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 9. Displaying Media in VR

In the previous chapters, we focused on creating real-time 3D media for VR, and spent a lot of time looking at player characters, interface elements, and building the world. Now, we're going to shift gears a bit and explore another important application for VR—displaying movies both on flat screens and in immersive environments.

VR is very good at this. Because it's possible to create a nearly infinite space within the headset, users can experience movies and media on enormous virtual screens with no distractions to take them out of the experience. These screens can take any shape as well. In addition to flat and curved screens, photos and movies of entire environments can be presented in a sphere surrounding the player so that they feel totally immersed in the space. In this chapter, we're going to learn how to create these things.

In particular, we will cover the following topics:

  • Displaying video on a virtual screen
  • Displaying video with stereo depth from...