Writing3D is a set of tools designed to lower the barrier-of-entry (and speed up development time) for producing VR games, literature, and artwork. Click here to view the complete documentation website.

We strongly encourage you to read the complete Getting Started guide, but for the impatient, the following should get you up and running.

To quickly get started with Writing3D, you may download it as a zip file and extract it to a desired directory on your computer. Alternatively, you may clone it using git to stay up to date on all the latest changes:

$ git clone https://github.com/wphicks/Writing3D.git

Once you have a copy, run setup.py with Python3, and you should have everything you need.

$ cd Writing3D
$ python3 setup.py install --user

Once you've run setup.py, take a look at the samples directory to see some simple Writing3D examples.

Based on cwapp and inspired by projects like Processing and Twine, which help make a range of technologies more accessible to creative coders, Writing3D aims to provide a highly accessible point-of-entry for creative work in virtual reality. It is designed with three major goals in mind:

The layered design of Writing3D helps make it both useful and accessible for VR content creators of all technical abilities. Those with limited (or no) coding experience can still access all of Writing3D's functionality through its Python-based graphic user interface (GUI), w3d_writer. For those who have more coding experience or those who have become comfortable with the GUI and want to create even more sophisticated work, Writing3D provides an easy-to-use Python module, pyw3d. Finally, since Writing3D interfaces with Blender to render VR projects, users who are experienced with 3D modeling can directly import their models into the Writing3D framework to quickly add interactivity and animation.

Writing3D is open source software (GPLv3), which means you are free to look at and modify its source code. It is also specifically structured to make it as easy as possible for users to add their own functionality. This means that Writing3D can continue to improve and gain cool new features as the community of users grows.

Writing3D not only uses best practices to ensure that it can be maintained far into the future but also contains features to ensure that projects developed with this framework will continue to be accessible for the foreseeable future. Among other things, Writing3D provides a method to save an "archival" copy of any VR project using a human-readable XML format. This will help ensure that creative developers have access to a valuable "canon" of VR work even as VR technologies evolve.

Our commitment to maintaining VR work means that projects from Brown University's Cave Writing program going as far back as 1999 can still run through Writing3D and may soon be available on new hardware platforms like Google Cardboard and the Oculus Rift.

For more information, check out our FAQ page or dive in with the Getting Started guide.

Writing3D is currently in a pre-alpha stage. It can read and write to its archival xml format and render most project features. It has not been extensively tested across platforms and OSes, and some features remain to be implemented, including:

1. Particle systems
2. Stereo images (images which only appear in one eye of stereo visualizations)
3. Support for OpenAL-based 3D audio
4. Simplified Python interface for adding Writing3D features

The GUI is also currently in an unusable skeletal state. That being said, pyw3d currently provides almost all features that will eventually make up the core of Writing3D, and you can begin using it immediately to create basic interactive VR experiences.

If you are interested in Writing3D and would like to see its core feature set completed sooner, please see the Getting Involved page.

The best ways to contact those involved with the Writing3D project are by tweeting @whimsicalilk or by logging an issue on Github.