VR is all over the place, but sometimes it’s not where you most expect it. Plenty of apps out there might could do with a wee bit of VR to help show off an..<\/b>
VR is all over the place, but sometimes it\u2019s not where you most expect it. Plenty of apps out there might could do with a wee bit of VR to help show off an apartment or a bit of 3D content, but those experiences can be pretty labor-intensive. Viro is a new company that hopes to empower mobile developers to easily add VR to their apps using familiar tools and code bases.
You may think, well, isn\u2019t that what Unity, Unreal, and other cross-platform engines are for? Yes indeed, but they also add levels of complexity and don\u2019t always play nice with the tools a developer has built their app with, or the skillset that a company has built up.
\u201cFor building a game, Unity is great,\u201d said co-founder Raj Advani, \u201d but it\u2019s not the simplest tool for building applications. You open up a game development platform, you see like a thousand different controls starting at you. Viro is simpler, it uses the same [i.e. mobile and web] codebase, it uses less code to do the same things.\u201d
Moon used the example of AirBnB, which is already experimenting with other social and presentational modes online. If they want to try doing some VR stuff internally, they can\u2019t just tell their app team to learn Unity. They could hire a couple people or an agency to put something together, but all of a sudden you\u2019re looking at six figures before you can even start working on it.
Viro uses a custom rendering engine, on top of which is React Native, a JavaScript-based app framework that many web and mobile devs will already be familiar with. You don\u2019t even need Xcode or Android Studio. The goal is to get users up and running in a VR environment of their own within half an hour or so, and enable the super-quick turnaround times one expects from a mobile team and perhaps not so much from a content-heavy VR team.
Of course, it\u2019s not as fully featured as those mainstream commercial content creation tools \u2014 if you want things like realistic physics and complex lighting, you\u2019ll still want to use them.
\u201cBut we don\u2019t consider ourselves Unity lite,\u201d Moon explained. \u201cThis is a different tool for different stuff. There are non-gaming apps that people want to build. There are these emergent cases that you see in mobile, like Uber, that people didn\u2019t predict on day one \u2014 we\u2019re hoping Viro will enable that kind of thing.\u201d
Today is the first public release of Viro , which is free to use \u2014 so give it a try, check out some test code on GitHub , or look at some sample work in the Viro Media app ( iOS \/ Android ). The plan is to keep the core toolset free and add premium services later when (ideally) companies decide to adopt the service more fully.
The company has raised $2.5 million from Softbank NY, Eniac Ventures, Lowercase Capital, and a few others. Moon pointed out that this is the first VR investment for many, but that they were enticed by the idea that they were investing not in VR content, but in the tools to create it. Whether you think VR is the future, a flash in the pan, or somewhere in between, it\u2019s hard to deny that at least for the next couple years, lowering the barrier to entry is a valuable proposition.<\/p>\n