Excellent Game Engine but mostly worthless without VR

[JeffGillin]

I know game engines come up slow - it's heavy lifting developing a real game like Bevy.

It might be THE BEST game engine in a lot of ways. Kudos to the team for making such a flexible and amazing game engine.

But without VR that means a dev ALSO need to keep their minds around other game engines, which is certainly too challenging for most, which means the dev can't go out and offer up VR solutions to businesses which is a huge market opportunity - bars, restaurants. hotels, etc

Because of this currently limitation, Bevy is very limited.

Even just VR - no worrying about XR / AR would be a huge win for bevy.

I think that most that don't come to bevy are seeing that its not focused on that market.

Now, I don't know what the headset manufacturers are doing atm - the hardware side seems to have stalled. But for devs, VR alone would open up HUGE markets not currently be served by anyone. And more and more, devs are getting kicked out of the field.

Why don't we crowdfund an effort to get the VR going? Just VR with no worries about the rest. VR alone is all that's needed.

[Maxime-Verrier]

I don't think it's fair to call bevy worthless without a XR (VR/AR) support.
XR is growing stronger every year and there will probably be a surge in popularity with the recent breakthroughs in XR in the next decade.

But right now, more than 99% of the use cases of game engines don't use XR in any shape or form, so calling a game engine like bevy worthless without it is far stretched.

Even in a future where XR rises in popularity, a game engine without XR will still be far from worthless.
For the short term future (around 1-2 years), the bevy's contributors and maintainers are clearly focused on the last major mainstream features that bevy needs (Editor, further ecs implementation, BSN etc).

I don't see an XR support for a while (at least 2-3 years as a strict minimum) honestly, but who I'm, I can be wrong.

[hymm]

consider contributing to the https://crates.io/crates/bevy_mod_openxr crate if you're interested in using vr.

[Jondolf]

You can absolutely do VR/XR with Bevy already, and many people have; there just isn't first-party support yet. bevy_oxr is the (third-party) XR plugin that most people seem to be using from what I've seen. (Edit: ahh hymm beat me to it haha)

Also see #115 for an existing issue about OpenXR support.