Unity has presented its latest developments for its game engine platform in Unite Europe 2016, and during the keynote today Unity Labs took to the stage to preview and demo some of its latest updates. The team revealed how developers can create virtual reality (VR) from within VR, and showed how easily they can switch from editing to play mode.

Amir Ebrahimi, part of the San Francisco branch of the Unity Labs team, took to the stage and launched straight into the demo that showed off the updates made to the engine in terms of VR development. He opened up the engine and showed how to edit VR while using the Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD) – “offering VR within VR”. He also used the Oculus Touch motion controllers, which allowed him to bring up a pallet to select various models to enter into the landscape. Ebrahimi explained that developers before would have to take off the HMD and edit manually on their PCs, but this is not a step that they will have to take with the newest updates.

Ebrahimi also announced that a new feature will also be Play Mode, which can be accessed whilst editing in VR. The demo showed the ease of which developers can switch between the two modes, effectively cutting out the slow middle-man manual process.

The assets that were used was the War Zone pack, part of the free assets already offered by Unity. It was said that it was not meant for VR, but it was still used to build the VR game.

Ebrahimi ended his section by saying: “We look forward to having you guys build editor VR extensions and post them on the store.” After he left the stage, CEO of Unity, John Riccitiello, commented: “We have clearly entered the Matrix by creating VR from within VR.”

These new features will be available in the fourth quarter of this year, and Ebrahimi also announced that the tools will all be opensourced.

For the latest in VR make sure to check back with VRFocus.

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