Applications built with ViRSE have two sides

1. The ViRSE Framework - Supplied by the ViRSE Team, this does all the heavy lifting to make your application work
2. Your plugin - Developed by you, this handles everything specific to your educational use-case

This architecture effectively means the majority of the work of building a VR application has already been done for you! Before you begin development, it is useful to understand what is the responsibility of the ViRSE Framework, and what is the responsibility of the plugin

ViRSE Framework

• Handle all user input and player control, allowing movement throughout the environment and interaction with the environment
• Handle user interface (menus, settings screens, etc)
• Provides ViRSE components that can be implemented and configured within plugins
• Handles automatic networking of players, and ViRSE components
• Builds and exports your plugin to the ViRSE server

Your Plugin

• Creation of the Unity scene, including audio/visual assets
• Implementation of ViRSE tools (activatables, adjustables, grabbables, infopoints, etc) into the scene, and configuration of these tools
• All logic specific to your use-case

<aside> 🤓 How do the framework and plugin talk to each other?

In order for the plugin and the framework to function together, they have to be able to talk to each other! For example, If you want to execute some of your own code when the framework detects a button has been pushed or a lever has been moved, or if you want to fetch data from the framework to feed into your code, there has to be some way for the plugin and the framework to communicate. This is done through a number of APIs - Application Programming Interfaces

APIs allow two separate software systems to exchange data and invoke each other’s behaviors without having any knowledge of the other’s internal workings. Among other things, this means these two systems can be updated and changed without breaking the other.

All plugin/framework communication in ViRSE is through these APIs…

• Each instance of a ViRSE component has its own interface. If you want to retrieve the on/off state of an activatable (a button), you will need to access the interface of that particular activatable
• For any data/behaviors that don’t relate to a specific ViRSE component (e.g how many users are currently online, whether the user is in VR or 2D mode, etc), there exists a single central API </aside>