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

Chapter 5. Interacting with the Virtual World - Part I

In the previous chapter, we learned how to make our player character move using teleport locomotion and then by adding a more immersive seamless locomotion scheme. We gave our users feet. Now, in this chapter, we're going to give them hands.

We'll start out by creating a new project using assets from the Marketplace to explore another way of starting up a VR project, and then we'll take the VRPawn we built in the preceding chapter and migrate it into this new project. Once we're set up, we'll begin by adding hands to the VRPawn and exploring ways of interacting with objects in the world.

This is important. As humans interacting with the world, we're most conscious of the way things appear as we look around, but we're nearly as conscious of our hands and what they're doing. VR developers call this hand presence, and when it's done right, it can contribute significantly to immersion. Think about it for a moment. Your hands are the part of...