Bringing my first Unity project from GearVR to the Vive — Part 3

Hi Everyone!

Following my previous artices on my 2 weekend Unity challenge where I learned the basics of Unity and created my first VR project.

About a month happened betwee the challenge and this next step....And to be honest, during this time I haven’t touched my project at all!

The reason why I wanted to learn Unity wasn’t to start a new career as a content creator but to understand what Virtual Reality creators were going through and how to help them. As I mentioned before, I am also running monthly hackathon on VR/AR technologies and want to be able to better support participants.

During the two weekend challenge, I learned a lot. It was really intense and I really needed a break after that. However, even if my project wasn’t perfect or transcending, I still wanted to take it further and port it to the Vive.

Bringing my project from GearVR to the Vive meant:

• Make it work in a full room scale
• Integrate the Vive’s controller
• Add interactions with the environment

Make the project work with the Vive
This part sounds complex but it is really not and takes only a few minutes. As I downloaded and linked the Oculus SDK to build my project for the GearVR, I did the same with SteamVR SDK, making sure I changed all the devices to Vive on the settings. It is as simple as this.

Integrate the Vive’s controller
For this part, I used VRTK resources and went through a step by step video guide by VRTK. It all went well and I could move around my scene using the Vive controllers until I decided to watch the next video and got tempted to add immediately new interactions with the environment.

Add interactions with the environment
As all the first changes I made to make my project work with the Vive worked well, I decided to speed up things a bit and directly add interactions with the scene. I should have jumped quickly on this step. It was a mistake and I broke the controls several times…

Resources used:

• Ray Wenderlich - tutorial
• Youtube help
• VRTK

After a few attempts I managed to fix the controls but every time I tried to add interactions it either mixed up the controls or didn’t have any effects.

So, this follow-up session working on my Unity project wasn’t a complete fail. I managed to get the project work on a Vive using the Vive controllers in a room scale environment.

I would certainly need to put my hands on it another complete day or weekend to add interactions and play more with the triggers actions.

But for now, I will leave this project as it is. In the coming days, I am going to start a coding course focused on web development that will let me prototype and start another type of project.

I will, of course, try to post regularly and update you on my journey learning programming basics ;)

If you are also starting such a course or have to learn new skills to create a project, feel free to drop me a message on Twitter @AmandineFlachs, I’d love to exchange and share our experiences!

DISCLAMER: This post was initially posted on Medium