Interaction SDKs for VR Development

Now that you’ve learnt a great deal about fundamental concepts in Unity, it’s time to apply those skills in a practical VR project. In this project, we’ll build a basic lightsaber game inspired by Beat Saber. We’ll create the game step by step, learning some exciting VR concepts in Unity as we go.

Chapter goals

This chapter aims to explain the VR concepts through the development of a reward-based VR game. This section will be hands-on, and you’ll also be making the game side by side. Follow along and implement the concepts on your Unity Editor.

We’ll start with the selection of the interaction toolkit (the XR Interaction Toolkit, in our case). Then, we’ll install and configure the packages needed for VR development in Unity. After this, we’ll look at the gameplay for the VR game we’re going to develop. Then, we’ll set up the game environment.

Next, we’ll map a VR headset and controllers with the XR Interaction Toolkit to enable head and hand tracking. To interact with objects, we’ll discuss the interaction system. We’ll go over how to implement far manipulation using ray casting and how to specifically place objects using sockets.

The main focus of this section will be on different types of interactions, including close-range and far-range interactions. Additionally, we’ll explore filtering interactions using interaction layers. Finally, we’ll examine locomotion and, ultimately, implement a reward-based system by scripting the game and designing the user interface.

There’s a lot to learn in this section. The previous sections will be very helpful in designing, developing, and, especially, troubleshooting the game. The first step is to decide between the various interaction SDKs. Let’s find out more below!

Interaction in VR

In “Building Your First VR Application,” we learned how to develop our first basic VR application by importing the XR Interaction Toolkit and configuring some settings.

The most important aspect of VR is interaction. This refers to our ability to interact with objects in the World Space by certain actions such as selecting, grabbing, physics interactions, locomotion, and UI interactions. These interactions make our environment immersive and close to reality. Writing code for interactions from the ground up can be a very hard and time-consuming task. So, to help us get started with the development and design of our VR experience, there are multiple software development kitsSDK is a collection of software development tools in one installable package. ( JABBA SDKs) that enable us to leverage interaction.

Interaction SDKs

Here’s a list of popular SDKs that help us with creating interactive experiences in VR:

• Mixed Reality Toolkit (MRTK): This is a Microsoft-driven project that provides a range of components and features used by VR developers to accelerate cross-platform mixed reality app development in Unity.