At this point, I was getting worried. How were developers supposed to support all these different headsets and controllers? Will multi-platform VR development be overwhelming for small teams new to VR development? Will the end result be a messy platform war, burned out displays and trampled controller husks littering the battlefield, where the majority of games work on Oculus or SteamVR but not on both? With so much happening around VR so fast, these seemed like legitimate concerns to me. But after spending a couple days at Oculus Connect 2 and talking to developers, I’m not so worried anymore.
VR development is going to be just fine.
All of the devs I talked to were predictably bullish on working with Oculus’ hardware. But I also tried to talk to some of them about cross-platform development, particularly with SteamVR. What I heard was good news.
“We want people to focus on making great content, great interactions, and deploy it anywhere. It just works out of the box,” said Nick Whiting, Epic Games’ lead VR engineer. Whiting and I discussed the new Bullet Train demo, but we also talked about how Epic’s been tailoring Unreal Engine 4 to suit the needs of VR developers. “For instance, [our previous demo] Showdown, we’ve shown it on the Vive, we’ve shown it on the Oculus, we’ve shown it on the Morpheus with no content modifications. It works on all of them out of the box with no content modifications, other than for the Vive, for the standing experience it assumes zero is on the ground, and on Oculus it assumes it’s in the head position. So you basically just change one number to set your camera position and everything else works. Very little modification to get it to work on different systems.”