Facebook engineers develop tools to improve VR content development efficiency

During the development of virtual reality content, programmers have to put on headsets to view the effects of the changes almost every time they change the code, and then take off the headsets and go back to work in front of the computer monitors, which undoubtedly slows down the progress of the work.

Two Facebook engineers came up with a simple idea during Facebook's famous hackathon: develop an integrated development environment system (programmers call it IDE) that can render programming interfaces in virtual reality.

They built the system using Facebook's own React application framework, which is widely praised by programmers inside and outside the social network for its cross-platform flexibility. With the new system, virtual reality development becomes a bit like science fiction.

Programmers can look around and create simple objects in VR, such as boxes or planes. A floating programming window can be operated by the keyboard (note: programmers are good at blind typing), giving engineers full access to the code behind the image. Once the code changes, the image will be updated in real time in 3D VR.

Although it looks a bit primitive, the scene of programmers building a virtual reality world has a bit of the flavor of the science fiction novel "Neuromancer".