shindig that's awesome! Did you use Unity for the VR hackathon? I'm planning on building a new PC and grabbing my own Vive next month. I already started doing some coding in Unity and it's a lot of fun.
Have you had any experience with Unreal Engine?
Yeah I use Unity, I used Unreal when it first came out but I started with Unity in 2009 and got a mobile license in March 2012 when they weren't free, and I can dance circles around Unreal guys when it comes to rapid prototyping and creating experiences. We have colleagues who are big fans of it for the visual appeal but we get 85% of the results with 1/10th or less the effort which is good enough for me.
Unreal has better visual fidelity and performance out of the box with less effort, Unity can make AAA games but it requires custom shaders and tricks to get the same performance. However, the HTC Vive runs at 90fps from Unity builds steadily, Valve is fucking amazing. We've shipped a lot of Oculus projects and we don't even pay attention to them anymore.
The other main reason we use Unity is because it's the first to get support for new tech coming out. It's currently the recommended development platform for Hololens development for example while Unreal doesn't run on it, it got Vive and Oculus support first, 6 months+ before Unreal. We got our Hololenses in April this year, I got a big head start on the Unreal guys since they can't actually use it yet.
We also have been doing Augmented reality with it for 4 years, while Unreal is just now getting AR....
I've also been using Kinect 1, Kinect 2, Primesense sensors, openNI, and just a ton of other shit that integrates easily in Unity. Everything from CastAR, Leap Motion, various haptic suits, Meta glasses, etc work with Unity before Unreal.
More than a year ago we got one of the first 200 HTC Vive prototypes (I work less than a mile from Valve in Bellevue), I had 5 weeks to make an experience for a big company similar to Samsung, and it was really straightforward to get it done even with beta sdk's and hardware thanks to the productivity in Unity.
Download Vuforia and the examples and give it a spin in Unity...years ago there was a better AR library called MetaIO but Apple bought it and shut it down.
Apple also bought Primesense and pulled the plug on it overnight while we were using it. The structure sensor is based off it. Primesense developed openNI as an opensource project and Apple shut down the servers hosting it. Someone put up a new repository with the last version they'd downloaded so it still exists today.