Virtual reality (VR) isn't just the media we knew and loved from the twentieth century in a stereo headset. It's much more than that. VR doesn't simply show us images of the world around us in stereo 3D. In a literal sense, sure, that is what it does, but that's a little like saying that music just wiggles the air around our ears. Technically true, but too reductive to let us understand it. VR plays with our senses and dances with the cognitive mechanisms by which we think we understand the world. To get VR and learn how to create for it, we have to accept that it is an entirely new medium, and what we don't know about its language, rules, and methods far outweighs what we do know. This is powerful stuff, and, without question, VR or some variant of this technology is likely to be the defining art form of the twenty-first century.
You'd be right to greet this assertion with a bit of skepticism. Given the present state of the technology and of the industry, it takes some imagination to see beyond the horizon of where we are now. And you've probably seen by now that the public's expectations are in a race with the actual state of the technology and the art form. Sometimes, they lag behind its reality, and sometimes they jump ahead. Opinions about VR, therefore, are all over the place. If we're in one of those phases where the tech makes a leap forward, people get amazed and excited by the possibilities and the breathless blogs declare that the world has changed. If we're in one of those phases where the expectations have jumped ahead, suddenly everyone's disappointed that their first-generation Oculus Rift hasn't morphed overnight into the Holodeck and we see a lot of disillusionment on blogs. It's impossible to predict where the pendulum will be in its swing when you read this.
Here's the reality though, and why we believe this medium is worth learning now: VR is coming, it's inevitable, and it changes everything, even if this isn't yet obvious from the rudimentary state of the first-generation technology. This medium carries with it the potential to revolutionize the way we learn, play, engage the virtual world, and so much else. But it's going to take time and imagination.
VR is a medium at a crossroads. The decisions we make now are going to carry us far into the future. The developers working in this medium will be the ones to shape its language and methods for the next generation. To work in VR is to work on a frontier, and that's an exciting place to be.
In this book, we intend to give you a solid set of tools to begin your work on this frontier. This book uses a practical, hands-on approach to teach you how to build VR games and applications using the Unreal Engine. Each chapter walks you step-by-step through the process of building the essential building blocks of a VR application, and we pair these steps with in-depth explanations of what's really going on when you follow them and why things are done the way they are. It's this why that matters. Understanding how the underlying systems and ideas work is crucial to the work you'll do on your own after you've finished these tutorials, and, in this book, we've tried to give you both—an understanding of what to do to build a VR application, and the background you'll need in order to use this book as a springboard for your own work in VR.
You should come away from this book with a solid understanding of how VR applications are built, and what specifically you need to know and understand about the Unreal Engine to build them. It's our hope that the work we do together here will set you up to take your exploration into this new frontier wherever you want to go.
