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Feature Roadmap
This page documents our planned development roadmap from the features perspective. We have a second page dedicated to the device roadmap here: Device Roadmap
With the end of 2019 approaching, we’ve finally found time to lay out our development roadmap for the upcoming year. Consider this roadmap as a rough draft; due to a number of reasons, we don’t necessarily know what will be developed when, but we have rough timelines for development of the following features.
The 2019 features have been released in VSDK Version 1.0.2
As most of our internal dev team is heavily booked through December, we’re keeping our changes in what’s left of 2019 focused on developing quality of life improvements and rolling in changes from projects actively using VSDK.
Tutorial Video Series: We’re in the process of filming and editing a video tutorial series (with videos rolling out over the coming weeks) to help VSDK reach more developers on more platforms. The first set of tutorials will mirror the written tutorials, but if these are successful we are likely to continue with more original tutorial content.
Text Tutorials: Some of our best systems don’t have their own tutorials. Before the end of 2019, we plan on writing tutorials for the Hand SDK and the Haptics SDK to help developers get a handle on these powerful features.
New Secondary Grab Attach Mechanics: While working on a few tech demos, we made some improvements to Secondary Grab Attach Mechanics that we intend to roll into the main branch. Completed
SteamVR Housekeeping: We currently support a wide number of SteamVR versions, but our maintenance of this code is complicated because we are very granular about support. By the end of the year, we are planning on streamlining our support for both legacy Steam VR version 1.2.3 and Steam VR v2.2+. This has proved to be an issue with developer adoption of VSDK, so we'd like to fix it ASAP. Completed
Basic Prop Placement Tools: We have been developing a few tools to help developers design experiences and in particular to place objects. These tools are currently very basic, but we intend to release them soon for more feedback. Completed
The 2019 features have been released in VSDK Version 1.0.2
Our theme for 2020 will be immersion; we have multiple features coming to VSDK that are focused on making it easier for developers to make experiences more immersive across more platforms, with a particular focus on hand tracking, animation, gestures, and body presence. Of course, we also have a number of quality of life changes and new device support goals in place.
Additional Hand SDK Support: The Oculus Quest is receiving hand tracking in early 2020; we want to add support for Oculus Quest and HTC Vive hand tracking libraries as soon as possible after the feature is released so developers can start playing with the hand tracking as soon as possible.
Advanced Gesture Revamp: Continuing the theme of strengthening the Hand SDK options, we are going to revamp the Advanced Gesture System to be more open and extensible (it was built over a year ago with a single project in mind, and is in desperate need of refactoring). Custom Advanced Gesture Conditions are expected to be at the heart of this revamp.
Hand Animation System: One of the most difficult aspects of creating a multiplatform VR game is setting up and managing animated hands or controllers across different devices. We plan on making this easier by providing a unified hand animation system that can take data from whichever Hand and Controller SDKs are active and intelligently animate avatar hands, without developers needing to worry about code specific to each platform.
Body Presence SDK (Stretch): One key element of good VR is body presence that goes beyond just controller and hand tracking. Think of this as the upgraded version of the proposed Hand Animation System: the Body Presence SDK would set up ways for developers to set up avatars with different tracking points and levels of fidelity for awesome immersion without tying the virtual body to a single SDK. This will be a time consuming effort, so we are hoping we can secure funding to help develop this feature.
Project Housekeeping: We are planning changes to our GitHub pages to be more clear about what technologies we support.
Code Housekeeping: A lot of the VRTK code includes features marked for deprecation. We plan on doing a pass to remove these in early 2020 for code clarity and to reduce UI clutter.
Developer Tools: We plan on creating more developer tools in 2020 to help with VR level design.
Asset Store: We plan on getting VSDK onto the Unity Asset Store to help developers get access to it more easily.
Editor UI Improvements: While they are all functional, many of the VSDK object UIs are not user friendly as they present a ton of information that either is only needed in custom scripting or in very specific situations. We want to redesign the editor UIs to be easier to use and present information more clearly.
Event Bus: We have specific upgrades we’d like to implement with respect to how events are handled by Reactors that should make Reactor prefabs more useful.