Virtual reality is going to be a big deal in 2016. The Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, HTC Vive, Playstation VR and plenty of Google Cardboard headsets will be out in the hands of the public this year. VR headset owners are going to be searching for as many quality VR experiences as they can get their hands on and it is up to developers to pioneer these early stages of virtual reality. We need people to look into VR, experiment, discover best practices and build virtual reality into the best platform it can be. Here are six platforms you can use to take your first steps.

There are several options for getting into VR — Unity, Unreal Engine, the Google Cardboard SDK, SteamVR/OpenVR, OSVR and WebVR are the six main options that come to mind.

Unity

Unity is a game engine that has been around since humble beginnings in 2005. It has grown to support a huge number of platforms since then and over the past few years has made leaps and bounds in its support for various VR platforms. I’ve got Unity and have found it to be really nice for developing on the Google Cardboard. Unity would be my first recommendation right now for people wanting to get into VR.

Platforms: Oculus Rift (integrated), Samsung Gear VR (integrated), Playstation VR (integrated), HTC Vive (Steam VR), Playstation VR, Google Cardboard

Language: C# or UnityScript (similar to JavaScript)

Price: Personal Edition is free with Unity splash screen as long as you do not earn more than $100,000 with your app

Download: Unity

Unreal Engine

Unreal Engine is another game engine that has been around for an incredibly long time, initially being used for the first person shooter “Unreal”. It also supports various VR platforms and even was used by Oculus Story Studio for their “Henry” VR short film. It doesn’t appear to be compatible with Google Cardboard’s SDK though.

Platforms: Oculus Rift (integrated), Samsung Gear VR (integrated), HTC Vive, (Steam VR in Unreal Engine 4.8 Preview), Playstation VR (integrated)

Language: C++

Price: Free with a 5% royalty on gross product revenue after the first $3,000 per game per calendar quarter from commercial products

Download: Unreal Engine 4

Google Cardboard SDK

Google Cardboard is one of my main suggestions for beginners getting into VR for one main reason – abundance. Chances are as a developer, you’ve already got a smartphone. Google Cardboard headsets cost around $20 or so and have a range of suppliers and brands releasing their own versions. It’s relatively simple to find one that suits your needs. Place your smartphone into the Google Cardboard headset and VR is at your fingertips! The Google Cardboard SDK supports development via either Unity (as mentioned above) or its Android SDK. For anyone who isn’t an Android dev, I’d suggest the Unity option.

Platforms: Google Cardboard compatible smartphones

Language: Unity development or Java via the Android SDK

Price: Free

Download: Google Cardboard Developer Page

SteamVR/OpenVR

SteamVR is a set of tools and services for virtual reality managed by Valve, the company behind Steam. Valve are working with HTC to produce the HTC Vive headset — a key part of the SteamVR project. OpenVR is the name for the API and runtime that does not contain the Steam bits, just the VR stuff. I like the sound of the OpenVR concept — “OpenVR is an API and runtime that allows access to VR hardware from multiple vendors without requiring that applications have specific knowledge of the hardware they are targeting.”

Platforms: HTC Vive

Language: C++

Price: Free

Download for SteamVR: StreamVR

Download for OpenVR: OpenVR on GitHub

OSVR

OSVR is an option for those looking for a way to work with VR but who want a solution that is open source. It apparently has a total of 300 industry partners, making it the “largest open source VR ecosystem in the industry”. These guys aren’t on their own fighting for the open source way — companies such as Unity, Unreal, Bosch, Razer, Sixense and Leap Motion are helping out in this effort too and sharing some knowledge. I’m intrigued to see where this leads.

Platforms: Oculus Rift, Sensics headsets, some Vuzix headsets

Language: C++

Price: Free

Download: OSVR

WebVR

WebVR is one of my favourite options, so I’ve saved the most exciting one till last! As VR spreads across homes around the world, the web is going to need to step up its game. Luckily, we’ve got a bunch of devoted people working on WebVR, a way of empowering browsers to show VR content in the browser. Recently, some of the team at Mozilla released A-Frame, a framework allowing you to create WebVR experiences using markup. This could be a great way of seeding VR content across the web that users can still see without VR by dragging around the scene.

If you are keen on looking into WebVR, I wrote a post late last year on how to build VR on the web today. Whilst it doesn’t cover A-Frame (I’ll be writing a SitePoint post on that early this year), it covers the most common methods that use JavaScript.

Platforms: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Google Cardboard compatible smartphones

Language: HTML and JavaScript

Price: Free

Download: WebVR.info

Download A-Frame: A-Frame

What do you think?

2016 is going to be a great year for virtual reality! Which of the tools above do you think are the ones developers should go for? Are there other tools out there that developers should be delving right into that I’ve missed? Let me know in the comments below or tweet your thoughts to @devdiner.

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