30 Mar 2016
Starting Out In VR And AR: Best Tools For Ambitious Beginners
News
Here‘s the virtual reality/augmented reality pie. You, of course, want a slice of it. Maybe a finger in both of them. But how can you do it, if you have a dream, a sparkle in your eye, but no experience in coding? You are in luck, because developers are rushing head-over-heels to present their easy-to-use design and development kits for people like you. And we‘re making a list, just to help you out.
VR Software
Goo Create is an easy to use WebGL platform. It‘s so simple, you mostly end up dragging and dropping stuff, be it 3D models or state machine system which replaces the need for coding. State machine allows you to add behaviours that rotate an object, or play a sound at set time, or change material of an objected at the press of a button, no coding on your side involved.
WebGL might not be the most groundbreaking, AAA-producing format out there, but it makes it very democratic as far as systems are concerned. WebGL is run on all browsers of note, it allows you to get away with non-AAA graphics – which is a boon in VR creation, especially where Samsung Gear VR is concerned – and you expand on your works once you learn Javascript.
Unity 5 is the indie favorite game engine out there. Unfortunately, it doesn‘t have native support for visual programing – for that, you‘ll need to buy the Playmaker plug-in. This then guarantees that you won‘t need programing knowledge to make games – and on the most basic level, Unity is a free piece of software, so it‘s not like your Playmaker purchase is something you add on top of the basic cost.
Unity boasts compatibility with a mind boggling range of platforms, and you can use for everything from PC games to those things on mobile that can be generously called „games“. However, you will need another plug-in for VR. But by that point you‘re using a piece of software that has loads and loads of official tutorials, so you won‘t be left hanging.
Unreal Engine is the big daddy of free engines – you only pay them 5% of what you make, which we can all agree is more than a fair share. Unreal Engine also supports Blueprints, its own version of visual programing. Just drag and drop and mush them together until you end up with what you need (and which doesn‘t burn the computer down).
UE4 is mean to support stuff ranging from humble mobile games to blockbuster AAA development. The VR component can deliver 90 Hz stereo framerate at high resolutions. New blueprints, assets and whatever else are also available on their market.
UE4 also gives you the access to their source code - not that important for a beginner, but once you warm up, you can really delve into the guts of the engine to deliver astounding performance.
This is the last of the big kids, and it‘s newest iteration has been announced to be free. Or pay-what-you-want with an optional 9.99 a month subscription that leads to support and various other goodies. Either way, it‘s peanuts compared to its potential and power.
The beginner developers will be most interested in Cryengine‘s Flowgraph functionality, which is their fancy word for – all together now – programing without writing the least bit of code. Also, the launch of Cryengine V sees the company unveil more of learning materials and documentation – the lack of tutorials was what set it apart from Unity and Unreal Engine before. But not anymore!
Also, Cryengine, a beefy engine for beefy games, is compatible with all major platforms (consoles and PC), as well as Oculus.
Amazon Lumberyard is another AAA engine that‘s totally free. It‘s based on the Cryengine and monetized through various online services and multiplayer integration (so you can spite Amazon by making a single player game with no online connectivity). Seeing how it‘s Cryengine based, it has the same visual programming Flow Graph tools as the parent engine. However, these tools are enhanced so that you would be able to easily integrate various online functionality in games.
VR functionality is a planned feature!
Surprise! The free 3D modeling software Blender 3D also has a game engine. And that game engine can run on Logic Bricks, which is how Python (on which Blender is based) is turned into a visual programing suite. It‘s somewhat simpler and thus more limited than the other engines, but it gives you a 3D modeling tool you can use without launching an another program.
It bears so similarity to Autodesk Stingray, which also has a node-based visual programing mode, but Blender is much much cheaper (in that it‘s free).
Who wants a piece of that VR pie? Everyone, including Autodesk. Their Stingray game engine includes, among other things, visual node programing, all set for you new and ambitious users. Its recent upgrades have broadened the VR potential of the program by introducing support for HTC Vive. The engine is popular for design and visualization apps.
With that said, Stingray is not free, with prices ranging from $30 a month to $240 a year. It also meshes best with other Autodesk products like Maya LT and 3ds Max, and nobody called them ‘cheap’.
AR For Beginners
With Google Glass dead and Microsoft Hololens only now launching a dev kit, the future of augmented reality is a little less certain than that of VR. That said, AR is making progress via the help of ubiquitous phone cameras and people are developing software for various AR application.
Wikitude Studio is advertised as a way to make your own AR apps without funding or programing experience - something of great interest for beginners . Drag, drop, publish and your AR experiences will be available to folks who use Wikitude App. Eventually, you can go pro, get a paid version of Wikitude Studio or even hire some nerds to craft your AR experience through Wikitude SDK.
Entiti by WakingApp might not be a video game engine, but it does let you create both virtual reality and augmented reality projects with a „dynamic visual logic system“ which, as you can already guess, means you don‘t have to code anything.
The application is made for quick creation of VR and AR presentation, and other Entiti users can easily watch your Entities as long as they also have the app. It‘s extremely easy to get started with Entiti – you can make a simple 3D AR overlay for an image in about 10 minutes of blind stumbling about. I would know, I did that myself.
Future (and Beta) VR projects
Meanwhile High Fidelity is all about the VR. They claim that they have an extremely speedy way of creating your own „shareable, scalable and immersive virtual reality environment.“ It lets you create something close to your personalized Second Life areas or something more abstract. As long as it‘s meant to be experienced in VR and can be accomplished by using their take on „visual programing“ (as well as actual coding), you can do it.
Speaking of Virtual Reality that‘s like „Second Life“. „Second Life“ creators at Linden Lab have announced their Project Sansar... and have not told us much since. However, they have some serious claims. Sansar will supposedly democratize VR by letting people with no engineering (so, coding or modeling) experience create, share and monetize their own multiple user online VR experiences. So something that‘s very much Second Life so far.
Their aim is nothing short of being to VR what WordPress is to the internet. To that end, Sansar will be optimized for Oculus, but also available through PC and even mobile platforms.
IrisVR is here with the goal of making life easier for architects. The developers aim to make VR architectural presentations as easy to produce as they can be. The architect will only need to create the model of the building in some commonly available software like Sketchup and then IrisVR will convert it into something you can walk around in. The ease of conversion is the main selling point: you only have to have the model. And a VR headset, of course.
InsiteVR is quite similar to IrisVR. This piece of soft lets you make 3D or 360 image presentations. Again: drag, drop, explore, stub your toe while walking around in HTC Vive. You can see who is viewing the image you‘re looking at or see the world from their point of view to provide pertinent narration. On the 3D side, it supports the entire range of HTC Vive movements. So now you can crouch inside your 3D architectural model! The future is weird!
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