EditorXR

EditorXR
Information
Type	Authoring tool
Industry	Virtual reality, augmented reality
Developer	Unity Technologies (Unity Labs)
Written In	C#
License	Unity Companion License
Supported Devices	Oculus Rift and HTC Vive in edit mode; Oculus Quest and other targets through Player builds
Release Date	December 15, 2016 (experimental build); March 3, 2017 (0.0.1); October 1, 2020 (0.4.12-preview, Unity Package Manager)
Website	https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/EditorXR

EditorXR, originally released as EditorVR (EVR), is an experimental package from the Unity Labs team at Unity Technologies, published with its source code on GitHub, that lets developers edit Unity scenes from inside a virtual reality headset. It adds a VR view to the Unity Editor so that a user wearing an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive can work on a project in edit mode, placing, scaling and inspecting objects with tracked controllers. The package's short description is "Author XR in XR".

Unity demonstrated prototypes of the editor in 2016 and released the first experimental build, with its source code on GitHub, on December 15, 2016. The project was later renamed EditorXR, and its version 0.4.12-preview release notes of October 2020 announced that it was available on the Unity Package Manager. Unity no longer develops it: in 2024 a Unity developer wrote on the project's issue tracker that some of its learnings and functionality live on in the XR Interaction Toolkit and Unity's VR and MR templates.

Reviewed 21 October 2026. History, version table, features and Carte Blanche section checked against the EditorXR GitHub releases, changelog, docs and issues, Unity 2017.2 notes, the SIGGRAPH 2017 abstract and the cited press articles. About review dates.

History

Prototype demonstrations (2016)

Unity principal designer Timoni West showed a VR scene editor at Unity's Vision Summit 2016 in Hollywood in February 2016. Using an Oculus Rift with Oculus Touch controllers, she pulled out assets, placed and resized them, and built a balcony scene around herself. Road to VR noted that Unreal Engine had shown similar prototype VR editing the week before. West said that "in the long term the vision is that [the VR editor] should be just as customizable as Unity is in 2D."

At a special event during the Game Developers Conference in March 2016, West presented a later prototype, again on a Rift with two Touch controllers. Its centerpiece was a "Chess Board", an overhead mini-map of the scene that could be zoomed to different scales; objects could be grabbed, scaled, rotated and dropped onto it by hand. West gave no release date.

During the opening keynote of Unite 2016 in Los Angeles on November 1, 2016, West and principal engineer Amir Ebrahimi demonstrated EditorVR on an HTC Vive, dragging models between rendered scenes in real time with assets from the game Firewatch. Unity said the tool would arrive "within the next couple of months". At the same conference Unity said EditorVR would be open source with an open API. Chief marketing officer Clive Downie called this "kind of an unprecedented first for Unity".

Experimental release (2016-2017)

West announced on December 13, 2016 that the first experimental build would be available two days later, and Unity released it on December 15. The GitHub repository was created that day, and its first tagged pre-release was titled "Initial release of EditorVR". The release consisted of two parts: a custom experimental build of Unity 5.4, which Unity advised installing separately because it would overwrite a standard installation, and an EditorVR asset package that had to be imported into each project. Unity 5.5 was the current version at the time. The build worked with every Unity license level, including the free Personal license, but Unity offered no formal support for experimental features and set up a dedicated forum instead. TechCrunch reported that Unity expected keyboard and mouse to remain the main tools, with EditorVR useful for rough layouts and precise tweaks. Game Developer reported that the first build was to be fully open source and that its interface was Unity's normal UI system rendered in 3D; Ebrahimi said, "This is just Unity's normal UI system."

At Unity's GDC 2017 press conference, West said EditorVR had been downloaded more than 6,000 times and that some users had contributed code back to the project. The build by then included third-party tools such as ProBuilder, which edits and textures meshes inside VR, and Unity announced a tool-building competition whose winners could show their work at the following Vision Summit. Version 0.0.1, called the official release in its notes, followed on March 3, 2017 and still required the custom 5.4 build. Version 0.0.6 (May 2017) moved to a custom Unity 5.6 build and added single-pass rendering support.

Ebrahimi, West, Matt Schoen and Dylan Urquidi presented EditorVR in the Real-Time Live! program at SIGGRAPH 2017 in Los Angeles. Their abstract lists the main technical problems: working with any VR scene without degrading performance much, reproducing play-mode behavior such as colliders, physics and animation while staying in edit mode, keeping every operation non-mutating and non-destructive, and staying extensible as the VR market changed.

EditorXR and Package Manager release (2017-2020)

The release notes for Unity 2017.2 state that "EditorVR is now supported without needing a custom build (still requires separate Unity Package download)." Version 0.0.9, released on November 22, 2017, dropped the experimental build requirement and already used the name EditorXR (EXR) in its notes. It added controller tooltips and visual hints, block selection and TextMesh Pro text. Version 0.1.0, eight days later, added a workspace for browsing Google's Poly 3D model library.

Version 0.2.0 (February 2019) added the EditorXR Runtime, which runs a subset of the tools in Play Mode and in Player builds. It also added a one-handed Spatial Menu, a Minimal context for lightweight client builds, mouse locomotion and an option to start EditorXR automatically when the user puts on the headset. Version 0.3.0 (November 2019) added two-handed rotate-and-scale and removed the dependencies on partner SDKs. The 0.4 series restructured the project as a Unity package. Version 0.4.8 (August 2020) included improvements for the companion app of Unity MARS and removed "Labs" from the namespaces and package metadata. Version 0.4.12-preview, published on GitHub on October 1, 2020, announced that "EditorXR is now available on Unity Package Manager".

