Whether you’re already in the videogame industry or not building virtual reality (VR) titles can be a daunting prospect, with plenty of new skills and techniques to learn to make a viable project. Software engines such as Unity or Unreal are two of the most popular tools for developers to use but there are more. Virtual Reality Toolkit (VRTK) is a piece of software designed to make it easy and quick to build VR solutions in Unity3d for a range of headsets. Currently available as VRTK version 3 for free, the creator is looking to Kickstarter to crowd fund version 4.
With VRTK developers get a range of features to use within their VR projects for free. These include options such as pointers, teleportation, animated curves, headset pointer and much more. To expand upon these, further resources and talent are needed. Run as a solo project by The StoneFox, VRTK v3 has already been used by quite a few studios to build VR titles on Steam, such as QuiVR, CarCar Crash, Deisim, Manastorm and Vive Spray to name a few.
The Kickstarter campaign aims to raise £150,000 GBP over the next month, and while VRTK will still remain free and open source, five professional unity assets that will be sold on the Unity asset store will form the rewards for Kickstarter backers. These are: Fully rigged VR hands, VR avatars, Teleport beam suite, Interactions with realistic weapons and an Inventory system. Depending on the reward tier backed, users will get access to one or all of these assets.
Currently VRTK supports the Oculus Rift SDK and SteamVR for HTC Vive but with version 4 this will expand to further headsets including Google Daydream, Samsung Gear VR and OSVR. Other planned features for VRTK include:
- Support for future VR accessories, pucks, etc.
- Refinement and improvement of existing solutions
- Support for visual scripting plugins (Playmaker, etc)
- Text input solutions
- More locomotion features
- More 3D controls
- Anti harassment solutions
- Camera effects such as tunneling
- Binaural audio
- Regular updates to the Unity Asset Store
- More robust roadmap of features with better estimated delivery dates (rather than just Soon)
- Better example scenes
- Script start up wizard for easy adding common scripts to scenes
- More video tutorials on how to build things with VRTK
- Tutorials on how to build multiplayer with VRTK
- Better online help documentation
- Continuation and growth of existing community and support
The campaign also has several stretch goals depending on its success, so keep reading VRFocus for further updates.