What are recommended Software and Hardware for VR production?

May someone guide me to what is the recommended software and hardware to use for VR production and programming language?
 
You could start with unity or unreal engine. Both are freely available and have high quality tools+vr support and also work on mobile/consoles in addition to desktop. They do take some of your profit though if you release something commercially. Unreal+epic store for distribution is probably winning bet if you want to maximize your share of profit.

You will likely be mostly bound by gpu performance. Faster the better but you can get started with something slow and cheap. I believe the latest gpu's have a lot more vr related optimizations compared to old ones.

Video below gives pretty good introduction to what is needed and how to get started

 
You could start with unity or unreal engine. Both are freely available and have high quality tools+vr support and also work on mobile/consoles in addition to desktop. They do take some of your profit though if you release something commercially. Unreal+epic store for distribution is probably winning bet if you want to maximize your share of profit.

You will likely be mostly bound by gpu performance. Faster the better but you can get started with something slow and cheap. I believe the latest gpu's have a lot more vr related optimizations compared to old ones.

Video below gives pretty good introduction to what is needed and how to get started


Thank you for that, I will research up on those engines. Thanks for the tip on the video to watch.
 
I am thinking Real Time graphics with 360 video, thank you in advance.

You meant those two as something separate or something together?

For something together (look at Jonathan bell VR on PSVR), I don't think unity or unreal have any easy work flow to do it.

For something separate, unity and unreal have tons of tutorial and tons of "ready to use" projects that you can use to familiarize yourself.
 
You meant those two as something separate or something together?

For something together (look at Jonathan bell VR on PSVR), I don't think unity or unreal have any easy work flow to do it.

For something separate, unity and unreal have tons of tutorial and tons of "ready to use" projects that you can use to familiarize yourself.

Thank you for your information. I was meaning something together.

I will have a look at Jonathan bell VR as you described.
 
I believe you can combine them. Videos can be streamed textures mapped into objects. Or you can play video and insert 3d objects/scenes into it for the inverse.
 
What about the option of Realtime graphics?

Basically you can make static 3d scene with the editor. Then use scripting to make it come alive like games do. You can enable user to roam free there or use scripting to create on the rails experience. Unreal and unity support vr so you don't need to do anything special. Just build your scene.

You can think video as a texture on surface. You could embedd video into objects in the realtime scene. Or you could have something like 360 video as background(skybox) and then embedd realtime elements on top of that.

My gut feeling is the combination will work out of the box but performance might be horrible. Performance would be the difficult part. You probably have to make compromises on format, bitrate and quality of the video to make things work smooth.
 
Maybe best way forward is to download unreal engine:
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/

Then reproduce the vr tutorial linked above locally to get feet wet.

Then imagine the simplest way to mock up the experience you are looking to make. Keep it super simple.

Once the mock up is done you have concrete idea on what work you need to do, what is missing etc. Then you can focus on the end product and ask concrete questions on open items.

Doing some work is best design tool imho. Analysis paralysis is real and can get you stuck.
 
My gut feeling is the combination will work out of the box but performance might be horrible. Performance would be the difficult part. You probably have to make compromises on format, bitrate and quality of the video to make things work smooth.

In regards to performance issues, maybe better to not include video in realtime graphic scenes. Is this correct?

I will give the unreal engine a try.
 
In regards to performance issues, maybe better to not include video in realtime graphic scenes. Is this correct?
Depends on the complexity of the rest of the scene. What you claim you want to do (VR scenes with embedded video textures like the Jonathan Bell demo) seems rather hard to achieve.

I'd start with Unreal Engine or Unity's VR tutorials and slowly go from there.
 
How about just try to make something that works and think about the performance way later?

That's what I usually do when making apps, websites, games, scripts to automate my work (so I can go home at 5 PM instead of 10PM without extra pay).

Sure, those are not a good development practice / culture. But I think simply "just trying to do something" and seeing / experiencing it "works" really helps:

  • To determine the scope. And what to focus.
  • To see where the hard stuff are and make a plan about it.
  • To self motivate.

Edit:

Maybe DREAMS can help? It seems people able to quickly make "working" proof / concept pretty fast with that thing.

Dunno it can make something like Jonathan bell VR or not.

I hadn't used it again for weeks. I think @Shifty Geezer knows dreams pretty well
 
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