It’s still not clear exactly how best to build modified FOVs. We need more complicated scenes; here are a few things we might use to generate them:
Unity
Unity has a nice editor, and we can expect students to be familiar with it. I don’t think we get source code.
Unity claims they’ll have Rift support for free users soon. That was in September.
Unity pro already has support, and costs either $75 / month (with a 12 month contract), or $1,500. That’s per component; if we want the base and android, that’s $150 / month, or $3,000.
For educational licencing, we could contact them as suggested on the official site:
https://store.unity3d.com/education
Or purchase from the official reseller:
http://www.studica.com/unity
They offer all components in a watermarked version for $150 per year, individual components for a one-time $750, or all components for a one-time $1,999; we’d want the main component, and maybe android or ios.
These are all pre-orders for Unity 5.
Studica claims all of their discounts end on October 31st, 2014.
Unreal Engine
With this we get source; it’s unclear how it compares to Unity. They also have a visual editor, and some weird pegs-and-wires visual programming system that I’m a little curious to see in the wild, how it shapes the way people think about programming.
Free to students via the Github Student Developer Pack. They’ve given me access for a year; I think there’s some kind of renewal process after.
Free to schools by filling out the form at the bottom of this page.
Non-educational licences are $20 / month; with both educational and non-, they claim 5% of your profits if you launch a commercial product.
Just Load Something and Draw It
Both of those will sometimes be inflexible; even with the full source code of Unreal, even simple modifications mean a lot of learning their system. Implicit in the act of research is doing things established engines don’t expect.
For quick tests and simple scenes, we might want a really barebones way to load, manipulate, and render models. For that, I’m looking at Open Asset Import Library.
I haven’t yet had time to look at these in detail; a future post may have some kind of comparison.