Chris Pruett, Oculus’ head of developer relations and co-founder of Robot Invader, has recently released somewhat of a technical quick-start guide targeting potential Gear VR devs looking to get that extra mile out of their game or experience.
The blog post, Squeezing Performance out of Your Unity Gear VR Game, and can be found in full on Oculus’ blog where Pruett details some hard limits and tricks to keep in mind when developing for both the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 and Galaxy S6/S6 Edge, the only devices currently capable of driving their respective versions of Samsung’s Gear VR mobile headset.
“In mobile VR, anything less than 60 frames per second doesn’t just look bad, it feels bad,” warns Pruett. “Your high-end PC runs the game at about 1000 frames per second, but it sounds like a jet engine and actually levitates slightly when the fans really get going,” he says to put into perspective the massive difference in power between a gaming-grade desktop computer and a smartphone.
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Pruett goes on to further discuss how to optimize games and apps to fit some real world hardware concerns that could arise if devs aren’t careful to intentionally limit their Unity-built creations to fit the mobile platform. He covers a number of areas including; VR environments, a list of techniques for designing and optimizing performance, and a number of ‘gotchas’ that could throw a wrench in the works if not properly observed.
You can read Pruett’s post, the first of a two-part quick-start guide into the world of optimized Gear VR development by clicking here. If you’re interested in how to create a game or app that plays on both tethered and mobile hardware, Darshan Shankar’s blog has an informative post on developing cross-platform VR apps for Oculus Rift and GearVR.
More extensive information on mobile development can be found in the Oculus Unity Mobile Integration Guide.
