The productive VR Toolkit for rapidly building VR solutions in Unity3d.
For almost a year I've been building a VR Toolkit to make building VR content quicker and easier for developers and non developers to help push the VR platform forward by giving people a way of just creating cool content for Virtual Reality.
VRTK is a completely free, open source (MIT License) solution that solves many problems in VR such as locomotion, interactions, Controls and more.
It aims to provide developers with access to as many VR platforms as possible and currently supports SteamVR and Oculus SDK.
You can already download VRTK version 3 from github at http://vrtk.io
or from the Unity Asset Store.
So why the kickstarter?
Up until now, VRTK has been a project that I've run in my spare time but I have so many ideas and plans to take it to the next level. I want to make VRTK a fully fledged platform that makes building for VR so much easier allowing content creators to concentrate on bringing great experiences to VR.
So many games (many on Steam) already use VRTK to power them, but I want to get more people building and creating great content for virtual reality. The best way to move the platform forward is to get as many people experimenting and coming up with cool and wild ideas.
To do this I'm going to need to bring in more resources and talented people to work on the list of features I have planned.
I could ask for a smaller amount and carry on building this toolkit on my own but full time, but this would still not be enough to bring my grand vision alive. I would always be limited by being just one person without the complete skill set required to bring the best in class virtual reality toolkit to anyone interested in building a VR future.
Planned features
- Support for more Virtual Reality headsets, controllers and SDKs
- Support for future VR accessories, pucks, etc.
- Refinement and improvement of existing solutions
- Support for visual scripting plugins (Playmaker, etc)
- Text input solutions
- More locomotion features
- More 3D controls
- Anti harassment solutions
- Camera effects such as tunneling
- Binaural audio
- Regular updates to the Unity Asset Store
- More robust roadmap of features with better estimated delivery dates (rather than just Soon)
- Better example scenes
- Script start up wizard for easy adding common scripts to scenes
- More video tutorials on how to build things with VRTK
- Tutorials on how to build multiplayer with VRTK
- Better online help documentation
- Continuation and growth of existing community and support
This list is just the start of what I have planned for the future of VRTK!
Rewards
VRTK version 4 will still be free and open source, but I don't want people to pledge and get no benefit in return so I'm also planning 5 professional unity assets that will be sold on the Unity asset store. These assets will form the rewards for the kickstarter backers.
The below images are just to provide a concept of what is being offered and in no way reflects the quality of the final products (I'm not an artist and if successful with the campaign then a professional will create high quality assets for the final products)
Asset 1: Fully rigged VR hands
Asset 2: VR avatars
Asset 3: Teleport beam suite
Asset 4: Interactions with realistic weapons
Asset 5: Inventory system
Stretch Goals
If by some crazy chance I reach the target amount and people keep on pledging, then I've set up some stretch goals of what else can be delivered if I have the funds to do so!
£200,000
We'll make an extra Pro Asset for VRTK based on the most popular suggestion of our backers.
£300,000
We'll make a VR game showcasing VRTK and make the source code available to all backers. Plus you all get a game key when we launch it
£500,000
We'll provide proper business grade support for VRTK for all backers for the first year. Get your questions answered directly by the team!
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Risks and challenges
VRTK is an intensive project that requires a lot of collaboration and support from the VRTK community and the wider VR community.
One of the biggest challenges will be ensuring the right talent is brought on board to work on the great features planned. Finding great developers and artists is always a challenge and especially in an emerging platform like virtual reality.
The reason the project is asking for so much money is to ensure enough is available (after fees) that great quality people can be afforded to work on the toolkit to produce more and better quality stuff for all to use!
The funds raised by this kickstarter will be enough to fund the project for a year, which should give enough time to deliver the planned features plus the professional assets. However, it's possible that not all features will be delivered because sometimes in development things don't work out the way it was expected and alternatives are better solutions.
VRTK is always going to be open source and when features are delivered, they will appear on the GitHub repository so throughout the year new features will be delivered.