Unity 4: Rift UI experiments

I have been experimenting with creating UIs for Rift applications using Unity 4. I figured it might save people some time to see the mistakes I've made so they can avoid them.

I started with a basic scene with a script that used the UnityGUI controls (OnGui with GUI.Box and  GUI.Button) to create a simple level loader. Here is what the scene looked like displayed on a typical monitor:

As a quick test to see how well this GUI would translate to the Rift, I used the OVRPlayerController prefab from the Oculus Unity Pro 4 Integration package  to get the scene on the Rift. And, well, as you can see, it doesn’t work at all.



The problem is that UnityGUI creates the GUI as a 2d overlay. Because the GUI isn't in 3d space, it doesn't get rendered properly for the Rift and therefore it can't be properly viewed on the Rift. To create the same GUI in 3d space, I used the VRGUI package found on the Oculus forums posted by boone188. This package creates a plane in 3d space where the GUI is then rendered. Following the examples in that package, I created the same basic menu as before, but now in 3d space. It looked like this:



This GUI works, but it doesn't feel right.  Having a GUI plane in between me and the world I created just isn’t very immersive. For an immersive experience, you need to integrate the UI into the world you are building. As this is a level selection menu and I’ve built it around an elevator, making the elevator buttons into the level selection buttons is a natural choice. Here’s the concept for the scene (and if this were drawn by a competent artist, I think it could look good.)

To select a level, the user just needs to look at it (Raycasting from the point between the two cameras is used to determine where the user is looking), the button will then turn green to show it has been selected and then the user can  confirm the selection using the gamepad.