VR support comes to Amazon's Lumberyard engine, starting with Rift and Vive

There's a new update coming to Amazon's Lumberyard engine "in a few weeks," Lumberyard Beta 1.3, that will add support for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and other virtual reality headsets to the nascent game engine.

While Lumberyard demos have included VR segments in the past, the debut of Beta 1.3 will mark the first time the engine will officially support VR game development since its debut at GDC earlier this year. 

Rift and Vive support will be enabled through "Gems," those proprietary packages of features that Lumberyard devs can enable to augment the capabilities of the engine. 

While Beta 1.3 will only include Gems for the Rift and Vive, a blog post from Amazon's Cody White suggests that "these Gems serve as templates for customers to build their own Gems and support any VR devices they want."

And though Beta 1.3 will include a "VR Preview" feature that can be used to evaluate VR work in progress without leaving the editor, it doesn't appear to include an option to use the editor in VR, à la Unreal Engine.

For more details on how Lumberyard's VR support will actually work when Beta 1.3 ships, check out the full post over on Amazon's Gamedev Blog.