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Umbrinox's avatar
Umbrinox
Explorer
6 years ago

OVR or XR Interaction???

So I am 3 weeks into my Unity journey and I feel like I am learning 2 systems at the same and pretty much everything I want to achieve is back and forth between those two systems and I have been left completely confused.  So those two systems/options are:

Oculus Integration or OVR
XR Interaction Toolkit

I have an Oculus quest and this is the platform I want to develop for.  I started learning OVR and I found it easy to achieve good results. Within my first week I’d made my own bowling game, I had put a gun in my hand and got it shooting apples and all was good.

Then I started wanting more and started following other videos. I found nothing was working!  And then recently learnt there are these two separate routes above. So now I have a OVR project and an XR Interaction project.

The OVR stuff is easy to set up but I’ve been told by more advanced developer that I shouldn’t be using it because it is limited and that the XR Interaction Toolkit is the future and allows for much more flexibility, although I still have an extremely limited knowledge of C# and pretty much copying the code without really having a full understanding of it.

Ive decided to go back to the drawing board (again) and do Unity’s currently free premium C# course while I work out my options

Which bring me to my question, what should I be using to develop an Oculus game, OVR or XR? I have posted on here hoping to get a definitive answer so I don’t waste any more hours learning a route I don’t need to learn. 

Thanks in advance

3 Replies

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  • The main point of Unity XR is that it brings together all types of controllers and VR headsets under a common programming structure. This makes it easier to develop your software for multiple platforms. If you are sure you're only ever going to develop for Quest, then you can stick to OVR. But I would say, never say never. You might well end up making something for Quest that you would later want to release or use on a different platform. 
  • I've been having similar thoughts to yours. The last time I used the XR Interaction Toolkit (couple weeks ago) it was still a preview package that's something to keep in mind. While  it did have many nice events, it was also missing a couple a features that I had gotten used to with OVR.

    That being said, lately I'm having terrible Unity Editor performance with the OVRManager enabled and I don't know why. OVRManager.Update() and FixedUpdate are taking very long...
  • XR Plugins are the future, but you have to hand-assemble even the most obvious and basic behaviors (e.g. teleporting, grabbing).  I assume Unity will offer more useful prefabs over time, but for now, I rely on tutorials like this one from Dilmer Valecillos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEEk0wgFSdY