Low-Fi prototyping to speed up Virtual Reality development

Extensive List of VR prototyping tools to improve your workflow

My first project in VR (using Unity) that led to my obsession for finding a better way to design for VR

Hello everyone!

There are a lot of different ways one can go about developing a VR App depending on if it is a 360 video, Gaze based 360 UI or a Room Scale Experience. Regardless of the type of “VR” app that you are developing, it is almost always better to create a low-fidelity prototype to test your idea first before diving into development. This can save you a lot of time in developing a VR experience that is usable and reduce development costs as you are only developing a concept that works.

Low-fidelity prototyping is a method used extensively in User-Centered Design process for designing web and mobile apps. It allows you to quickly test out your ideas and get user feedback on a design that you haven’t invested a lot of time in developing. Some of the methods for developing low-fidelity prototypes for 2D UIs are Paper prototyping and Wireframing.

Wireframe of a webpage using wireframe.cc

Coming from a UX design background for web and mobile, I have been searching for a prototyping tool that will allow me to quickly test my ideas in Virtual Reality, similar to what Figma, Sketch and Framer allowed me to do for 2D UIs. Unfortunately since VR is such a new medium with multiple kinds of content, input methods and VR headsets, such a tool seems elusive to me in the recent future. Although, I have been trying out different tools to make low-fidelity prototypes and have finally settled on Origami for 360 degree experiences and Unity for 3D VR/Room scale experiences. (This will probably change in the near future as new tools are released :)

I thought it will be useful to the VR community to share the list of prototyping tools that I have come across. Let me know if you want me to add another tools not included in this list.

Tools for prototyping 3D VR experiences

Tvori — $19.99

Sketchbox VR — Free

Unity — Free and Paid

Unity Editor VR — Free

Unreal — Free and Paid

React VR — Free

NeosVR — VR based game engine — Free

Tools for prototyping 360 degree experiences

Origami Studio — Free

Adobe after effects — $9.99/month for the whole Creative Suite

Framer Studio — $15/month

Sketch — $99

A tutorial on how to use Framer, Adobe After Effects and Aframe to do 360 degree prototyping

Facebook design — Some design assets for Unity and Origami Studio to prototype 360 degree — Free

Apparently Mettle provides add-ons for editing 360 degree video for after effects and Premiere. I haven’t tried them myself but they do seem that they could be of use. Although they are paid tools — $150

Web based Tools for 3D prototyping

PlayCanvas — Free

A-frame — Web framework for VR — Free

Vizor — Free

WebVR — Javascript API for creating VR — Free

Halo labs — Request demo

3D Modeling tools in VR

Tilt Brush VR — $30

Quill — $29.99

Medium — Free

PantheonVR — Currently in Beta

GravitySketch — Currently in Beta