Learn from Oculus + Unity Developers w/ This Free 11-Unit VR Development Course

We are excited to announce a partnership with Unity to offer a free, 11-unit, VR learning course covering insights and best practices to grow your VR development skills. Each unit within the course is led by subject matter experts from Oculus or Unity with backgrounds in VR engineering, spatial sound design, testing/QA, distribution on the Oculus Store, and more.

Who is the ideal audience for this experience? We consider this course for intermediate Unity developers. As Chris Pruett, Director of Content Ecosystem at Oculus, notes in the first module, “We’re not going to cover baking lights or creating a nav mesh, we assume you know those things already.” We’ve done our best to keep this level of expertise in mind, ensuring that the content will inform and empower those of you who are looking to level up your VR development proficiency.

While the course is best consumed in order, you’re welcome to dive into specific units. So if you already consider yourself an expert in VR development, you can still use it to brush up on specific areas of expertise such as spatialized sound or locomotion.

Throughout the course you will follow along and eventually build a vertical slice of an escape room game. After completing the course you can submit the vertical slice for feedback from the Oculus Developer Support team. Questions during the experience? Simply check out the Unity Connect page where the VR learning community can share questions, comments, and feedback about the program.

Unit 1: Design, Develop and Deploy for VR
Chris Pruett, Director of Content Ecosystem at Oculus
Chris gives you an overview of the VR industry, best practices for a successful VR game and an overview of what you’ll be learning.

Unit 2: VR Game Development and Prototyping
Ruth Bram, Producer at Oculus Studios
Planning sets you up for success, and in this unit, you’ll learn to create a game design document, a player profile report and a press kit.

Unit 3: Using Unity to Develop VR Experiences
Joy Horvath, Game Developer + Instructional Designer at Unity
You’ll learn how to set up the Oculus and VRTK integrations in Unity. Plus, how to set up a basic VR scene.

Unit 4: Locomotion and Ergonomics
Eric Cosky, Software Engineer at Oculus
Get best practices for making your VR experience comfortable, and how to implement a teleportation system.

Unit 5: Hand presence and Interaction
Matthew Franklin, Developer Relations Engineer at Oculus
Learn how to interact with your hands in VR, use them to manipulate objects and how to overcome challenges with item placement.

Unit 6: UI Best Practices for VR
Gabor Szauer, Developer Relations Engineer at Oculus
Transition from 2D to VR, review well established VR interaction paradigms (think laser pointers) and find out how to design a user friendly interface for VR.

Unit 7: Sound in VR
Robert Heitkamp, Spatial Audio Technology Lead at Oculus
Implement spatial audio for VR with the Oculus Spatializer Plugin. Plus, dive into reverb and mixer settings and learn how to test your audio.

Unit 8: Performance Requirements
Matt Conte, Head of Developer Relations Engineering at Oculus
Be efficient with assets, implement lighting and configure your settings to get better performance from your VR game.

Unit 9: Optimizing VR Applications
Cristiano Ferreira, Developer Relations Engineer at Oculus
Get to the bottom of bottlenecks with Unity Profiler, Frame Debugger and Unity Profile Analyzer. You’ll also learn about the technical requirements to pass Oculus VRCs.

Unit 10: Testing your VR Application
Lisa Brewster, Oculus Store Manager
Bruce Wooden, Content Launch Manager at Oculus
Successfully run tests on your VR application - By the end of this unit, you’ll be ready to implement quality VR playtests to your development cycles.

Unit 11: Submission and Go-to-Market Strategy
Mari Kyle, Content Launch Manager at Oculus
In this final unit, you’ll get a crash course on marketing to drive awareness of your VR experience. We’ll talk about the strategy of pricing. Plus, best practices for submitting to the Oculus Store.

What Oculus hardware is recommended for the course?
This course is focused on developing for Rift S, so we recommend using a Rift S, but the principles covered also apply to Oculus Quest.

What prerequisites do I need to take this course?
This course is designed for intermediate level developers with familiarity building in Unity, ideally with some VR experience too. If you’re brand new to game development or VR, we recommend taking an intro to Unity course and/or one of Unity's many intro to VR tutorials prior to taking this one.

How long will it take to complete the 11 units?
The course is self-paced and should take you 25-30 hours.

What version of Unity do I need to complete the course? The course uses 2018.4 LTS.

Who is teaching the course?
This is a collaborative effort by Unity and Oculus, featuring a number of experienced software engineers, immersive game developers, and business professionals.

Who is eligible for feedback from Oculus Developer Support?
Upon completion of the course, you may submit the vertical slice you develop during the course. In addition, there is an option to upload a game design document (GDD) of a future concept.

What type of feedback will Oculus Developer Support provide?
Oculus Support will provide technical feedback on the vertical slice and qualitative feedback on the GDD with regards to passing the Oculus Store submission process. We will not provide qualitative feedback on your likelihood of being accepted to the Store.

We hope this course helps you reinforce and grow your skillset as a VR developer. Feel free to share any questions in the comments section, and be sure to keep an eye out on the Oculus Developer blog for more VR development learnings and insights.