Overview and assessment of unity toolkits for virtual reality applications

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Kenneth A Ritter III

University of Louisiana, USA

: J Comput Eng Inf Technol

Abstract

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As the interest in Virtual Reality (VR) increases, so does the number of software toolkits available for various VR applications. Given that more games are being made with the Unity game engine than any other game technology, several of these toolkits are developed to be directly imported into Unity. A feature and interaction comparison of the toolkits is needed by Unity developers to properly suit one for a specific application. This paper presents an overview and comparison of several virtual reality toolkits available for developers using the Unity game engine. For comparing VR interaction a scene is created in Unity and tested at the three-sided Cave Automatic Virtual Environments (CAVE) at Rougeou VR Lab. In the testbed scene, the user must disassemble the major components of the Electrotherm Green Machine at the Virtual Energy Center. The three toolkits that met the criteria for this comparison are getReal3D, MiddleVR, and Reality-based User Interface System (RUIS). Each of these toolkits can be imported into a Unity scene to bring VR interaction and display on multi-projection immersive environments like CAVEs. This paper also provides how-to guides which can easily assist users to install and use these toolkits to add VR applications to their Unity game. A comparative analysis is given on performance, flexibility and ease of use for each toolkit regarding VR interaction and CAVE display. MiddleVR was found to have the highest performance and most versatile toolkit for CAVE display and interaction. However, for some display applications such as CAVE 2, the getReal3D toolkit maybe better fitted. Regarding cost, RUIS is the clear winner as it is available for free under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) Version 3 license.

Biography

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