Book Image

Unreal Engine Virtual Reality Quick Start Guide

By : Jessica Plowman
Book Image

Unreal Engine Virtual Reality Quick Start Guide

By: Jessica Plowman

Overview of this book

With the ability to put players directly in the game, virtual reality gives users the chance to experience digital worlds directly. Nevertheless, many designers are unsure where to start when working with this amazing technology. With this book, you will learn user experience design processes and create immersive gameplay experiences designed for entertainment and player comfort. Using the power of Unreal Engine 4’s Blueprint visual scripting language, you will build player interaction and locomotion systems from scratch and use these flexible systems to create a sample game, as well as develop functional 2D and 3D user interfaces for players to interact with. And also learn the best practices for creating game art for virtual reality. Finally, you will learn how to test your application with your target audience and finalize your game for distribution. By the end of this book, you will have the knowledge to be able to make the leap from traditional game development to creating immersive virtual reality experiences using Unreal Engine 4.
Table of Contents (8 chapters)

Choosing our locomotion method

One of our goals as VR designers is to leverage the unique advantages of this new technology to create novel experiences that players want to play again and again. The technology is fantastic for making the player feel as if they're interacting in a living and breathing fantasy world they would otherwise not be able to inhabit. Using the hand controllers, our players can touch our world and interact with it in a very visceral sense. However, locomotion systems still haven't caught up to that level of immersion yet.

Player locomotion in VR is still in its infancy, and, as such, there's no one method that has been found to work well. Many methods have been tried. There are vehicle simulation games, where the player remains seated in a cockpit. There are action/adventure games where players run through a landscape using artificial methods...