XR Origin, Your Presence in VR

Objective: Understanding what goes into making your own XR origins (XR Rig)!

What is XR Origin? XR Origin serves as the center of tracking space in an XR scene. An XR Origin configuration is a set of Game Objects and components that work together to transform data from the XR tracking subsystems into world space.

When you install the XR interaction toolkit in Unity and the starter assets Unity includes an XR Origin you can drop into your XR scene. In this tutorial we are going to cover how to create your own, and what it includes.

To begin, we can create an XR Origin by right-clicking in the Hierarchy, scroll down to XR and select XR Origin (VR).

This places the XR Origin in your scene. You can select it now and place it wherever you want.

Now, let’s take a look at what is included in the XR Origin. Parented under this object is a camera offset, under that there is a main camera (headset), left hand and right hand. As stated above, this object is all about tracking the player’s head and hands.

You can see in the inspector you can change the tracking origin mode. You can choose the headset itself or the floor. When you are tracking the floor, it sets the origin to the real-world floor. You can select device when you don’t care where the floor is in comparison to the players head. Think like a spaceship, or a racecar.

When the device is selected you had an offset option that you don’t need when you are tracking the floor. This value controls the height given to the player when the device is being tracked.

This is all there is to the XR Origin. Don’t be afraid to get into yours and tweak it to fit your specific need, and I’ll see you in the next tutorial!