Heya VR Peeps.
I’ve been using UE4’s Gear VR support since it went live, in preparation for the Mobile VR Jam. I like it a lot, and it has been just as easy to use as the Oculus Rift support. However, given that this is the first release there are some rough edges that need fixing. Normally I wouldn’t be worried about these issues and expect them to be fixed sometime down the road. But with the Mobile VR Jam deadline coming fast, I wanted to highlight them here and hopefully hear back that they will be resolved soon. In a perfect world these would be patched into v4.7.x rather than wait for 4.8, as 4.8 carries all of the usual uncertainties of a new release. Personally, I’m fine with a source patch and don’t need to wait for a binary build.
I present to you my UE4 Gear VR issue list:
1. MSAA
There are a lot of jagged edges in UE4 Gear VR as we don’t have the same down sampling we do with the Rift. mentioned releasing a MSAA patch to the community in this post.
To show how important this is, John Carmack has this to say in his tweet (from https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/583648614683172864):
2. Virtual Head Model
I brought this up in this post. This mimics the eye’s positional changes even when all we have is the head’s rotation, based on how the human head moves. Unity has this (see Hero Bound: First Steps) and it really improves the experience by lessening possible simulator sickness.
3. Displaying the Gear VR Platform UI
There are three standard platform UI’s that I can think of that are supplied by the Gear VR SDK: Global menu, ‘Are you sure you want to quit?’ menu, and the volume change pop-up. The code for this appears to be in ThirdParty\Oculus\LibOVRMobile\LibOVRMobile_042\VRLib\jni\App.cpp, although it is my understanding that game engines cannot use this code directly. In UE4 we have the OVRGLOBALMENU command, which I assume should open the Global menu, but it currently crashes your game. I’ve tried out a freshly compiled Unity game (not one on the store) and it supports these platform UI’s. In Unity, the Quit menu takes you to the store, even if you didn’t start there.
4. Support for Touchpad Swipes
We have touchpad presses, but we also need Gear VR touchpad swipes. These are common gestures that nearly every game or app will use. It looks like there is code in ThirdParty\Oculus\LibOVRMobile\LibOVRMobile_042\VRLib\jni\App.cpp within InterpretTouchpad() to support these. I would guess that the same code would need to be moved into UE4’s input system.
Thanks for taking the time to read through these and providing a response. I’m not trying to be overly critical of the Gear VR implementation. I just want to make sure that UE4-based games and apps can stand up against the Unity ones during the Mobile VR Jam, and aren’t disqualified for missing required functionality.