End of development

In February 2022, replying to a bug report about Unity 2021.2, a Unity developer posting as mtschoen-unity wrote: "We no longer support this product and the edit mode functionality relies on legacy VR support, which was deprecated in 2020." In February 2024 the same account confirmed that Unity was "no longer actively developing EditorXR". The comment added that it should still load in Unity 2019.4 and that the package can be installed by name as com.unity.editorxr. The repository has not been archived, but its last code push was in May 2022.

Release history

Version	Date	Notable changes
0.0.1-rc1	December 15, 2016	"Initial release of EditorVR" (pre-release); custom Unity 5.4 build
0.0.1	March 3, 2017	Release still requiring the custom 5.4 build
0.0.2	March 11, 2017	Viewer scaling of the world with two hands, tooltips
0.0.4	April 11, 2017	Snapping, locking, saved workspace layouts
0.0.5	April 22, 2017	Last 5.4 release; replaceable editing contexts
0.0.6	May 12, 2017	Custom Unity 5.6 build, single-pass rendering
0.0.8	October 1, 2017	Annotation tool, tool-switching workflow, blink snapping
0.0.9	November 22, 2017	No experimental Unity build needed; controller hints, TextMesh Pro
0.1.0	November 30, 2017	Poly workspace for Google's Poly library
0.2.0	February 24, 2019	EditorXR Runtime, Spatial Menu, Minimal context
0.3.0	November 5, 2019	Two-handed rotate-and-scale, partner SDK dependencies removed
0.4.12-preview	October 1, 2020	Unity Package Manager release

Dates are those of the GitHub release pages; the changelog gives earlier dates for some entries.

Features

EditorXR is opened from the Unity Editor's Windows menu or with Ctrl-E, after which the user puts on the headset; the first build offered no preview window on the desktop monitor. The documentation describes the following interface elements:

Element	Function
Main Menu	3D equivalent of the Unity menu bar, opened by pointing at a Unity button on one controller with the other; gives access to tools, workspaces and settings
Radial menu	Contextual menu shown when an object is selected, with actions such as redo, clone, cut, copy, paste, delete, select parent and lock
Pinned toolbar	Shows the last tool chosen for each hand below the controller's Unity button
Workspaces	VR equivalents of Editor windows that can be moved, resized and rotated: Console, Hierarchy, Inspector, MiniWorld, Profiler and Project, among others
MiniWorld	A scaled-down copy of the current scene for moving large objects or the user's own position
Locomotion	Blink (pointing an arc to jump to a spot) and Fly modes
Annotation tool	Drawing notes into a scene

Objects within arm's reach are handled with a direct-selection cone at the tip of the controller, and distant objects with a ray, which exposes a manipulator gizmo for constraining movement to an axis or plane. Because the interface was Unity's ordinary UI system rendered in 3D, Ebrahimi said Unity wanted developers to carry the interfaces they built for EditorVR into the builds they released. Developers can write their own tools and workspaces against the open API, and from version 0.0.5 they could replace the default tool set by creating new editing contexts. The package description says EditorXR's tools and workspaces can be built into Player builds for devices such as Oculus Quest, and the documentation describes bringing authoring workflows to AR-capable smartphones; Unity labels the runtime "highly experimental".

Requirements and supported hardware

The first build supported the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift. Rift users needed the Oculus Utilities for Unity package and had to list the Oculus SDK before OpenVR in the Player settings, while Vive users needed the SteamVR plugin. Owners of an Oculus Rift DK2 with Razer Hydra controllers could use the Sixense plugin. TechCrunch reported that one of the team's design problems was reconciling the very different Rift and Vive controllers into one control scheme. The latest package manifest in the repository (version 0.4.13-preview) declares compatibility with Unity 2019.1.14f1 and later and depends on several Unity XR tool packages, including the legacy input helpers. EditorXR is distributed under the Unity Companion License for Unity-dependent projects.

Carte Blanche

Unity Labs also worked on Carte Blanche, a separate VR authoring project for people who are not programmers. Dioselin Gonzalez, a senior VR engineer at Unity Labs, described it in a March 2016 Voices of VR interview: users would build worlds by placing cards from a virtual deck with tracked controllers, find models and scripts from the Unity Asset Store by voice, and export projects to Unity for further work. It was aimed at desktop VR owners with Oculus Touch or HTC Vive controllers, and Sylvio Drouin had told Road to VR that the tools should be expected to launch sometime in 2017. A concept video shown at the Samsung Developer Conference in 2016 featured a voice assistant called "U" and gesture controls on Oculus Touch.

Unity showed later progress at Unite Tokyo in May 2018, where West reportedly confirmed a public release for October 2018. Unity then described Carte Blanche as an "experimental prototype", not a platform, and said it would not include the ability to share experiences. UploadVR contrasted it with EditorVR, which is aimed at experienced developers editing Unity projects; Carte Blanche used pre-made assets and cards placed on a board in front of the user.

See also

• Unity
• XR Interaction Toolkit
• Unity MARS
• Unreal Engine
• Game engine