Avoiding Motion Blur on UMG widgets attached to your head

Development Rendering
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Screenshot from metroid prime as reference of helmet UI.

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We were thinking of trying some 3D UI that looks like it’s projected onto a helmet visor in front of you but the motion blur as you look around makes this completely impractical. The widgets look nice and crisp when added to the viewport in screenspace but not when placed 10 units in front of your eyes in world space.

Come to think about it, I can’t think of many Unreal VR titles with UI that is rendered right in front of your eyes. This seems to be a common problem for people trying to make UI for VR.

I guess another option is to avoid transparent widgets. When transluscent, the entire widget is a blurry mess. When masked, only the edges are an ugly aliased looking mess. Maybe we need to make it look like the HUD is projected from a little in helmet screen that occludes your view rather than try to make it look like it’s an overlay.

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One solution is using 2D UI, but you use a material to distort your 2D UI as a texture, for example, the further you are from the texture center, the more distortion you get. Then you will get a effect that 2D UI looks like 3D helmet.

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Yeah I also figured out that in VR you should use stereo layers instead of raw 3D widgets.

It unfortunately doesn’t clip for free against the environment and you have to do some extra hole punching work.