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


This chapter picked up where the last one left off and gave us a chance to start picking up objects. We learned how to use Blueprint Interfaces to enable function calls to be made on a wide variety of objects and how to detect actors we could pick up and use attachments to pick them up and drop them. Finally, we also learned how to create haptic feedback effects to indicate to players when they've made contact with an object they can pick up.

As we mentioned at the start of the previous chapter, hand presence is an important factor in driving an overall sense of presence in VR. We're aware of our hands all of the time in real life, and bringing them into the virtual world does a lot to make us feel present in the space as well. In addition, the ability to use our hands to manipulate objects directly is one of the crucial things we can do in VR that we just can't do in any other medium. (For an example of just how well this can be done, check out Vinyl Reality by EntroPi Games (https...