Stereo layers and screen mirror

Started using stereo layers to get better looking menus but noticed it doesn’t render on the screen mirror, wondering if there’s a way around that, it would be a bit awkward if the game I released didn’t show any UI when recording footage of the game, could the original widget be shown on screen only and not in headset?

Also I did try adding a background to the menus and moving the stereo layer one unit forward, this allowed me to show the widget on screen and stereo layer in headset, but I’d prefer to have transparent backgrounds and having them stacked is noticeable without the bg, wondering if there are better approaches

Stereo layers are pretty limited, since they are composited by the VR runtime. I think the better option is to improve the quality of the 3D widget component.

The main issue with the widgets is that it gets rendered in a static resolution without mipmaps, so it looks awful when it gets scaled as the player moves. One way to fix it is to modify the component code to make it generate mipmaps when rendering:
https://hollowdilnik.com/2021/01/09/widget-filtering.html

I’ve been thinking about it, and a more performant option might be to dynamically change the render target resolution to approximate the screen space resolution. I haven’t tried it yet though.

The quality can be further improved by adding shader-based supersampling in the material.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/msaa-3d-widgets-horrible-jagged-edges/138040/8

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I’ve already stumbled on that blog and considered giving it a try, I’m just not setup for code right now as I’m doing everything in blueprint, and it doesn’t seem to give as good results as the stereo layers, which is why I’ve put it aside as last resort

If I do give it a try I’ll make sure to try the supersampling as well.

Thank you!

So I ran into more issues with the stereo layers and decided to give the filtered widget plugin a try, it did get rid of all the shimmering and aliasing but the text was a little too soft, gave the SS material a try and that helped, it’s still a bit soft especially compared to how crisp the stereo layers looked, but the filtered widget is just more simple to use so I’ll go with that.

Thank you so much!