Category: Unity XR Toolkit

Posted on

Sarah Stumbo on Unity 2017.1 and Supporting Virtual Reality

Unity has helped support videogame developers on all platforms, but it looks like they’ve managed to find a way to simplify the processing of creating a videogame by bringing in new features such as Timeline, Unity teams, Cinemachine and much more. What’s so great about these new features is that it enables teams to work on a videogame together at the same time as well as making it easier for videogame devs to control the way in which characters move, are animated as well as controlling when and where the camera moves. 

VRFocus‘ Nina Salomons talks to Unity’s XR Evangelist Sarah Stumbo about what Unity is doing when it comes to virtual reality (VR). She explains that these new features are not specifically for conventional gaming but also apply to VR videogames. It can be very expensive and very frustrating for developers to have to upgrade, change and optimize their experience for new headsets being released and their subsequent updates. It seems that Unity aims to fix this with the XR Toolkit.

She discusses that the XR Toolkit will help improve inputs, allowing for developers to create a single experience that can be cross-platform and go on all headsets, including Microsoft’s mixed reality headsets. She also mentions that VRTK and how that is a higher level features for virtual reality. What’s very clear is that Unity aims to help support the community, hoping to create an environment and online community where developers can help support each other when building XR applications for the future. Unity 2017.1 is available now in beta, Check out the video below to get more information.

Posted on

Unity’s XR Toolkit Aims to Improve VR Development Later this Year

The Unite Europe 2017 conference is well underway in Amsterdam, Netherlands, with plenty of sessions focused on virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) development. VRFocus is at the event bringing you all the latest news and interviews, and caught up with Unity’s XR Evangelist Sarah Stumbo who revealed the company’s upcoming XR Foundation Toolkit should be ready later this year.

Earlier this year Unity unveiled the XR Foundation Toolkit (XRFT) during the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2017, a piece of software designed as ‘a framework for XR developers that allows anyone – not just programmers – but artists, and directors, random people who want to get into immersive design.’

XR Foundation Toolkit (Includes)

The premise behind it is to speed up development of immersive content enabling more people to dive into the industry. And while no release date has been confirmed just yet, it’s not too far away.

“XR Toolkit is something that we’re working on right now. It won’t be ready, I believe, until this Fall, but we’re really excited about it, said Stumbo to VRFocus. The toolkit will dramatically aim to improve the experience of developing for VR especially when it comes to the input. So there’s so many VR platforms now Oculus, Vive, Microsoft has their VR headset right now and what we really aim to do is to make all of those inputs, all of the controls for them cross platform so that you can build one experience for VR and deploy it to all of the headsets and the toolkit will be a really great toolkit for developers to get started quickly.”

Unity has been a major player in the VR field, with a significant amount of developers using its softare to create the latest videogames. This has been aided by the release of EditorVR – which saw an alpha release in December 2016 – allowing creators to build their experiences directly in VR.

The first day of Unite Europe 2017 has also seen Ubisoft reveal several prototypes for Microsoft HoloLens and the confirmation that Lenovo’s MR headset will be available prior to Christmas. For any further updates from the conference, keep reading VRFocus.