Oculus Unity Integration: Experimental Cross-Platform Support

We're committed to making it easier to help developers build for and target the broadest audiences possible. Now, instead of requiring separate development cycles, developers will be able to put all of their work into one project and then separately package it to ship onto multiple stores with very little additional work.

We've listened to the developer community and learned that one of the biggest pain points in VR development has been the sheer volume of duplicated work required to ship an app on multiple platforms. So we wanted to try and do as much of the work as possible as a starting point, creating a feature set that works out of the box on both the Oculus and OpenVR platforms, and then allowing developers to extend it.

It's important to also note that the Oculus Store publishing process and requirements have not changed, as this feature is meant purely to streamline development. For a completely in-depth overview, take a look at our Unity Cross Platform Development Documentation.

We know that experienced developers will be itching to extend the API in all kinds of ways. A lot of developers enjoy having low-level control over every API they use. We want to stress that even though this cross-platform API provides a set of functionalities that work out of the box on multiple platforms, developers will also have the freedom to customize how their app behaves on any single platform. We have a property in OVRManager called “loadedXRDevice,” for example, that allows platform-specific responses to be easily tuned. If you want to call directly into OpenVR, we've also bundled openvr_api.cs, under our OVR.OpenVR namespace.

Some developers will opt to only use functionality that instantly works identically on all platforms. Others might call directly into OpenVR for all of their functionality when the loaded device is OpenVR. Ultimately, developers will be able to choose exactly where they fall on this spectrum. They can either opt for an abstraction to avoid platform-specific details, for full control of these details, or anywhere in between.