3 Valuable Insights Into Virtual Reality Development

Published on:

Virtual Reality Development requires a balance between the client's requirements and your team's creativity. Let's take a look at how you can combine the two:

The Virtual Reality (VR) industry is relatively new, however, it boasts an amazing growth rate as more companies enter the market every year. In this article, we want to share insights into developing a VR project with you. Below, you’ll find our main takeaways from multiple projects we have worked on at iVariant. We hope that our experience will be useful to other VR developers as following these recommendations can ease the Virtual Reality development process.

#1 Find The Sweet Spot

As a development team, you often have to aim for the sweet spot in terms of reality, client’s requests and gamification, maintaining a balance between all the aspects. While development teams often pursue the goal of satisfying their clients only, it is also crucial to bring the most value into the final project. Therefore, the greater goal should be to provide the user with the best possible experience.

Another sweet spot your team needs to find is between strictly following your client’s directions and making your own suggestions and improvements. While listening to your clients is crucial, it is also important to approach every project with creativity. Don’t be afraid to brainstorm and offer a client your own vision of the product. This way you are more likely to find a good idea quicker and come up with a more cost-effective implementation.

#2 Form Development Stages

Virtual Reality projects share development stages with video games (and mobile games). These include prototyping, graphics, scenario, and the development itself. It is important to make a set plan and write out all the stages before the development process begins.

Here are the 6 stages of VR project development that the iVariant team follows:

  1. Form the task, discuss the concept, develop the roadmap
  2. Examine the client’s references, communicate with experts, collect all the information
  3. Further develop the task and coordinate with the client
  4. Decompose the regulations and scenario drafts.
  5. Create 3D-models and develop locations.
  6. Implement object logic and insertion it into the platform

#3 Account For Edits

Last but not least, it is important to leave time for QA and customer-requested edits. Don’t think that your work is done once you present the project to your client. In fact, it often happens that the client has a lot of further comments and suggestions. Therefore, it is important to account for the final edits when you plan out the stages for your VR project. However, the best thing to do would be to maintain continuous communication with the client in order to minimize the number of edits in the end.

Moreover, the choice of a VR platform plays a role here as well. For example, we use Varwin, which allows us to edit VR-content quickly and immediately show changes to the client. Moreover, the clients can make changes themselves thanks to the drag-and-drop logic interface based on Google’s Blockly, as you can see below. It was especially useful to us when our client was very meticulous about colors and parts and they wanted to explore all options. For example, they could not decide between buttons and levers for the control panel and wanted to experiment with different colors, which led to our developers having to make changes multiple times a day. Giving them access to the platform was a tremendous relief for our team. It also saves time for clients as they don’t have to wait for developers to make changes.

Varwin

© Varwin

Conclusion

Overall, we hope that these insights will bring value to you and your team and you’ll keep them in mind for your future VR projects. Every VR project is different in its specifics, but the approach stays the same. Balance the client’s requirements and creativity, plan ahead all the development stages and leave time for the final edits — these are the three lessons we hope you’ll take away from this article!

 

_________

Sharing is caring!