I’m working on a small project where I’ve taken a 360 panorama of the interior of a car. Taken from the drivers seat.
I map this on a sphere and put my VR Spawn inside of it. Now comes my problem. If I make the sphere the size comparable to the reach
of the Hands with the motion controllers. It looks like the character is inside a ball. If I scale my sphere to make it look more realistic I can’t reach
to the dashboard with my hands becouse the sphere is way to big. Looks like I have to walk first before coming close to the dashboard.
Is there a way to change this? Maybe changing the VR scale? Tutorials about this subject?
It looks like a ball because the panorama photo does not contain depth information (how far away individual things in the image are), it just makes a ball. As you have discovered, this works at far distances (as we don’t perceive much depth at distance. So panorama photos work for environments, like sky, background mountains, starfields, etc. But for close up, you need to handle parallax. If you move your head from side to side, you see near objects move on front of far objects. For example, the steering wheel might cover the gas gauge, but if you move your head to the side a bit, you see the gas gauge and the wheel covers something else. And you can’t get that effect with a panorama photo. You don’t even need to move your head, each eye is located at a different position, so see a slightly different image, and your brain uses this difference to work out how far away everything is. The panorama photo was taken with a camera with a single lens, so is already missing all this depth information. At great distance, the difference each eye sees is minimal, which is why the panoramas work for skyboxes and backgrounds, but not up close.
To get it looking realistic with head movement, you need to make a 3d model of the car interior. You can take photos and map them onto the 3d model as textures. Unreal will render the scene twice, one from each eye position, and present those images one to each eye. And as you move your head the scene is re-rendered each frame from new angles. This is what gives you that feeling of the objects being right there in front of you
if you took the panorama from one eye position, and a second panorama from a position a few centimeters to the side (the other eye position) and then showed one panorama to each eye (I don’t know if unreal lets you do this) then you would get a full 3d looking scene, not the ball effect, but this works only as long as you keep your head totally stationary. This is whats being done in the majority of 3d sbs films, and they also often have issues of scale (looks like gigantic heads on big cinema screens), and as soon as you move it does not behave correctly. There is no real shortcut if you want it to look right, you need to model the scene in a 3d program.