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

Teleport locomotion


As we discussed in Chapter 1, Thinking in VR, one of the biggest challenges we face in VR is motion sickness that's triggered when the user tries to move around. One of the most commonly used solutions for this is to teleport the user from place to place rather than to allow them to move smoothly through the space. This breaks immersion, but avoids the problem of motion sickness entirely because it doesn't create a sense of motion at all. For applications where immersive movement isn't a priority, such as architectural visualization, this may be an ideal scheme to employ.

Creating a navigation mesh

The first thing we're going to need for a teleport-based locomotion scheme is a way to tell the engine where players are allowed to move and where they aren't. We can use a navigation mesh to do this job.

Note

A navigation mesh, often shortened to navmesh, is an automatically generated set of surfaces indicating walkable floors in an Unreal level. AI-controlled agents use the navigation...