Unite Europe 2016 is underway, and Unity is revealing a number of new features to be introduced in upcoming updates. One of those is Unity’s VR editor, allowing you to create VR content while in VR. We’ve seen glimpses of this before at the Vision Summit and GDC, but this new look at the editor shows some of the functional solutions Unity is introducing.
The major addition is the “chessboard”, a kind of palette that is bound to the position of one of the motion controllers – in this demo case, the Oculus Touch. The palette shows an overhead view of the current scene, while the user views the scene normally in first-person. The user is able to select and modify objects on the palette, and view their effects from first-person in real-time.
They can also jump to new areas in the scene by resetting their camera according to a location on the palette. In this respect, the palette functions much like a minimap in a real-time strategy game, allowing you to quickly move around and select objects whilst maintaining your actual viewpoint.
Unreal Engine’s own VR editor contains a similar palette function, however we’ve only seen it used so far as an asset browser – moving around is instead accomplished by pushing and scaling your view with the motion controllers.
Skip to 1 hour, 53 minutes in the above video to jump to the start of the VR editor portion of the keynote. Unity’s VR editor will be available in Q4 of this year, and the tools behind it will be made open source, allowing developers to create their own VR editor extensions for the Unity asset store.
