Exploring New Frontiers with VR Game Engines

Top VR Game Engines

Benjamin Arango

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

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3 Best game engines for VR

• UNITY 5.3

Offered by Unity Technology. It is a free version with all the features available. This is one of the most used and popular VR game engines. There are so many reasons for that. One of those is that it offers cross platform deployment to the entire range of mobile, VR, desktop, web, console and TV. It also let alt.ctrl.GDC exhibits to utilize this game engine to create games for the controllers and interact with them.

• Unreal Engine 4

Offered by Epic games. This is known to as a very sophisticated Game engine that is primly used to develop some AAA games. The engine has showcased two VR games – Bullet Train and Showdown and both these games contain excellent visual graphics and effects that are really astonishing.

• Lumberyard

Offered by Amazon. If you are looking for a VR game engine that offers you the full convenience of developing games, this should be the one. It is comparatively a new entry in this segment and it is free with full source. This also means that one can tweak the engine if felt necessary. This could be an excellent platform for developing online games and don’t need to worry about hosting a robust game.

VR game convention and best practice

It would be very early to call for a perfect convention for the VR game developers, designers as the total numbers of the VR game titles is still under 100. You can understand!! So far, there is no clear surface but the game developers and designers are trying their best to solve problems by their own. They are sharing their lessons that they have learned while developing first several VR games. Some of the concerns that they are sharing are – interaction patterns, reality-trade-off and fidelity contract in terms of physics rule, affordance and narrative expectations.

It is quite expected that in future, more and more best practices will converge together with even more advanced research in VR psychology and UX. Hopefully soon this will cause the emergence of some conventions that will put the developers, designers and the players on the same page.

Benjamin Arango

Benjamin Arango is a writer and a lover of all things video.

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