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

Playing stereoscopic 360 degree video


Now, we're going to do the same thing for stereoscopic 360 degree video. At the time of writing, stereoscopic 360 degree video is much less common than its 2D counterpart, in part because it consumes so much more disk space, and also because it's significantly more difficult to produce, but it's reasonable to expect that things will continue to evolve.

In the meantime, we can find a viable test file here: https://www.dareful.com/products/free-virtual-reality-video-sequoia-national-park-vr-360-stereoscopic.

As always, download the file, put it in your Content/Movies directory, create a File Media Source asset that points to it, and test it in your Media Player to ensure that it plays on your system.

Next, let's make a copy of our 2D spherical test map to use for our 3D test:

  1. Take the MoviePlayback2DSpherical map and hit File | Save Current As... to MoviePlayback3DSpherical.
  2. Select the MovieSphere asset and change its assigned material to your OverUnder material...