SteamVR is a virtual reality toolset from Valve Corporation headquartered in Bellevue, enabling users to experience VR content on hardware of choice. SteamVR supports the Valve Index, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows Mixed Reality headsets.
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Unity
Score 9.4 out of 10
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Unity Technologies headquartered in San Francisco offers the Unity real-time 3D and 2D development platform.
I wanted to play "Half Life:Alyx" which is the best VR game currently available. I was able to purchase it through steam during a sale, launch it through SteamVR, and stream it to my oculus. This allowed me to use the processing power of my desktop with the mobility of my oculus.
Unity is excellent for 2D and 3D games and educational experiences. It is well-suited for VR and AR development. It is also a great platform for mobile games. It is less-suited for non-game purposes (although it can certainly be used for those as well), or educational experiences. It is also less-suited for AR experiences that are highly complex, where you will probably want to write the native code in Android Studio or Xcode, as the case may be. It is theoretically less-suited for cases where performance is a huge concern as well, although, in my experience, performance has never been a problem.
Unity is a multiplatform game engine. It has more than 20 options for exporting your game, ranging from desktop, mobile, console, web and, lately, VR and AR. Unity was one of the first game engines able to export games playable on internet browsers and it helped to cement the World Wide Web as a place fit for gaming.
Unity has a very smooth learning curve for beginners. It is easy to start and soon you are seeing some tangible results of your efforts. The game engine has all sorts of helpers and shortcuts to facilitate some frequent tasks in game development.
Another of Unity's advantage is the access to Assets Store from within the game engine, allowing the user to import instantly objects, scripts and textures from the store into their projects. Such easy access to these elements from inside a project greatly enhances speed production and is particularly helpful to beginners.
SteamVR is the best platform on the market for VR games, and its integration with the already fantastic Steam marketplace makes it piggyback on a very mature product and highly tuned usability. The low-cost, high-reward offering is impossible to beat at this time. There is also a section that is in the works for VR videos, which, once complete, will add additional welcome functionality to the platform.
Steam on the whole is a very mature platform, so SteamVR had a great head start in that regard. I'm used to how Steam operates and that got me most of the way to understanding and navigating SteamVR right from the start. The thing holding me back from a perfect score is the lack of a simple tutorial for those who are not as familiar with the legacy Steam.
It's actually incredibly easy to use given the complex tasks you have. Once you learn the various windows it becomes second nature. Compared to something like Blender (which I would probably rate as a 2 on usability), the learning curve of Unity is a breeze! The only improvements I can think of would be to streamline some common workflows so you don't have to dig through menus to find them.
The system is easy to download, doesn't take much time to boot up, and is built on the tried and true bones of the Steam launcher. That means great memory of what games you've purchased in the past, and which ones you are currently downloading. Playtime metrics as well are tracked, and the SteamVR has a low crash occurrence, assuming your PC was stable to begin with
SteamVR is fast to boot up, fast to load games, and fast to recover even if you need to restart for any reason. The navigation within SteamVR is quick and responsive, and sifting through have libraries is smooth and fluid. When connected via virtual desktop to an oculus headset, SteamVR still works great and allows for wireless VR Gaming
I have not had to use Unity's support extensively. This is likely because there is so much documentation and so many classes available for free online. Due to this, there is little need for support. They were very responsive when I requested educational licensing. Setting it up and providing it all quickly.
SteamVR has more volume of games, a variety of games, and quality of games much more advanced than the oculus store. While the SteamVR headset is better than the Oculus, the software (SteamVR) is the better option. Plus, you can utilize your computer storage to hold games instead of being limited by the Oculus internal storage capacity.
We love utilizing unreal engines but we seem to have a better use case for the architectural visualization side of things. This has given us the ability to find better more photo-realistic assets from not only the marketplace but 3rd party sites that have a unity bases file to work off of.
One person connection is easy to establish and maintain, however we found that multiple people from multiple locations and internet speeds and troubles connecting to s SteamVR social hub. Ultimately we were unsuccessful, however once in a game we had no difficulty connecting to the social hub within it. For some reason, the connection outside of a game was harder to establish
