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

Prerequisite – VR hardware


If you're planning to develop for desktop VR hardware, such as the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive, we're going to assume here that you've already set up your headset and ensured that it's working. If you haven't, now's a good time. Head on over to https://www.vive.com/eu/setup/ or https://www.oculus.com/setup/, and run through the guided installation and setup operations there.

Remember that your VR headset driver software, Oculus Home or Steam VR, needs to be running when you use the headset.

If you're going to be developing for mobile standalone VR, your setup process will involve a few other steps, which we'll walk you through after we get Unreal Engine installed. We do recommend even for those developing for mobile VR that you have a desktop VR headset available as well. It dramatically speeds up debugging to be able to launch your software right into the headset without having to cook it and deploy it to the device every time. It's not required, but you will find it...