How can you begin developing for virtual reality?

Continuing my serie on the most asked questions on reddit (I already answered about if you have to buy a VR headset and which one you should buy), today I’ll talk about what do you need to know to start developing some games in virtual reality.

So, how can you begin developing for virtual reality? What do you need to know?

I’ll just tell you a little secret: developing for virtual reality requires almost exactly the same skills of any other 3D games development. But keep this secret for yourself: it is so cool when you impress people saying them that you’re a virtual reality developer and girls just go crazy for it because they think that you’re some kind of futurist superhero, like Johnny Mnemonic.

The Disruptive Technologies Conference

I’m proud to announce that we of ImmotionAR, with the help of some sponsors and some friends of Gianni’s (that are Microsoft MVP like him) are organizing a super-cool conference here in Turin, Italy about new disruptive technologies! We’ll talk about virtual reality and will showcase our full-body VR solution ImmotionRoom

There will also be another cool guy showing VR + mind control (uuuh) and three speeches about Hololens, with people actually taking Hololens devices there (and I hope they’ll make me try it!).

If you’re in Italy, come and see us! See agenda and registration info here. It can be a great occasion to talk about AR and VR together! If you’re not from Italy, share this event to let other people know!

What VR headset should you buy?

In my last article, I explained how to decide if you have to buy a virtual reality headset. In this new one, I’ll try to explain you which one you should buy, depending on what you want to do.

CAUTION: before reading this article, you must be aware that virtual reality is becoming full of fanboysm, so expressing the wrong opinion about a virtual reality headset to your friends (like saying “Oculus Rift is great” to a Vive owner) can make them kill you with a shotgun or, even worse, can be the beginning of WWIII. So, use the contents of this article at your own risk.

Every day, new VR headsets come to the light. In this article, I’ll just review the most known ones, i.e.: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, PSVR, OSVR, Gear VR, Google Cardboard.

Should you buy a VR headset?

Some months ago I started being part of the reddit virtual reality communities, like /r/virtualreality, /r/oculus and /r/osvr. This communities are really great (if you’re not part of them… what are you waiting for? Subscribe!), but sometimes there are questions that are just repeated one bazillion times: if I had one dollar for each time I answered them, I’d be the king of the world.

One of this recurring question is “Should I buy a VR headset?”, so I’m writing this post just to give you an answer from my perspective once for all (and so at the next time I’ll see this question on reddit, I could just type a link to this post… much easier). I’ll give you answers to other common questions in the next posts.

Let’s start : do you have to buy a VR headset?

The answer is… it depends. And with this answer full of wisdom, the article ends here, thanks for reading…