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

Summary


In this chapter, we installed the Unreal Engine and learned about the various options we have available to us when setting it up. We created and launched a simple test project to verify that everything was working. Additionally, for those developing for mobile VR, we learned how to set up the required drivers and software development kits, and set up a mobile test project that we deployed to our device.

Along the way, we learned how to use the Epic Games launcher—not just as a way of keeping engine versions up to date and launching projects, but also as a vital learning and support resource. Through our exploration of the launcher, we learned how to get answers to questions from the Community tab and where to find documentation and video tutorials from the Learn tab. We explored the incredibly useful Content Examples project and looked at other projects we can use to explore specific topics in the engine. We saw that the Marketplace offers a huge range of free and paid content that...