VR is all over the place, but sometimes it’s not where you most expect it. Plenty of apps out there might could do with a wee bit of VR to help show off an apartment or a bit of 3D content, but those experiences can be pretty labor-intensive. Viro is a new company that hopes to empower mobile developers to easily add VR to their apps using familiar tools and code bases.
“VR needs more content,” CEO Danny Moon told TechCrunch, “and different toolsets allow developers to create different types of experiences. Viro allows mobile developers to build native VR.”
You may think, well, isn’t that what Unity, Unreal and other cross-platform engines are for? Yes indeed, but they also add levels of complexity and don’t always play nice with the tools a developer has built their app with, or the skillset that a company has built up.
“For building a game, Unity is great,” said co-founder Raj Advani, “but it’s not the simplest tool for building applications. You open up a game development platform, you see like a thousand different controls staring at you. Viro is simpler, it uses the same [i.e. mobile and web] codebase, it uses less code to do the same things.”
Moon used the example of Airbnb, which is already experimenting with other social and presentational modes online. If they want to try doing some VR stuff internally,…