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 360 degree spherical media in VR


So far, we've done a decent job of reproducing 2D and 3D traditional screens in VR, but let's take things a step further and do something we can't easily do in the outside world. One of the most compelling and common uses of VR is to display immersive 360 degree video that surrounds the viewer. Even in mono, this can create a fairly deep sense of presence in users, and can be produced fairly easily using an ordinary camera and stitching software, or a dedicated camera that's been purpose-built to create spherical images.

 

Displaying spherical media, for the most part, works exactly as it does on the flat screen, but of course we'll need new geometry for our screen.

Finding 360 degree video 

First, let's find a video to play. A few good options live here: https://www.mettle.com/360vr-master-series-free-360-downloads-page/.

The Crystal Shower Falls link takes us to a Vimeo page that allows us to download the video. For our test here, the 1080p version...