Virtual Reality for the Masses 🥽
Hello friends!
Thanks for all the great feedback on last week's newsletter. If you'd like to see anything specific for next week, just hit reply and let me know!
We may still be far away from Neal Stephenson's Metaverse, but virtual reality is advancing at a breakneck pace. VRChat is insanely popular. Facebook just announced Horizon, a VR world for the Oculus Quest and Rift, coming in 2020. But not everyone has an Oculus headset or an expensive VR gaming rig. How can we commonfolk build or enjoy virtual reality on a budget? It's perfectly doable, and may even be the ideal approach for connecting to a massive audience.
Let's talk about VR. 🥽
TLDR
How to get started with VR on a budget
Make or purchase a Google Cardboard headset
Target web browsers with A-Frame
Model 3D assets in Blender
Get A Headset
To truly experience VR, you need a headset. Headsets range from DIY (free) to super-expensive. Here's a list of some current popular headsets:
Oculus Rift - PC-powered headset with two touch controllers
Oculus Quest - Self-contained headset with two touch controllers
Oculus Go - Self-contained headset with one controller
HTC VIVE - Several models with plenty of accessories and room-scale tracking
Google Daydream - Standalone and smartphone-based headset options
Google Cardboard - Controller-free basic headset that you can build yourself or buy cheap
If you want to build VR for everyone you'll need to accommodate the Google Cardboard. But you should also consider a more advanced model with two hand controllers for those used to hand-control interaction. Anything that can be done with hand-controllers should not be critical to your VR experience in order to deliver a quality VR experience to everybody.
Pick A Framework
If you want to build VR worlds, you don't want to start from scratch. Here are a few development frameworks that get you up and running right out of the box:
Unity - This has become the industry standard for building in virtual reality. But it comes with a price if you want to launch a commercial project.
Unreal VR - The highest-quality performant VR engine available. This is not for the faint of heart.
A-Frame - Build VR experiences for the browser using markup and JavaScript. Experiences also work without a headset.
If you want to reach everyone, even those without VR equipment, build in A-Frame. It has the lowest barrier to entry, it's free, and has a huge ecosystem of developers supporting it. However, experiences in A-Frame cannot be as high-fidelity as those in Unity or Unreal, so polygon counts and texture files need to be kept to a minimum.
Construct Your World
Inevitably, what you want to build will go beyond 3D primitives, and you'll need to build things in a 3D modeling application. 3D applications can get super expensive, but there are also free options. There are also some pretty awesome tools for building your worlds while using your VR gear, but we're not going to get into those here. I've added links to some of those further below. For straight-up modeling, you need a standard 3D application. Here are some of the leading 3D applications:
Maya - Hollywood industry-standard modeling. This is the créme de la créme of 3D apps.
3ds Max - Long-time leader in modeling for games. Excellent low-poly tools.
Blender - Open source and free, but capable of anything you can dream of building in 3D.
If you want to model 3D on a budget, you can't get any cheaper than Blender. And you're not sacrificing capability. It's also worth noting that there are many, many specialized VR modeling apps that can all output to the model formats you'll need for VR.
Check Out These VR Experiences and Tools
Hit reply to tell me all about what you're doing in VR. I'd also love to know what you thought of this issue, and what you want to hear about in the future. Thanks for reading! 🙌
Until next week,
Craig