Book Image

Unreal Engine 4 Virtual Reality Projects

By : Kevin Mack, Robert Ruud
Book Image

Unreal Engine 4 Virtual Reality Projects

By: Kevin Mack, Robert Ruud

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) is a powerful tool for developing VR games and applications. With its visual scripting language, Blueprint, and built-in support for all major VR headsets, it's a perfect tool for designers, artists, and engineers to realize their visions in VR. This book will guide you step-by-step through a series of projects that teach essential concepts and techniques for VR development in UE4. You will begin by learning how to think about (and design for) VR and then proceed to set up a development environment. A series of practical projects follows, taking you through essential VR concepts. Through these exercises, you'll learn how to set up UE4 projects that run effectively in VR, how to build player locomotion schemes, and how to use hand controllers to interact with the world. You'll then move on to create user interfaces in 3D space, use the editor's VR mode to build environments directly in VR, and profile/optimize worlds you've built. Finally, you'll explore more advanced topics, such as displaying stereo media in VR, networking in Unreal, and using plugins to extend the engine. Throughout, this book focuses on creating a deeper understanding of why the relevant tools and techniques work as they do, so you can use the techniques and concepts learned here as a springboard for further learning and exploration in VR.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
12
Where to Go from Here
Index

Setting up for mobile VR


Mobile VR headsets such as Samsung Gear and Oculus Go are separate devices from your PC, so you can't simply launch into a VR preview the way you can with a desktop headset. Instead, you need to package the project and deploy it to the device so you can run it directly on the headset. You'll have to set up a few things to make this possible.

Creating or joining an Oculus developer organization

First, if you're going to develop for Oculus-based mobile VR platforms, you need to register with Oculus as a developer. We're assuming here that you've already created an account with Oculus since you would have needed to do this to use the headset at all. If you haven't yet done so, do that first and log in.

Now, navigate to https://dashboard.oculus.com/organizations/create/ and run through the steps to register as a developer. If you're joining an existing organization instead of creating your own, contact its administrator to be added to the list of registered developers.

Setting...