Dylan Smit

If you are responsible for the art of the project, make smart choices. Objects that are held or the user interacts with a lot should have high detail, which will cost some performance. On the other side, walls do not need to be high resolution in all projects. Take a good look at the project requirements and make a small mockup to communicate which tradeoffs you can make to make the project run well.

Most 3D tools have a lot of settings to tune. Some of these can already improve performance a ton by themselves. VR has some universal settings. The first is using (eye-tracked) foveated rendering to improve quality where the user looks. There are also some options, like asymmetric projection and phase sync, which can improve performance or perceived latency with just one checkbox. You could even implement Application Spacewarp for a huge performance boost on standalone VR. If you are working with Unity, here are my tips: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjnZTAR0BuTDNeDPy44G4bUpYRHGzy_xh

When starting a project for a client, talk about which hardware will be used compared to their requirements. Next to some headsets being more powerful (eg. Quest 2 vs Quest 3), it is a lot easier to optimize for 1 headset compared to multiple!

A course will be nice for getting up to speed with the current trends, but it often lacks depth about cutting-edge developments. This is because it takes time to develop courses, and doing this on experimental and rapidly changing tools is not always suitable. So use courses to get up to speed, and use that momentum to build up your knowledge even further

There are many places to stay up to date with trends. My favorite is to follow some YouTubers. They cover the latest news about VR hardware and software. I just put on the video when cooking or traveling, and get updated with the latest info. For more technical knowhow there are great newsletters from pretty much every field, including VR! Look around and you will definitely find a newsletter that will help you stay up to date.

Forums are a great place to ask for support and also offer help yourself. A lot of my knowledge comes from reading from and helping others on the Unity forums and Discord. Here I see what people use in the real world and which problems they run into. This gives me a good overview of what I need to focus on and where I can learn myself