Oculus Rift will ship with four-month Unity Pro trial

VR-minded Vision Summit 2016 kicks off with other freebies, news announcements.

Sam Machkovech – Feb 10, 2016 4:30 pm | 24

Another Oculus bundled product: four months of Unity Pro. Credit: Oculus

The creators of the Unity game engine kicked off a virtual reality focused event in Los Angeles on Wednesday, and it began with a wave of freebie announcements—perhaps most notably, the news that all Oculus Rift buyers will get four months of free, unfettered access to Unity Pro.

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey was on hand at the Vision Summit 2016 to confirm the news, pointing back to Oculus’ original decision to offer shorter free trials to the VR headset maker’s dev kit products. “For virtual reality, we knew a lot of the best ideas and applications weren’t going to come from people that you could predict,” Luckey told the Vision Summit crowd. “It was gonna come from people who would create things you wouldn’t expect.”

This news follows prior bundled-software announcements, including a copy of Eve: Valkyrie for every headset pre-order and a copy of the cute platformer Lucky’s Tale with all headsets, which may help the slightest bit with the $600 headset’s sticker shock.

Luckey said that he hopes the free four-month trial will encourage “everyone to start creating apps using Unity. They can start thinking about being a creator, not a consumer.” Luckey also estimated that “something like 90 percent” of software for its first consumer-level product, the Samsung GearVR headset, was developed in the Unity language, and he gave attendees a very rough estimate of how many Oculus Rift headsets he expects to ship this year: “We’ve shipped a couple hundred thousand developer kits, and that’s nothing compared to what we plan on doing this year.”

The other major PC VR platform, the HTC Vive, also arrived at the Vision Summit in freebie form. A brief, pre-recorded statement from Valve co-founder Gabe Newell confirmed an Oprah-level giveaway: a free HTC Vive Pre kit for everyone in the room. Those kits weren’t tucked beneath attendees’ seats, however; they’ll have to wait for those VR systems to be distributed at a later time.

The rest of the event’s keynote was rounded out with brief, excitement-addled statements from a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer, a VR filmmaker, and a Google Cardboard representative, along with the world’s first presentation of Unity’s upcoming in-VR engine version—which, like Unreal Engine’s recently announced update, will allow game makers to keep their VR headsets on and manipulate 3D objects with motion-tracked controllers. Unity did not announce when it expects that VR toolset to roll out to users.