Valve have released the Unity based renderer for its superb VR experience collection The Lab in an effort to encourage adoption of what it sees as optimal rendering techniques for VR experiences.

Although many probably assumed that Valve’s collection of VR experiences, known as The Lab, released to the public just in time for the launch of the HTC Vive, would use the firms in-house developed 3D engine Source 2, it seems that the majority of experiences were actually built using the hugely popular Unity engine (with one notable Robot related exception).

Valve, recognising the popularity of the Unity 3D game engine among virtual reality developers, decided to release their high performance rendering engine which implements techniques developed by them to “provide the highest fidelity experience with the best performance,” for free, to the Unity asset store for developers to learn from and implement. The move was announced by Valve’s Chet Faliszek at Unite Europe in Amsterdam yesterday.

Valve have released source code for The Lab and Unity engine developers are encouraged to dig in to Valve’s custom shaders to learn more about, or indeed directly implement techniques such as Single-Pass Forward rendering, Adaptive Quality and GPU Flushing, all of which Valve implemented in The Lab and reference in a new blog post discussing the new release.

Valve’s focus is very much on preventing performance issues resulting in loss of frames, which can of course lead to discomfort for VR users, before they happen, though the use of dynamic level of detail (Adaptive Quality) for example.

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They don’t currently have any focus on utilising a form of Oculus’ Asynchronous Timewarp. ATW, as the name suggests, decouples Timewarp from the render loop, which is a method dealing with frames that aren’t finished rendering by the time they need to be sent to the VR headset. The company explains in more detail in a recent blog post:

On Oculus, ATW is always running and it provides insurance against unpredictable application and multitasking operating system behavior. ATW can smooth over jerky rendering glitches like a suspension system in a car can smooth over the bumps. With ATW, we schedule timewarp at a fixed time relative to the frame, so we deliver a fixed, low orientation latency regardless of application performance.

This consistently low orientation latency allows apps to render efficiently by supporting full parallelism between CPU and GPU. Using the PC resources as efficiently as possible, makes it easier for applications to maintain 90fps. Apps that need more time to render will have higher positional latency compared to more efficient programs, but in all cases orientation latency is kept low.

Illustration of ATW's ability to provide a reprojected view of the last available frame when rendering exceeds allotted time | Photo courtesy Oculus
Illustration of ATW’s ability to provide a reprojected view of the last available frame when rendering exceeds allotted time | Photo courtesy Oculus

Valve calls ATW an “ideal safety net,” but suggests a system to avoid relying on it too heavily, which is what this renderer release is all about. Developers looking for help achieving a consistent 90FPS, required to mitigate against artifacts that may lead to nausea, will likely greet Valve sharing its hard-earned coding tricks with open arms.

You can grab the source for the renderer at the Unity asset store here, and check out the full blog post detailing the release here.

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Based in the UK, Paul has been immersed in interactive entertainment for the best part of 27 years and has followed advances in gaming with a passionate fervour. His obsession with graphical fidelity over the years has had him branded a ‘graphics whore’ (which he views as the highest compliment) more than once and he holds a particular candle for the dream of the ultimate immersive gaming experience. Having followed and been disappointed by the original VR explosion of the 90s, he then founded RiftVR.com to follow the new and exciting prospect of the rebirth of VR in products like the Oculus Rift. Paul joined forces with Ben to help build the new Road to VR in preparation for what he sees as VR’s coming of age over the next few years.
  • Sam Illingworth

    That should be useful – The Lab is gorgeous!

  • Axphin

    Was The Lab built in Source 2 or Unity? The Wiki page shows both under Engine.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lab_%28video_game%29

    I think it would be great to get access to the project files for The Lab, or at least starter projects for some of those experiences. Would love to mess around and decontstruct Xortex.

  • Axphin

    Read that again… so everything in The Lab was done in Unity except Robot Repair?

  • DiGiCT Ltd

    Thank you valve

  • Greg Dietz

    Just another reason-even though I bought the rift instead of the Vive-all my vr games will be bought through Steam. I can’t help but be a steam fan boy.

    • ReanimationXP

      Think you meant the reverse there bud.

      • mirak

        No he didn’t.
        What he said is clear, he will buy on steam rather on oculus store, even if he have an oculus rift.

        • ReanimationXP

          Think he edited it.

          • mirak

            Ok