Facebook last month extended the horizon for the Oculus Unity Integration by making available the basic support for HTC Vive to the Integration. In the December release, Facebook further expanded that support and managed to bring down the GPU cost of Oculus Rift support. This new support for the HTC Vive will be applicable to any SteamVR headset theoretically.
This latest feature is called OVROverlay or it is sometimes called TimeWarp layers through which UI and text will be proffered. This is basically the Oculus compositor layers system which, for the HTC Vive, will be passed to SteamVR’s compositor. According to Oculus VR’s CTO John Carmack, this is “the biggest” tip for sharp text in VR.
The support will also be helping in improving the performance of the Rift in Unity apps. The developers have been able to increase the performance by making the occlusion mesh culling “more aggressive.” It is expected that it will be able to free up some GPU time. However, there is a foreseeable downside to it and the freeing of GPU time comes with a price. This new edition will make the editor preview smaller. Apart from these changes, the new update contains a few changes in its feature.
The update will have a new sample scene and a tutorial for the feature. The new update will also include the Oculus Profiler Panel. It is, as the name sounds, designed for profiling VR performance and in the Unity it will come as a popup window.
It works on Rift apps locally and from Oculus go over USB. However, Gear VR is yet to be on the receiving side of this feature as the feature does not work properly on it yet. The Unity Profiler may speed up the process of diagnosing the causes that lay behind the performance issues.
