How to learn VR development for Rift/Vive in Unity

Mukul Agarwal
Virtual Reality Pop
3 min readNov 26, 2016

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Hello! If you are here, you have already started the process of learning to develop for VR. I am so happy to recruit another one of you into my (and a few hundred thousand people’s) craziness. Thanks for making the jump.

Let’s start: First of all, you will need to select a Game Engine: Unity or UnReal. My personal preference is Unity as it has a lot of online resources to learn from.

Note: If you are reading this and WebVR has taken over the world, then ignore this whole article. These game engines are probably dead.

Now that we got that out of the way let me tell you how to learn Unity to develop VR experiences. Here is a step by step guide:

  1. Download Unity3D from here. Subscribe to the Unity Personal plan if you are just starting out and not planning on making a commercial release.
  2. Go through the Roll-a-ball tutorial (REALLY IMPORTANT!). It will get you familiar with the workflow and UI of Unity. It will also teach you about gameobjects (building blocks of the VR world) and scripts (that add behavior to the VR world).
  3. Go through the Survival Shooter tutorial. You don’t have to complete all of it, but it will introduce you to important concepts for building games and ultimately VR experiences. (Complete this whole tutorial if you do not have any programming experience).
  4. If you are developing for HTC Vive or Oculus Rift (You can use OpenVR to develop for both the platforms at once), go through this tutorial to get yourself familiar with SteamVR, camera rig, play area and setting up a VR project in Unity. If you are developing for Gear VR (go here), for Daydream (go here and here).
  5. Now that you have an understanding of how to develop basic VR experiences, take a look at this video from Fuseman to learn how to add interaction in the VR environment using tracked controllers.
  6. If you want to develop multiplayer VR experiences, watch this video from Fuseman about using Photon Cloud to do so.

Also check out this video (from Fuseman, again) if you want to learn how to create Tilt Brush from scratch. It’s a really cool video in which he explains how you can use quads and triangles (building blocks of 3D graphics) to create amazing 3D drawing.

Of course, these steps are only the beginning; you will have to do a lot of Google searches and late night forum hunting to get good at developing VR experiences. This article does not tell you everything that you need to know but will get you started in the right direction.

Also, I have not talked about designing VR experiences here, I will write another article about that in the near future. You will also need to learn a 3D modeling software such as Autodesk Maya or Autodesk 3DS Max. I will detail that and some of the other software that you need to learn in a later article.

Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or want to work together. (Hint: Hire me as a VR Designer ;)

Twitter, Behance, LinkedIn, mukulagarwal.com

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Designer | Augmented Reality & AI Lead | 10X'ed revenue in 3 years @Amazon | 7+ patents | #metaverse