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Question SteamVR, OpenXR, Render Pipeline and where to start as of now?

Discussion in 'VR' started by argosy_ops, Dec 16, 2020.

  1. argosy_ops

    argosy_ops

    Joined:
    Dec 27, 2012
    Posts:
    49
    Hey everyone!
    There's been a lot of movement recently regarding development in VR with several subsystems being deprecated, but OpenXR not being there quite yet. I'm on a new project and I'd like to get an idea what the best starting point as of now is.

    What I understood so far
    SteamVR is moving towards OpenXR and has built an implementation for Unity's OpenXR interface that is available as of the SteamVR Plugin 2.6.1. If I'm going to build a new project that I want to ship to Vive, Index or Reverb (WMR), then I'd go through the plugin to build the interactions, but use the OpenXR interface that comes along for the rendering part, as opposed to the previous pipeline.

    What about the beta coming later this month?
    As far as I understand, there is a beta with OpenXR 1.0 support coming out later this month. But what does it actually do? From what I gathered so far, the XR Plug-in framework is there since 2019.3 and would interact with the SteamVR plugin. What is this beta about and what would I need it for (if at all)?

    Render Pipelines
    Sticking with support for the above mentioned headsets, do you at this point recommend HDRP or URP? We are not targeting home consumers, so we have a clear range of GPUs as targets, ranging from GTX1080 to RTX2080. What pipeline would at this point assure the best compatibility and workflow/performance benefits for this purpose?

    Unity version
    Refactoring the inputs to the new input system will certainly take us a bit and 2020 LTS is scheduled to arrive sometime next spring. Seeing the big version increments in the render pipelines between 2019 LTS and 2020.2, would you at this point recommend to stick with 2019 LTS or jump onto 2020 rather?
     
    nomadic and IgnisIncendio like this.