone figure this out pls).
Currently no known games made with Lumberyard.
Lumberyard is free to use.
Vizard
Cost
?? (need to contact sales for prices)
Space
~500 MB
Supported OS's (+ desired requirements)
Window XP SP3 or above
Pentium processor at 1 GHz or higher (Recommended: Dual Core 2 GHz or higher)
OpenGL compatible graphics card (Recommended: nVidia GeForce 6 series with 128 MB or greater)
1 GB RAM (Recommended: 2 GB RAM or greater)
400 MB hard drive space
Supported VR Hardware
Claims to work with most virtual reality devices. (I tested it with both Vive and Oculus. It delivered).
Planning to test in the cave
Time to Install
around 5 minutes
Resources
Tutorial
linktototorialpage
The Visualization Toolkit (VTK) is an open-source library for 3D computer graphics and scientific visualization. It consists of a C++ class library and several interpreted interface layers including Tcl, Java, and Python.
More Information
A-Frame/WebVR
"WebVR is a JavaScript API for creating immersive 3D, virtual reality experiences in your browser. A-Frame uses the WebVR API to gain access to VR headset sensor data (position, orientation) to transform the camera and to render content directly to VR headsets. Note that WebVR, which provides data, should not be confused nor conflated with WebGL, which provides graphics and rendering." A-frame is based in HTML and built on top of the DOM so most libraries and frameworks work including:
Cost
FREE
Space
N/A (cloud based?)
Supported Headsets
"Most"
Time to Install
0 minutes
Tutorials (will simplify/expand upon later)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv6_C4UqTfs
Sources
https://makezine.com/2016/03/24/makers-introduction-vr-best-software-tools-free/ (Viewed January 29th, proper citation TODO)
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/vr (Viewed January 29th, proper citation TODO)
https://unity3d.com/solutions/cinematicvr (Viewed January 29th, proper citation TODO)
https://aframe.io/docs/0.7.0/introduction/vr-headsets-and-webvr-browsers.html (Viewed February 15, proper citation TODO)