While
the frontiers of virtual reality are expanding due to increased
interest in the Oculus Rift headset, creating games and virtual reality
experiences has generally been limited to those who can program.
Sixense,
a company known for its motion controllers that excel in virtual
environments, wants to lower the barrier of entry to VR creation to
anyone with a little design know-how with its upcoming software
development kit. The SixenseVR SDK will integrate into Unity and Unreal
Engine, two of the most popular game engines, giving creators a toolset
that already supports most gaming platforms.
"The
main reason this is important is because quite often developers such as
designers and artist have great game concepts but are not proficient in
programming and are often dependent on others to see their ideas come
to life," said Sixense Creative Director Danny Woodall. "Giving them the
ability to prototype and flush out their ideas without the aid of
someone else is very powerful. Unreal 4 has a similar vision and uses a
system called blueprints to allow developers to use a node based visual
scripting system."
The
SDK's Unity integration means creators can download any of the hundreds
of thousands of already created assets from the Unity Asset Store. This
includes everything from characters, weapons, objects or environments.
Once they've imported what they need, it's just a matter of attaching
virtual reality controls to the character, Bland said.
As
shown in the video, the motion tracking provided by the head and hands
fills in some of the animations for the character — the STEM controller
can provide up to five points of input — while the normal character
rigging already provided fills in the rest.
Sixense
originally designed the system to work with its own motion controller
called the STEM system, an open platform which was funded on Kickstarter
for commercial distribution in October. Previously, Sixense only
licensed its motion control technology to other companies like Razer,
but now it is also producing its own hardware.
Because
of this open platform past, CEO Amir Rubin said Sixense has gotten much
further than other motion control companies when creating products for
VR. The company also wants to make sure that its SDK works with every
potential controller and platform, eventually including Sony's Project
Morpheus headset and PlayStation Move controllers, as well as just input
from a position-tracked Oculus Rift and regular gaming controller.
"We
are developing the sixense VR SDK because we belive that the success of
VR is dependent on the suppot it gets from the developer comunity."
Rubin said.
The SixenseVR SDK will be available when the STEM controllers ship to backers in July.
Posted by : Gizmeon
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