Building application in Oculus.

Great question; I would like to know too. It seems to me that the creator of Virtual Desktop may be a good person to talk to about this as well.

Well, I don't know what kind of applications you are planning to develop. But there is nothing stopping you from developing serious VR-applications using Unreal or Unity3D, even though they are mainly targeted at game developers. I have done some serious simulations using Unity3D my self, so I know it is possible.

If none of these engines fit your need, take a look at the subforum: Other Engine Integrations
viewforum.php?f=39

There you will find lots of other graphics engines with Oculus support, either official or done by independent developers. For example, I have done the integration for OpenSceneGraph, which is a engine that is well used inside the driving- and flight simulator community, as well as in academia.

As an application developer, one of the first thoughts that came to mind when seeing Oculus--after virtual porn--was virtual applications/operating systems.

This could unlock tons of possibilities. Instead of needing a bunch of monitors (or any monitors at all) you could have a 360 degree workspace provided by one HMD.

The only way to accomplish this would be through a 3D game engine like UE4 or Unity. I imagine in time we might see a framework for making Windows and other applications with VR support, but for now you would need to recreate your UI in the engine, or potentially capture the contents of a window and project it into the game (similar to an iframe on the web).

I think much closer on the horizon is the concept of VR websites and online showrooms which will make use of technologies like WebGL.

"individual101101" wrote:
I tried searching for information on work (both official and un-official) that has been done on constructing an app framework for Oculus, but I could not find a meaningful thread anywhere. It seems like the majority of effort right now is for game development (?).

It's less of a matter of finding a framework specifically for Oculus development than finding out if 'Tool X' has Oculus support. If you have a favorite engine or framework with which you want to work, googling '<engine name> oculus rift' will generally tell you if there's existing work towards supporting the Rift. Plenty of non-game focused systems are already working on support. For instance, WorldWind has some experimental support for Oculus, as does OpenSceneGraph.

Yes, official Oculus integration is likely to tend towards game support because games are likely to be the major market driver.

You can also look at my book (linked in my signature) which is written as a ground-up guide to development for the Oculus Rift, with a focus on cross-platform and cross-language usage, rather than on gaming.