The future of virtual reality technology just got brighter thanks to an announcement at the Oculus Connect 2014 conference: Unity and Oculus have continued their strategic partnership so that Oculus is now fully supported by the Unity engine. As a result developers will have a wide range of tools at their disposal to create stunning projects for the Oculus Rift and Oculus VR Store.

The Unity platform will now include a dedicated Oculus add-on that is available for both Free and Pro versions of the Unity engine without any additional cost. Major features of the add-on will include stereo imaging optimizations, 3D audio support, deeper Unity editor integration, inclusion of the Oculus Rift in the Unity development and debugging workflow, integration of Oculus-specific APIs within Unity, and direct publishing to the Oculus platform.

“There are so many incredible VR projects on Unity, and this partnership will make it even easier to build more great experiences for the Oculus platform,” said Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe. “We're thrilled to be working with Unity to put world-class tools in the hands of developers.”

“Oculus is an innovative technological leader that is ushering in a new era for creating fully immersive interactive experiences, not just of games, but of all kinds,” said Unity CEO David Helgason. “We're incredibly happy to play a role in this and see that our entire developer community, who are already producing some really incredible stuff, can bring their crazy ideas to life inside the Oculus Rift.”

Many games have already been created using the Unity engine, such as Lucky’s Tale, Game of Thrones: The Wall, The Gallery: Six Elements, DarkNet, Titans of Space, Blocked In and The Rift. The expanded support that will be available in the near future will allow for exciting new projects that expand immensely on the possibilities offered by these games.

Currently there is only an Oculus plug-in that can be accessed by Pro users. Unity is working quickly to make the plug-in available for all users, Free and Pro, while the dedicated add-on is under development and finalization. No word on when the add-on will be officially launched.