I’ve been helping out with the Transit Costs Project at New York University lately. I’m partnering with a game artist to simulate a proposed redesign of Penn Station. Earlier this week, I took out my old VR headset to get a VR version of this.

I began doing VR rather unexpectedly in 2021 for another game. The problem is that Facebook/Meta dropped support for development on Mac and Linux a while ago; it’s possible to develop by making and installing standalone Quest builds, but it’s not as simple as just pressing play and testing things out in the headset, as in Windows. I wouldn’t want to do this full-time, but for this project getting things working was pretty simple.

I’ve used Devin Willis’s guide as a starting point, but this hasn’t been updated since 2019. In 2023, things are a bit different.

Installing Android Dependencies

I used Unity 2021.3.2, with Android Build Support and all related packages. Unity installed OpenJDK, OpenNDK, and OpenSDK, which saved time installing them by hand.

Screenshot of Unity Installation

Installing Gradle

Gradle was a different story. My first build failed, and Gradle needed to be installed by hand. I used SDKMAN! to install the latest Gradle, then updated Unity’s preferences to point to the new Gradle installation.

curl -s "https://get.sdkman.io" | bash

sdk install gradle 8.1

This needs to be assigned in Unity’s Preferences.

Screenshot of Unity Preferences

From there it was straightforward to connect the device and do a test build.