Like say I had to create some VR for someone with a proper VR headset, but all I had was a laptop.
Could I just test it by crossing my eyes? Or buy a couple of lenses and tie the laptop round my head?
Yeah, it wouldn’t get the full movement effect. Maybe I could attach some gyroscope sensors via the USB port to my laptop. Or just control the camera manually.
Like in an emergency if someone wanted me to make them a VR demo, and I didn’t have much money, would there be a way to test it and be reasonably sure it would work?
And then maybe just test it once on a friends real VR system just to make sure?
Your cheapest means would be targeting Cardboard and using a cardboard capable Android device and viewer. From there it starts getting expensive: Dayadream, Vive, Oculus…
What will be the end users headset? cardboard + mobile phone + vridge is the cheapest solution. Making accurate scale scene can be hard without testing properly.
You can create a Cardboard/ GoogleVR experience for Android and get full emulation in the Unity Editor. If you want to look at it without a phone, you can put the cardboard viewer up to your computer screen and look at the stereoscopic image. You can resize Unity Game window so it fits to the right size. You will easily see the screens pixels and obviously can’t turn your head. Probably looks similar to looking at an iPhone in VR.
You could test it, sure, but – despite how nicely Unity’s cross-platform VR tools are shaping up to be – you couldn’t really be reasonably sure it would work on the actual target hardware without testing on that hardware. If you’re targeting Oculus, you could get a used DK2 on eBay for much cheaper than a CV1. Or arrange for a few back-and-forth tests with your friend’s VR hardware. One session probably won’t be enough.
