VRTK v4 - officially announced.

Just heard some great news, from thestonefox (via slack) that a version 4 of VRTK is official and has just begun development.

Having received a grant for funding, development of VRTK has begun and I believe a 6month cycle is expected.

A main aim was to re-develop VRTK with common design patterns in mind.

This is exciting news!

 

I thought VRTK was dead. This is good news. I think...

 

A live stream will be held on Sunday night (8pm BST (GMT+1)) where thestonefox and bddckr will discuss some of the new and fundamental changes.

I'll hit the link in this thread for those interested when he makes the link public.

 

This is great to hear!

 

And as quick as that, here is the link for the live stream to be held Sunday:

 

Looks neat! I wish I had two hours to watch it. Would anybody be kind enough to summarize the key points?

 

- v4 is a full rewrite to make it easier to use, extend and customize in addition to allow to mix and match specific functionality without requiring to go "all in" on VRTK.
- v4 will have feature parity with the current version (3.3.0).
- All components are generically usable, all dependencies need to be set up manually. This means easier to extend+customize and easier for experienced developers and we will be offering "Editor wizards" to help ease the setup pain, especially for Unity newbies.
- Because it's a huge rewrite and fundamental changes to the way you set up and use features are part of v4 there will be no upgrade path from v3 to v4.

- Existing repo will get a new branch soon, will be the "Unity example project repo".
- One repo per supported third party SDK, Unity's XR integration is part of the Core repo.
- New repos are all submodule-able (except for the existing repo).
- New home for all repos is (and will be for the existing one soon): https://github.com/ExtendRealityLtd/

 

Any mention of when this might be out?

 

You can see our public timeline here:
https://github.com/ExtendRealityLtd/VRTK.Unity.Core/milestones

For other questions I suggest to just join our Slack at http://invite.vrtk.io/

 

Thanks for the milestone list. I intend to keep also releasing playmaker actions for v4, for those who are interested. For v3 we have 100+ actions that have been well used and abused. Looking forward to v4 as it comes out. Thanks @bddckr.

 

Some new news from slack:

Milestone Showcase - on youtube, tonight @8.30pm UK time.

 

Any news on the current status of VRTK v4?

 

We keep the community updated in Slack and the link to the milestones always shows it off, too.

 

V. 4 beta just announced on VRTK Slack and Oculus Developer Blog:
https://developer.oculus.com/blog/vrtk-v4-now-available/

 

So i take it this project is on life support again? Doesnt seem much movement since the beta release and i see the dev on twitter saying he is working for free again...

 

It's not looking particularly good at the moment which is a shame. The documentation on their site is good but there's not enough. I don't really like that they kind of gave up on supporting unity UI and didn't seem bothered about universal render pipeline, as it's clearly the future.

It's weird that Unity recently made official tutorials using VRTK 4. They must like it, you'd think the'd throw them some money or (preferably) create their own version, like the Standard Assets package but for VR.

 

Ya i'll probably just stick with steamvr and then port to occulus since their sdk is such a mess for me. VR is very disappointing in unity.

I with I could say I can't believe occulus only funded them enough to get a beta, but I'm not suprised at all. Feel bad for the creator he has done ton of work and gotten too little support from these guys.

 

At least Oculus was kind enough to give some funding. AFAIK everyone else from the smaller fishes to HTC, Valve and Unity just kinda told em to buzz off.