WorldViz (Vizard)

Description

A software intended to allow you to "build once, deploy everywhere." It claims "Universal VR hardware connectivity supports all HMDs, 3D displays, motion trackers, gloves, and input devices." It has been used for experimentation and research at Stanford, it appears to be less used for commercial reasons.

Tutorial for Hello World (Windows)

1. Tutorial

Recommended System Requirements

According to a Vizard dev: "While nearly any recently purchased desktop and most laptops more than meet the requirements, here are the absolute minimums needed to run Vizard:"

• 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

Metrics

Accessibility: The estimated time for someone to get it up and running

• Beginner: No coding or graphics experience | 5+ hours

• Intermediate: Some coding or graphics experience |2 hours

• Advanced: Both coding and graphics experience | 1 hours

• Expert: A lot of experience with computer graphics | 1 hours

Power: The engine's power - i.e. how much one can do with this

• High: It is extremely good to get a really quick VR environment up and running quickly. It interacts very easily with all the most common VR Hardware which makes running your 3D environemnt in VR really easy.

Usage: Evaluation of software's use for the following purposes

• Art - Since  it is a great prototyping  tool (given the development speed) it could be used by artist to quickly create their ideas in VR without much overhead 

• Game design - Could be used to create games, but doesn't have the maturity of Unity

• Science - Useful to create 3d environment to conduct behavioural tests (This is how it is used in many research labs) 

Summary:

Vizard was easy to pick up, and worked relatively quickly in VR.