Oculus VR’s growing developer community has received their latest update to the Oculus software development kit (SDK) with the release of 0.4.3 beta. The release of the latest version is packed with a number of new features and is now available for download from Oculus VR’s official website.

One of the more exciting features of the new SDK includes support for the free version of Unity! For those not familiar with Unity, it is one of the most popular game development engines currently available on the market and is widely used among Oculus Rift developers. Prior to the 0.4.3 Beta update developers were required to own a paid license of the Unity Pro version ($1,500 value) in order to utilize all the tools necessary to integrate virtual reality features of the Oculus Rift. Thanks to the partnership between Oculus and Unity more developers will now have an opportunity to access these tools in order to develop and create VR content for the Rift.

The new SDK update is supported for versions of Unity 4.5.5 and up.

New Features

• Display Driver latency reduction in Direct Mode by 1 frame, resulting in 0ms Post-present
• Updated display driver to support multi-threaded calls efficiently, this may improve performance in some scenarios.
• Added option in the Oculus Configuration Utility to Suppress the Health and Safety Warning during active development.
• Added option in the Oculus Configuration Utility to set the OVRServer logging level.
• Updated the Health and Safety Warning screen to reflect an age restriction of 13. More information can be found in the Oculus VR Best Practices Guide and in the Oculus VR Health And Safety Warnings documentation.
• Experimental Linux support (see included LINUX_README)
• Numerous stability and performance improvements.

Unity

• Added support for Unity Free in Unity 4.5.5 and up.
• Overhauled Unity C# API. Reduced performance overhead. See the migration guide for more details.
• Improved support for multi-layered rendering. Just instantiate multiple OVRCameraRigs, set Camera.depth and Camera.clearFlags for each eye, and use.

Bug Fixes

• Fixes in Vsync direct mode tearing.
• Fixed a bug in the D3D10/11 rendering path that was causing the overall brightness of the visuals to change on some systems.
• Improved OpenGL state management through contexts

Unity

• Fixed a source of jitter in TimeWarp timing that resulted in shaky images.
• Removed problematic “out of camera range” message. Will be replaced by an optional camera bounds visualization in a future release.
• In the editor, Game view rendering no longer targets the wrong view.

Along with the free Unity support, the new SDK also includes various software tweaks and improvements to the Oculus Rift DK2, including “experimental” support for Linux which will allow developers to port over their VR content to the open-source operating system.