We’ve partnered with Oculus to create a free intermediate level course, “Design, develop and deploy for VR.” You’ll learn VR best practices and how to build and launch your own vertical slice of a game from Unity and Oculus experts.

We’ve partnered with Oculus, to launch an extensive intermediate level course guiding you through all aspects of building a virtual reality (VR) game. As the VR industry continues to grow and mature, developers are asking more questions about making the switch to VR, and developers who already work in VR want to improve their skills. That’s why we teamed up with the experts at Oculus to build this comprehensive VR course, “Design, Develop, and Deploy for VR”.

In more than 20 hours of hands-on course content, you’ll learn about programming, user experience (UX) considerations for VR, optimization, launching your game and more. Twelve experts from Oculus and Unity give you in-depth lessons to help you build your own vertical slice (think, level of a game) of an escape room game. Plus, after you complete the course, you can submit your vertical slice for feedback from Oculus.

Even though this course is centered around creating a game, the principles and learnings apply to almost any type of VR content, whether you’re building practical business applications or immersive experiences as art or entertainment. You’ll find this course useful even if your interests go beyond making a game.

This course is designed to give you a complete picture of creating a VR experience. To help learners get comfortable with all aspects of VR creation, we’re also covering topics such as how to prototype and plan a VR experience, VR ergonomics, spatial audio for VR, and how to market your project.

We believe that to get the most out of the content, the lessons should be completed in the given order. But feel free to pick and choose units based on what you’re working on or where your interests lie. When you finish, you have the option to submit your vertical slice for review by the team at Oculus. This course is created with the Rift S in mind.

Here’s the course content at a glance:

Unit 1: Introduction – Chris Pruett from Oculus

Chris gives you an overview of the VR industry, best practices for a successful VR game and an overview of what you’ll be learning.

Unit 2: VR game development and prototyping – Ruth Bram and Mari Kyle from Oculus

Planning sets you up for success, and in this unit, you’ll learn to create a game design document, a player profile report and a press kit.

Unit 3: Using Unity to develop VR experiences – Joy Horvath from Unity

You’ll learn how to set up the Oculus and Virtual Reality Toolkit (VRTK integrations) in Unity as well as how to set up a basic VR scene.

Unit 4: Locomotion and ergonomics – Eric Cosky from Oculus

Get best practices for making your VR experience comfortable and learn how to implement a teleportation system.

Unit 5: Hand presence and interaction – Matt Franklin from Oculus

Learn how hand interactions work in VR, how to design interactions to manipulate objects and how to overcome challenges with item placement.

Unit 6: Best UI practices for VR – Gabor Szauer from Oculus

Transition from 2D to VR, review well-established VR interaction paradigms (think laser pointers) and find out how to design a user friendly interface for VR.

Unit 7: Sound in VR – Robert Heitkamp from Oculus

Implement spatial audio for VR with the Oculus Spatializer Plugin. Plus, dive into reverb and mixer settings and learn how to test your audio.

Unit 8: Performance requirements – Matt Conte from Oculus

Be efficient with assets, implement lighting and configure your settings to get better performance from your VR game.

Unit 9: Optimization – Cristiano Ferreira from Oculus

Get to the bottom of bottlenecks with Unity Profiler, Frame Debugger and Unity Profile Analyzer. You’ll also learn about the technical requirements to pass Oculus Virtual Reality Checks (VRCs).

Unit 10: Testing – Lisa Brewster and Bruce Wooden from Oculus

Successfully run tests on your VR application. By the end of this unit, you’ll be ready to implement quality VR playtests to your development cycles.

Unit 11: Submission and go-to-market strategy – Mari Kyle from Oculus

In this final unit, you’ll get a crash course on marketing to drive awareness of your VR experience and pricing strategy. We’ll also talk about best practices for submitting to the Oculus Store.

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You can get started learning with this course today. All you need is Unity, the Oculus SDK and VRTK , and Oculus hardware. Don’t worry, we’ll show you how to get started.

If you’re new to both Unity and VR, you may want to explore some introductory courses before you jump into this one. We recommend an intro to Unity course and an intro to VR tutorial.

Don’t forget that at the end of this course you’ll be able to submit your vertical slice for feedback from Oculus, giving you feedback to avoid common pitfalls developers make when submitting their games to the Oculus Store. Between the course content and feedback, you’ll have everything you need to take your next step in VR development.

What are you waiting for? Up level your VR skills with our new course.

Take the course