Welcome to the first episode of this new "How to Make a VR Game" series! So, in this video, we will learn how to configure

Unity for VR development and make our own VR camera rig. This is an updated version of my previous tutorial series

from two years ago that you guys seemed to enjoy a lot, but there have been quite a few changes lately. I think now is a good

time to redo it together. So, here's the plan for the next two months: I will post a new video every Sunday—so, 8 videos in

total. Six of them will be uploaded here on this YouTube channel, and the other two will be uploaded on my Patreon, where

we will use what we learned to make a complete game from scratch. The source code of this tutorial will also be

available for you guys over there. So, if you'd like to support the channel and have access to all of this exclusive

content, join us! Link in the description. But without further ado, let's get started! For all tutorials in this

tutorial series, we are going to use Unity. Unity is one of, if not the most, used game engines. It is used for huge

games like *Job Simulator* or *Among Us VR*, and VR games with crazy mechanics like *The Physics Lab*. And I'm super happy

to announce that Unity has agreed to sponsor this video. Yes, I can't believe I just said that!

But after teaching VR with Unity for years now on YouTube, I'm super stoked to partner with them for this series, and it

really shows how the channel has grown, thanks to you guys! So, go show them some love. Okay, so the first thing we need to

do is, of course, download Unity. So let's go to unity.com, download—and I'm on Windows, so in my case I'm going to click

download for Windows. And after going through the installation and opening Unity up, you should see something like this.

The Dignity Hub allows you to view all your current projects. So don't worry if it's your first time using it; it's normal for it to be empty. If we click on "Install," we can also see the Unity versions installed on this computer.

To install a new one, we can click on "Install Editor." For this tutorial series, we're going to use Unity 2020.3, as it's the latest long-term support version available right now.

By the way, you can of course use any version above 2019.4 that you want, but for simplicity, it's better if you have the same version as me to follow the tutorial. So let's click on "Install."

In the case of a VR game, we want to be able to build for both desktop and Android. So let's add Android support with both the GDK and NDK, and click on "Continue."

Lastly, we can say "yes" to the agreement (I know it by heart, so I don't have to read it again!), and finally, let's click on "Install."

After some time, the new version of Unity is installed. The next step is to create a new project. Let's go back to our project list, click on "New Project," select the Unity version we just installed, and select the 3D URP template.

This is a template that comes with already optimized graphics, which is great for VR as it conserves a lot of computing resources. But that's the subject of another video, so let's continue.

We can give a name to our project; I'll call mine "My Own VR Game." You can also set a custom folder to store your project right here. Finally, we can click on "Create Project" and let Unity do the rest.

After some time, this is what you should see: the beautiful Unity editor! Now, it might not have the exact same layout, but...

Reproduce the same as mine. You can go to the top here, click "Layout", select "Tool", and then click on the game windows.

Drag it under the scene like this. So all of these windows have a particular job for making our game. The scene window is

the main module to quickly move around and select any object that you want. The hierarchy contains the list of all of

the objects in your scene, and for each element, we have in the inspector the list of all of the components attached.

Finally, we have here the game window, which is used to test our game, and the project window, which contains all

discrete textures, 3D models, and other data. Now I'm going to create a fresh Unity scene, so let's click on the plus button

in the project window and select "Scene". We can change its name to anything we want, so "Main VR Scene", for example, and

it's never too early to organize our project, so I'm going to drag it into the "Scenes" folder that I already have. So if

we select this folder, we can see the two scenes that we have currently: the simple one we are at right now and the

new one we just made. So let's go to the new one by double-clicking on it.

Perfect! And now, the moment you've all been waiting for! Everything is ready, guys. We can get started on our VR game.

So the first thing that I'm going to do in this scene is add a ground for all players. So we can right-click in the

hierarchy, go to "3D Object", "Plane". This will create a new plane in the scene. We can center it, displaying it at the origin of

our scene by changing its position to 0, 0, 0. And we can even change the color of this plane with a new

material. So let's create a new object in the project window and click on "Material". I'm going to rename it "Plane"

material. We can change its color to black and drag it to our plane, and just like that, we have changed the material

of our plane to this beautiful black material. Perfect! And so, at this moment, we already have a camera in the scene,

but if we click on play, even if it displays what the camera sees in the game window, nothing is happening on the VR

headset. So let's see how we can enable VR for our project. To do this, let's go

to "Edit", "Project Settings", "XR Plugin Management", and click on "Install XR Plugin Management". Now that it is installed, as you can see, we can select the

plugin that will be used to handle VR on our game for both desktop and Android. So if we want to target the maximum number

of VR headsets possible, the best solution is to select OpenXR in desktop and on Android. By doing this, as you can see, we

have the specific OpenXR settings available just down here. And the last thing we can set is the interaction

profile we want for our game, which corresponds to the type of device we want to support. And as I want to support the

maximum number of devices, like I just said, I'm going to add all controller profiles on desktop and the Oculus Touch

controller profile on Android. There you go! We can now close this window and let's click on play to try our game. There it

is, guys! I am now able to see what's inside my VR headset, but nothing happens when I rotate my head. So to take the

rotation of the headset and move the camera accordingly in the scene, we can select the main camera in the Hierarchy,

click on "Add Component", and search for "Track Pose Driver". By default, it will select the headset, as you can see here,

with the "Center Eye HMD" reference. And if we click on play now, it works, and I can see inside my headset and the camera

