NexusVR - Connecting the Metaverse

Hey everyone!

For this year’s Leap Motion 3D Jam I’ve teamed up with Mac from the Night Cafe and we’re making NexusVR, a multiplayer portaling system so you don’t have to leave VR!

Here is a first pass WIP after hacking away at UMG to work with VR input

http://i.imgur.com/GSv6yRk.gif

What you’re seeing is me, in VR, hitting an arm menu, which pulls up all the VR experiences that I have available, selecting one, tossing it away, selecting another one and attaching it to the portal gateway infront and using a push gesture to step through.

What happens next? Wait for the next update :wink:

More WIP!

This is what happens when you step through…

A seamless and quick transition with no waiting. With an endless list to choose from, where will you go?

GuitarVR experience by @anonymous_user_cb76c62f](https://twitter.com/zachkinstner)

How about sharing a video or link?

Same concept, just turn your data into a virtual object and you can pass it to any receiver such as a big screen.

Thats awesome!

This is exactly the kind of thing I’ve been waiting for :smiley:

Just submitted the jam entry, sadly multiplayer got cut due to time constraints, but that means you get the single player nexus all to yourself! Some of the sights of the nexus itself:

How portaling looks like now

And you can browse both using the leap motion (which feels awesome btw) and mouse+keyboard. The search bar is a smart search bar and will redirect non-urls to google search results

If you have a leap motion and an Oculus HMD, grab it at nexusvr.io which redirects to the jam itch page. Just remember to plop all your portals (vr experiences) into the NexusVR/Portals folder and they’ll show up in your portal menu!

Enjoy!

Very impressive stuff! Keep up the great work.

How did you hack UMG widget to appropriately display VR content? I had a questions here:
https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/334010/does-umg-widgets-natively-support-vr-mode.html

I answered your question and I’ll elaborate a bit more here:

For VR you shouldn’t use screen based widgets, instead they should be 3d widgets placed and sized in the world. That way they aren’t anchored to your face and you can lean in to see more details. It will also sidestep the need to fix screenspace support for VR. See https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/UMG/HowTo/Create3DWidgets/index.html for details. This step requires no hacks.

The UMG hacks I’ve referred to above are about converting your hand collision with your 3d widget to expected responses in UMG. The end result is a surface about 50cm away from you that you can just touch as it if was a physical touchsensitive surface. This means you can do the things you usually expect of modern tablets such as momentum scrolling and tapping to select. With VR though you can also pass your hand through the screen which you can’t do in the real world, which allows depth based interaction. In my case I use this to convert what you’re looking at into a data cube link you can throw at other screens.

There are a lot of interesting directions to take this. Given people’s interest in the widget stuff, I’ll look into maybe packaging up some blueprints and make a video about it?

Awsomeness !

Hell yeah Getnamo. No question about it.

learn so much from all the stuff you give to the community.
Thank you,

Very impressive! VR devices have incredible potentials!

:open_mouth:

Wow! Great stuff man! Looking forward to seeing a repository with this functionality up on GitHub sometime maybe? :smiley:

Awesome stuff, keep it up

Hi, looks good.

I’ve tried to run NexusVR but it works not so good as your video.
Hands are very often not recognised(hidden) or recognised in not best way.
How did you do it?

Make sure you have gone through the basic troubleshooting for leap motion (no bright infrared sources in your FOV, push back slightly to minimize clutter in FOV).

Other than that, I think I have a hand count bug in the nexusvr branch of the leap plugin which may cause it to not always detect your hand in FOV, but if you don’t see your hand, just bring it out of view and back in to make it detected. Let me know if that helps :slight_smile:

The next focus is to squash bugs and getting multiplayer support in.

Thanks,
will try to find solution.

It looks like leap device is working fine from start.
But then it starts to lag, maybe it overheated or something like this.

In any case you’ve done great work.
We have a lot of fun when trying to throw portals.

Sometimes the main window will get defocused (e.g. mouse clicked outside the window when used with the web browser), which will cut the framerate down to idle, 0.5 second. Just refocus (alt tab or click inside) the window to get back the smooth experience.

Just realized i posted my question in the wrong thread (what a good start in the morning >.<) so here it goes :Wow ,i rly like what u did there sir :stuck_out_tongue: i always wanted to do a vr hud based on the use of leap motion and a 3d widget ,ill made it after this tutorial http://coherent-labs.com/blog/3d-hol...1-3ds-max-ue4/ however iv never been rly able to interact with it ,could u bring some light into the way u used line traces and collision to interact with them? would be rly thankful ,also is this blui instead of coherent ui?

Yep the second menu is using BLUI.

Regarding how it’s been done, here’s a breakdown:

First you take use ue4’s collision system and get a hit location from the widget (on begin overlap) and your moving object (e.g. hand mesh), at that point I sample the hand’s location and fetch the frontmost(relative to your view) finger, this is the finger that determines the hit location and depth. What you need to do then is to continue sampling the location until you stop colliding. While you’re colliding, take this hit location and translate it into x,y and depth (z in my case) in the widget’s space. This way your collision placement is now in ‘widget local’ position. Pass this touch into the widget component (e.g. a touchedAt(x,y,depth) function).

At this point I have re-usable blueprint user interface widgets that can do custom collision tests, e.g. take a point in 2d space and check if it overlaps a component. With that setup you can then take the position you fed into the collided widget and check against your UI components for collisions, if they do, do your actions. In the case of my ui, when I hover, I move a 2d cursor widget to the intersection position and when I intersect with the surface I cause scrolling in proportion to the movement done by the hand. Then when there is sufficient depth in the collision, I call a separate action (e.g. grab window/link information in the form of a cube).

This may sound a bit complicated, but it’s re-usable so from the end-implementation side it’s pretty easy to extend functionality to other umg widgets you compose. For example all you do is pass-through the touch for each touchable widget and they’ll respond accordingly and I only have to test 2-3 widgets for the composite UI. For my leap entry I only really implemented buttons and scroll boxes, but it wouldn’t take too much to extend these to other types. I also used the same UMG widget touch concept to pass in scrolling data into the BLUI browser surface, which allows you to scroll as if it is a touchable surface in both the browser and the portal list.

In your case you would replace the collision point with a Line Trace Hit, but the rest would work roughly the same.

To make it simpler, I want to release some reusable blueprints on this but I will have to revisit it in January when I have a bit more time.

Ty for taking the time to describe it yes it actually sounds kind of complicated especially the transfer to 2d,rly looking forward to the publication of ur blueprint in january,need it for doom like door interfaces (should work ok with leap since its kind of a giant button not a keypad) and also for the interface ive shown u gonna spend the time until ur release with binding it correctly to ur leap collision hands,call for it if u need something like that interface i think i can translate it to be used with blui since its basicly an html page anyway both plugins should handly it nrly the same way,maybe some actors named different,dunno will have a look into blui anyway :slight_smile:

This looks awesome Getnamo, makes me want a Leap!