On our next stream we’ll be discussing the different kinds of VR hardware out there and what to keep in mind when making a project for a specific device. This is a high-level discussion of upcoming technology and how to plan ahead.
WHAT
VR experts and discuss hardware capabilities and planning your project.
WHERE
Follow us on the official Unreal Engine Twitch channel:
WHEN
Tuesday, July 14th @ 2:00-3:00PM EST Countdown]
WHO
, Lead Programmer
, Technical Writer
, (@]())
Let’s hear your questions for them. Feel free to ask any questions on the topic in the thread below! We’ll get to as many as we can!
Can I develop for VR without a headset? With the Vive right around the corner I’m passing on buying a used DK2.
Will there be a VR template option in the Launcher anytime soon?
Is there a UE4 VR Bible anywhere? It seems most information I can find from others is pretty outdated now that UE4 has had some serious updates.
Thanks.
@
Depending on what you project is you cannot dev without a HMD.
Why?
Sense of scale: it’s the first thing you need to get right and you need to experience it and have a feel for it.
Sence of space: layout and level design will change a lot related to that, UI too.
If you are a serious Dev don’t pass on a DK2 now, HMD commercial release are +6 month away. You could start in a few days… but that’s up to your priority and schedule and budget (but I mean come on: 350usd…)
VR template: there is not really a need for it as UE4 plug the HMD to the camera. It just works.
VR Bible: look at reddit, look at Oculus forums, here, the whole community has been busy creating content, there are a lot of resources out there. (you could ask me, that works too ^_^)
@jjkramhoeft
That depends on your target hardware (Oculus, VIVE, Morpheus)
On Oculus there is a SDK, you can get it now to check things out but it’s Unity and FMOD/Wwise. (https://developer.oculus.com/downloads/audio/0.10.2/Oculus_Audio_SDK_Plugins/)
As I don’t want to install FMOD or 3rd party (I did a while ago), I haven’t experimented with that recently but it works.
On Morpheus you enable it in UE4 and it just works (sony has it’s own 3DA implementation)
Morpheus is the one that works “out of the box”
VR Optimized(!) Template (yes I have my own template, but so much new stuff comes with every release that I’m sure I missed some cool options to speed things up)
Timeline support Win10+DirectX12
VR SLI Support (don’t remember if it was Nvidia only?)
develop inside VR - I’m sick of putting on and off the HMD every other minute to check stuff
-Could you update us on a VR input timeline (blueprint), PS move, VIVE, (Touch hardware is not avail yet to “regular Devs”)
PS Move blueprint integration please…! (out of the box)
-I heard VIVE and Rift don’t use the same camera reference point and a few other differences, could you talk about theses differences and how to prepare your existing Oculus project for VIVE?
-Kite&Lightning wanted to release a few month ago a 360 stereo capture for UE4, then it vanished, I am guessing you are silently integrating that: What are your plans for 360 video (stereo or not) capture? Any ETA?
-Could you tell us more on what are the next VR related features and implementation in 4.9? What could we expect?
4.8 has broken many basic things for VR development (UE-17032 for example), causing us to be forced to keep working in 4.7 for our VR project. Is there any timeline for a dev-push to get 4.8 back on track in terms of VR support?
For indie devs without access to motions controllers (Touch or Vive’s), how to start targeting for this kind of input? Suggestions? Tips? Workarounds (eg. Leap Motion)?
This stream was definitely more about us talking about what to expect, how to pre-plan and advice for developing. We started off by listing and discussing available hardware, but you can skip to about halfway into the stream to get to the parts where we discuss more future UE4 features and advancements.
The twitch archive is up already, but the youtube one will be up soon:
My stream kept dropping out. I heard that there are more VR devs now, working on multiGPU and rendering features, but I didn’t hear what was coming up soon, if anything. Any of getting distanceFields and subsurface working?
If SLI comes into play, doesn’t that kind of invalidate the previous reasons for not updating rendering features that are deemed “too slow?”
It’s something we’re looking into supporting in the future, but right now, we’d rather spend the limited Android resources we do have to better our support of GearVR, which needs some love. Rather than dividing our efforts between the two platforms, we’re concentrating on resolving the outstanding issues on GearVR.
Thanks so much for taking the time to do the stream yesterday. It’s great to see where the updates for VR are going. We’re all racing as fast as we can to figure all of this out! Since you’re answering one question, I figured I’d ask one-more: are there any plans to add VR capabilities (like a WebVR approach) to the HTML packager?. Obviously there’s significant latency in the browser but maybe VR would work for simple HTML scenes.
Not that we’re actively investigating, but there’s nothing stopping someone from using the stereo rendering interface in the HTML packager. If someone does the implementation, it should work fine!
(sony has it’s own 3DA implementation)