Choosing your VR gear - Unreal Engine Tutorial

- [Narrator] Before any virtual reality project can begin, there are some important factors to consider with regards to the hardware being used and the end viewer experience. Of these considerations are things like standing room experience, or a room VR, room scale virtual reality experience. These are different because they lead into different pieces of hardware and different advantages and perhaps disadvantages. For example, interactive controllers for a virtual reality experience for things like interactivity or perhaps to teleport around. An example of a difference between this would be something like the HTC Vive where you can have a full room scale virtual reality experience with handheld controllers versus something more like an Oculus Rift DK2 or even an Oculus Rift without the hand controllers. These are different virtual reality experiences and these are things that you need to take into consideration. What is the goal of the visualization and do you require the ability to interact with objects? It may be something that down the line you'll want to add into there for the ability for someone in your visualization to interact with the scene all around. Regardless though, you need to look at the hardware considerations for the gear of your choosing. What I mean by that is, you need to look at what it is that you're working with in regards to your head mounted display. If you're working with something like the Vive, you do require some fast, pretty high end performance hardware, a machine that can handle the Vive and run it to its full extent for virtual reality. This is as opposed to something like working with a mobile platform where you might be working with, say for example, the Samsung Gear VR, which is a completely different world, in that sense, you're running off an Android device, in a contained head mounted display, and you are limited to that seated or standing space. The hardware requirements at that point are much different because your game, or virtual reality experience needs to be built towards an Android platform. Building for something like a higher end PC, you tend to end up pushing the limits a little bit further, and especially with the display, like the Vive, or the new Oculus Rift, you're going to want to make sure that your hardware can keep up with the performance that VR demands. Lastly, we want to actually switch and check and make sure that we are running all of the current plugins in Unreal. So here we are in Unreal Engine 4, and at any time before we start a VR project, we want to make sure that we go into the Edit menu and go down to Plugins that we actually have all the Plugins related to virtual reality. So on the left here, I'm just scrolling down to the list, clicking Virtual Reality, and you'll see the plugins that are installed that come native with Unreal Engine and you'll see the ones that are enabled and the ones that are not enabled and this is important to know. In the case of what we're working with here in this course, we're working with the Steam VR plugin. We need to make sure that that is enabled so that everything will work properly with the Vive, with Unreal. So that's just a quick overview of some considerations in regard to your hardware and performance and decisions to be made for where you're going with your visualization project in choices for your head mounted display.