Move accordingly. Nice, by the way, to be able to test your empty game directly in the Unity editor, like I'm doing right

now. You must have your VR headset to be able to play games on your computer. So, for example, either you already have a VR

headset plugged by default on your PC, like for the HTC Vive or the Valve Index, for example, or, like I'm doing here, I

have the Meta Quest 2, which I have plugged with a USB-C cable and I have Meta Link enabled to play VR directly on

the computer. So this is only the beginning, guys. We could, of course, go from here and build everything from

scratch to make this game, but instead we are going to speed up the development process by importing a set of tools to

interact and make our game faster, which is by using the Unity XR Interaction Toolkit. So to download the Unity XR

Interaction Toolkit, we can click on "Windows", go to "Package Manager", the plus button, add the package by name, type

com.unity.xr.interaction.toolkit, and now it should automatically install this package. Of course, there will be updates

in the future that might change how this tutorial works, but if you have any issues, go to the comment section below

and I will post how to handle this problem. But now that we have the Unity XR Toolkit installed, let's get started

and build our own XR rig. So you can think of the XR rig like the player in your game. To set up the XR rig,

let's first remove the moving camera that we have. Right-click into "Hierarchy", go to "XR", and click on "XR Origin". As you can

see, it adds an XR Origin to our scene. So let's make sure that this XR Origin is

at the center of the game by setting its position and rotation to zero, zero, zero. And as you can see, this XR Origin is a

It's a bit the same as what we did earlier. We also have a camera that has the track post driver, but thanks to the

interaction toolkit, we now have more features. Like, if we go to the XR Origin game object, we have here the XR Origin

component that has a tracking origin mode setting. And with this setting, you can add a certain offset to the camera

with the camera Y offset parameter. But most importantly, say if you want to take the height of the player into account, or

not, by setting the mode to "Floor". And this is what I'm going to do in my case. And there it is. If we click on play,

as you can see, the camera still works with the VR asset, but now it takes my height into account and it feels like

the plane that we added earlier is at ground level in real life. That's awesome! So now that we have made the

setup for the VR headset, let's do it too for the controllers. So to take into account the controllers in our XR rig,

let's first add an empty game object. I'm going to right-click on the camera offset and click on "Create Empty." So this

will create an empty child of the camera offset. A child means that if the parent moves, the children will move as well,

which is what we want in this case. So we can rename this empty game object "Left Hand" and add a new component called XR

Controller Action Based. There you go! Finally, I'm going to duplicate this game object with Ctrl+D and rename it

"Right Hand." But as you can see, we have now one big problem: for each controller, we have to set up all of the input actions, which

will take us a lot of time. Now, if you don't know what input actions are, we will talk about them in detail in the

next episode, so don't worry. But to avoid doing everything yourself, we will use a component preset by the Unity XR Toolkit.

First, we need to download this preset, so let's go back to our package manager. With the Windows package manager and our currently

installed version of the Unity XR Toolkit, we want to click on "Import" on the starter asset, and there you go. As you can see, if we

close this window and then go to "Samples/XR Interaction Toolkit/Starter Assets," we can have a look at this new folder

that we've downloaded. To use these presets, we can go back to our left hand, click on that little icon in the

top right corner, and select "XR Rig/Default Left Controllers." As you can see, now all of the actions are set up; that's nice.

And we can do exactly the same thing, but for the right hand. Okay, we're almost there. Last but not

least, we need to tell Unity to enable the actions that we're using. So let's select our XR Origin, click on "Add

Component," and add a new Input Action Manager. Finally, we can select the "XR Default Input Actions" asset that was inside the

starter asset folder and drag it into the action asset list of this component. And there it is, guys! Now, if we click on "Play,"

as you can see, it works with the XR Rig we built. The left and right ends are now following the position of the

controllers. And now, of course, we cannot see it in the Game window because it doesn't have a visual right now. So, to

quickly test our result in this Game window, let's select both our ends and let's right-click, go to 3D, click on "Cube." 

This will, of course, create a cube as a child of both our ends. And we can select the two cubes, remove the Box Collider

component because we don't want this component to collide, and scale down this cube to something like 0.1. And now,

if we click on "Play," ta-da! We can now see the cubes we just added that are following the position

How to Make a VR Game in Unity - PART 1

How to Make a VR Game in Unity - PART 1