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

Displaying stereo video


Let's begin by creating another map to hold our stereo video screen. With your MoviePlayback2D scene open, hit File | Save Current As... and save the map as MoviePlayback3D.

Now, we need to find a stereo video file to test with. They're out there on the web, but they can be challenging to find since we need to download ours. stereomaker.net has a few example files here: http://stereomaker.net/sample/. Let's pull down the Cycling in Hibaya Park video from here. We can also find more example files here: http://photocreations.ca/3D/index.html. Download the Bellagio Fountains, Las Vegas, Nevada 3D 2048 x 2048 clip. This will give us a side-by-side stereo clip and an over/under stereo clip that we can use for our experiments. The Hibaya clip is wrapped in an .AVI container, but as long as we're running the clip on Windows, that will work. To run it on another platform, we'd have to use an application such as Adobe Media Encoder or AVC to convert it:

  1. Place each of these files...