State of Gear VR

[Illusionweaver]

@Deiter;325629

Hey Everybody,

I wanted to give an update on our progress with GearVR. While we’re not always as active as we could be here in the discussion with you all, we spend a bit of time gathering info from your posts to help guide our internal decision making. Here’s a look into where we are at with Gear VR and where we are going.

Controller Support
Controller support is on it’s way but this is not just being built for Gear VR but for Android as a whole. We are also re-working the way the engine interfaces with controllers in general to make things like having a player with two input devices easier to achieve.

MSAA Support
MSAA on mobile isn’t currently officially supported in the engine. We provided an alternative implementation on GitHub, but as most of you know, Lollipop broke that implementation. We’re investigating a proper implementation with our Mobile team, and will hopefully have an ETA soon.

Swipes & Example Content
We do have some tasks and time set aside for creating an example Gear VR project that shows you how to set up a lot of the things you are asking for. However the Learning Resources team has had to shift focus for the time being but this task has not been forgotten and will be picked up again once we get a few other tasks off our plate.

Gear VR Global Menu
Last Thursday a new section to the Gear VR docs was added that shows you how to get a very basic global menu to come up. It is very basic but it will give you a better idea about to call the global menu in your game. It should go live with the next doc update so be sure to check the Gear VR docs.

Oculus Audio SDK
Unfortunately, in general, UE4 does not support spatialized audio on Android. Our audio programmer is currently in the process of overhauling the audio engine across all platforms, which will in turn bring Android into more feature parity with other equivalent platforms. In the meantime, the current Android audio engine support wouldn’t be able to support the Oculus Audio plugin without significant work, and it would be questionable on whether or not it’d be performant enough for the device. Also, as an FYI, if you were to use the fMOD hack to get Gear VR to have specialized audio you would also need to acquire a license for fMOD as it is not free to use.

Documentation
The Learning Team has been making updates to all the Gear VR docs as new things come on line. However I must admit that during the time that I have been using Gear VR modifying .INI files has never come up. I will talk to W more about this so that I can better understand what Gear VR specific .INI settings there are and how to best use them and then document my findings.

As the staff here are passionate VR fans, I can assure you that we are working on these problems and all of your concerns relating to Gear VR have not fallen to the wayside. I know that this might not be the answers you are looking for, but we really appreciate your patience and are thankful for the feedback you have given.

Great post , could you do a similar post for the state of Desktop VR (Oculus, Vive)? An update from Epic once in a while would be extremely helpful for VR developers who are trying to navigate the murky waters of the bleeding edge VR industry