9 Must Have Skills To Become An AR/VR Developer (With Course Recommendations)
By: Rajat Kumar Gupta
Tags: VR, Virtual Reality, AR, UX, Augmented Reality

XR encompasses augmented, virtual, and mixed reality technologies. This is an upcoming industry that may be good to get into. An XR Enthusiast can be of 2 types—

Developer Designer

It depends on the enthusiast’s thought process.

In this article, I have enlisted some of the skills that will help you grow in XR, as well as serve as an answer for “How do I become an XR Developer?”

Like many other technologies, there is no perfect roadmap to learning XR. Nevertheless, I have tried my level best to come up with a generalized learning process for the same.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments below this article.

Skill 1 — Programming

Basic programming experience in languages like Java, C#, Swift, Javascript etc is essential for developing any piece of software. Get a good grasp on any one of these languages. Concepts like loops, control-logic, OOP principles like inheritance, abstraction, encapsulation, etc should be at your fingertips before moving forward.

If you already have a bachelors degree in Computer Science, you have a good foundation. If you don’t, then who cares? Learn programming from YouTube, Udemy, Udacity and a thousand other free platforms.

Skill 2 — Software Development

Once you are through with programming, your thinking will automatically shift towards building stuff rather than practicing problems.

3 types of Software Development are pretty mainstream —

1. Web Development

2. Mobile App Development

3. Game Development

You should have a basic idea of any one of them atleast. There are tons of online resources to learn these.

Note that once you pickup a domain, you should stick to it for 6 months atleast. That’s 6 months of committed learning.

There is no use of all that knowledge that you have accumulated in the past 6 months if you don’t apply it to a real world project.Therefore add to that another 6 months of applying your learning in a real world project through an internship or a job.

Trending AR VR Articles:

The more time you spend working on a real world project under an organization, the more you sharpen your domain knowledge.

Based on your learning pace you can shorten the 6 months learning process + 6 months real world project experience into a shorter period. I am just providing you with a rough estimate.

In these 6 months you are expected to know stuff like —

UI/UX Development based on a given mock i.e if you are given a design you are able to develop that design using code. Naturally, the code depends on the domain that you have chosen. For web development, you should be familiar with HTML, CSS & JS. Then you can dive into a UI Framework such as React. Connecting your client side app to some API to show dynamic data using JSON Parsing techniques. Adding 3rd party libraries so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. I am not pinpointing any particular library because that again depends on your domain and your app requirements.

Also, I am not diving deep into things like code architecture, testing, security and fixing memory leaks in your mobile apps. These skills are required to improve the quality of your app, as well as scaling it up.

If in the future, you are working on an XR application that requires reaching out to a billion users, then you cannot ignore these quality aspects. For developing small AR/VR prototypes, you can compromise on the quality aspect.

The more knowledge you have in your domain the more you can think about how to combine things and think out of the box. This is one of the many ways to flex your creative muscles.

Skill 3 — General XR Knowledge

Now it is time to explore XR. Get familiar with the basic terminologies of XR. Understand the constraints of this technology. The objective behind this step is to get you familiar with terminologies of XR and become comfortable with the words used loosely in the XR domain.

There are 3 domains that come under the umbrella of XR

AR i.e Augmented Reality VR i.e Virtual Reality MR i.e Mixed Reality

Here is a course from the University of Michigan. This should be a good starting point.