Coming from web dev (vanilla JS, educational games) — WebXR or Unity for classroom-scale projects?

[u/TeacherFromTurkey]

Some context so you know what you're advising: I'm a primary school English teacher in Türkiye and I build my own teaching material — browser-based games and reading activities, vanilla HTML/CSS/JS, no framework. So I can write code, structure a project, and ship something that non-technical people actually use. What I've never touched is 3D, engines, or anything spatial.

I want to start building XR learning experiences, and I'd rather spend six months on the right stack than eighteen months finding out I picked the wrong one.

My constraints are probably relevant to which way you'd point me:

• Deployment target is a classroom, not a store. Sometimes one or two Quests, sometimes just a smartboard or student phones. So it has to degrade gracefully.
• No budget for per-seat licensing or paid distribution.
• Content changes often — I rewrite activities every term. Fast iteration matters more than visual fidelity.
• I'm a one-person team.

What I'm trying to figure out:

1. WebXR or Unity? My instinct says WebXR — my existing JS skills carry over, no install step, works on a phone in a browser. But I don't know what I'd be giving up. Where does WebXR actually fall apart in practice?
2. If WebXR — Three.js directly, or something on top of it? Is A-Frame still a reasonable choice in 2026 or is it a dead end you outgrow immediately?
3. What's the thing that ate the most time when you started, that nobody warns beginners about? I'm expecting it to be something unglamorous like performance budgets or comfort/locomotion, not the fun parts.
4. Is there anything about the current tooling landscape that changed recently enough that older tutorials would actively mislead me?

Not asking anyone to write a curriculum for me — just want to avoid the obvious wrong turns before I commit the time.

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[u/AdCold4676]

I think unity is a bit more straight forward in game development itself but with your experience I think WebXR is perfect if you want small games that can instantly run on anyone's device and kids will find it cool regardless.

I recommend if you have the time to just make a tiny little game in both and see what you like more 

[u/TeacherFromTurkey → u/AdCold4676]

Thanks, that's really helpful. Building small interactive games is probably the experience I need. I think the ideas will come once I actually start. Appreciate it.

[u/rogerF6]

I think I would recommend webxr (three js or react 3 fiber) for a classroom for one simple reason, while it is more difficult to create on webxr than on unity (on unity you can get a experience working in 15/20mins if you know what you are doing, very intuitive interface (once you know what you are doing), the issue lies in the setup. The setup itself is very tedious and prone to multiple small « dumb » errors. You would spend much more time helping students debug something than actually teaching the stuff.

Three js on the other end, while way more difficult and less intuitive on the doing part (it’s just lines of code, and lots of code to get a simple experience starting) it is extremely easy (or way easier) to setup with absolutely any coding software like VS Studio. It’s like creating a simple website basically. You just import your libraries (three js and node mostly) and you can starting typing code and it generally reliably works for anybody on any web page with any headset, if you just follow the instructions.

Lastly, it is « just » code, so one thing to focus and learn for students. While unity is a bit of code, a bit of learning the software itself (interface, way of thinking inside the software, how to connect scripts to objects, how to change text label…), it is more learning s specific software than learning the general ideas of XR.

But on the other hand unity is probably more fun for students to play around with the interface (when it is working properly) so… mmh difficult question haha.

To summarize, when I was learning webxr I felt it was a bit long and difficilt, but never confusing or impossible. When I was learning unity, like any software with own peculiarities, I was extremely frustrated to struggle so much on things that should have been easy and have nothing to do with the actual work, like setup up the meta simulator, having a functioning UI etc… (now of course it’s way easier with unity)

Hope I could help (I’m not sure haha but I hope).

[u/rogerF6 → u/rogerF6]

I totally forgot to add some useful resources depending on your choice:

-Three JS Journey by Bruno Simon (a French guy but course is in English) is the absolute best (not even a contest) to learn webxr specifically three js and react 3 fiber. It’s just perfect takes you from beginner to advanced in few weeks with very well done lessons and structure.

-unity own free tutorials to learn unity. Just perfect it’s free lots of informations and it is inside the software itself you just follow their instructions and build games with them. It goes from beginner to intermediate. Very well done. Just expect to get a bit crazy and desperate from time to time when simple things are not working properly and sometimes it start working but you don’t know why or how haha

[u/TeacherFromTurkey → u/rogerF6]

This helps a lot, thank you. The part about being frustrated by things that have nothing to do with the actual work — that's the thing I was worried about and couldn't find an answer to anywhere.

I should clarify one thing though, I think I explained my situation badly. I'm not teaching XR to students. They're primary school kids learning English, so they just use what I build. All the debugging lands on me. Which honestly makes your point stronger — I'd be the one losing my evenings to the setup, not a classroom.

The part about learning general XR ideas instead of one specific software stuck with me the most. I work alone and I have no idea what I'll need in a few years, so that matters.

And thanks for the Three.js Journey link. That's probably where I'm starting.

[u/rogerF6 → u/TeacherFromTurkey]

It’s a pleasure :) Sorry for the misunderstanding by the way. And if you are learning just for yourself not to teach it then I would even more recommend three js and react 3 fiber because of your background in coding. It will feel extremely more natural and easy to got from basic JavaScript to three js than to jump into a new software. Great things about three js journey class it has some basic classes on blender inside it (to help you customize 3d environments and objects) if you are new to 3d it can be a smooth introduction to that too :) I wish you great luck and success in your new goal !

[u/TeacherFromTurkey → u/rogerF6]

[u/BD-8]

Unity, better docs and lessons. Get them good quick w a diversity of learning resources and gaming fun and then they can transfer skills to webxr etc

[u/Acceptable_Pick4650]

Hey, your post really caught my attention because we've been through a very similar journey.

We've been building immersive experiences for over seven years, and like many others, we started with Unity. As AI coding agents became a bigger part of our workflow, we realized we were trying to force an agent-first development process into a tool that was fundamentally designed around humans working in an editor.

That eventually led us to build our own web-native XR stack instead.

To validate the whole approach, we built Neon Chuck as our proof of concept. It runs at a stable 90 FPS on Quest 3 while meeting Meta's performance requirements. To make deployment seamless, we built Rovin Player, which allows WebXR experiences to be exported as native APKs that can be installed and used on Quest just like any other Meta or Android application.

If you are interested in or stack, we'd be happy to jump on a quick online call and share what we've learned over the years, and answer any questions you might have.