The first build of Unity’s virtual reality game dev toolkit, EditorVR (EVR), which lets developers create games within virtual reality, will be launching today.
Unity’s principal designer Timoni West made the announcement on Twitter, although she explained this build is purely “experimental,” so expect plenty of changes in the weeks and months ahead.
During a demo at this year’s Unite conference (shown above), Unity showed how devs could use the editor, which supports both the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, to manually place objects from within the game world.
The editor uses the same UI as the regular version of Unity — albeit realized in three dimensions — as accessibility and usability are paramount.
“This is just Unity’s normal UI system,” added Unity’s principal engineer, Amir Ebrahimi, speaking at Unite. “So, as a developer you’re not building anything new, you don’t have to learn anything new.
“This is important for us because we want you to take the UIs you build for EVR and translate them to the build players you release.”
From within EVR, developers can grapple with windows — re-christened as “workspaces” — to resize and move them just as they would in Unity.
EVR will also be completely open-source, and will feature an open API so users can tailor tooling to suit their individual needs.
“At launch, the build will be completely open-source and feature an open API to easily expand, adapt and customize tooling to suit individual needs,” said Unity CMO Clive Downie, speaking to Gamasutra earlier this year.
“This is kind of an unprecedented first for Unity, in terms of our ability to offer open API and a level of open-source to our toolset so that our customers can build this tool with us and get the most out of it from day one.”
You can find out all you need to know about EVR, and download the new tool, right here (Google doc).