5 Skills To Be A Successful VR Developer

It’s incredibly exciting to be in the virtual reality industry right now. There hasn’t yet been the “killer app” built for VR, but as the technology and the industry matures, applications are becoming more immersive, meaningful, and replayable. What skills will developers need to have in order to create compelling VR applications? In my limited experience as a WebVR developer, I believe that the following 5 skills will be needed to be a great VR creator.

Software Engineering: For the past several years, knowledge of C# has been a requirement in VR development. While experience in it will always be advantageous, with the rise of WebVR and UnityScript, mastery of Javascript can be sufficient replacement. If you have knowledge in either, or even better — both, you should be set in regards to software engineering.

3D Tools: Many of the earliest VR developers came from the game industry because of their knowledge of 3D tools like Unity and Unreal. While Unreal is certainly used, especially in AAA titles, Unity seems to be the tool of choice for most VR developers. Understanding textures, scripts, components, objects, and other Unity basics will go a long way in developing your VR chops.

Platform Specific SDKs: While efforts in WebVR and OSVR are pushing for open-source / device agnostic VR experiences, at this time the VR industry is heavily fragmented and will probably continue to be so for the near future. For many mobile developers, this will feel normal as many of them focused on either the Android or iOS platform. While engineers were able to be proficient at both, many mobile devs found mastery in one or the other. This will be especially relevant for the array of platform choices in VR.

I don’t believe a single VR developer will be able to develop for more than one or two platforms with extreme proficiency. As to date, there are currently SDKs for the Oculus Rift, PS4 VR, HTC Vive, Gear VR, and Cardboard/Daydream. It will be up to the developer to match their existing skills and see where the market is trending to choose which SDK to focus on.

Sound Design: One of the first lessons you learn as a web developer is to never include any audio features. Many of us remember how annoying the early 2000 websites were when they included sound effects. To this day, auto-playing video and audio exist on sites and continue to aggravate users. But, integrating sound in VR experiences has been shown to be absolutely crucial in creating immersive experiences. While game developers will have no problem integrating audio into their projects, web developers will have a lot to learn about sound design. Aspects of sound design including audio effects, audio location, background music, and many more topics will be required learning to create a memorable VR experience.

VR UI/UX: When you surf the web, different pages vary in the design, but every website follows common practices with hyperlinks, shared icon meaning, user behavior patterns, and more. While that standard doesn’t exist today in VR, you’re going to want to keep up to date with the current VR UX trends and best practices. There are early pioneers like Mark Alger and Jim Yang who are demonstrating early VR UX principles that are being adopted by the community. There will be many more talented designers and developers in the coming years who will help the industry coalesce around UI/UX standards.

See more at http://www.vrdev.yonibinstock.com/