Further Development

[Angelo-Gebauer]

While the Unity-Plugin for SteamVr is awesome and feature-packed, we find that this is not the case with the Unreal-Plugin.

We are currently working on Projects using Unity and the Unity-Plugin. For a variety of reasons, we would like to switch our Developments to Unreal. However we can't, because of the amount of development that would be required to achieve the same results as with the Unity-Plugin.

Hence the question, are there plans to bring the Unreal-Plugin to the same feature-level as the Unity-Plugin?

[1runeberg]

Hi Angelo-Gebauer,

To help me provide a more qualified answer, which Unity plugin features specifically were you looking at?

Thanks,
Rune

[Angelo-Gebauer]

Hi Rune,

thanks for the quick response. The biggest problems we see are the skeleton-poser / interactable functionality from the Unity-Plugin.

You can see what we built with the Unity-Plugin in the video here:
https://campaign.inosoft.de/en/inopoint05/mitarbeiterschulung-mit-virtual-reality

Lets say you want to build the sliding door (with an interactable handle) in Unreal. Physics wise, i suppose you could use a Linear Motor or something like it (even though we can't really get interactables with simulating physics to work). But from our understanding, the Unreal-Plugin completely relies on the interaction-system that Epic built into the VR-Template, which attaches objects to the players hand. While the (awesome) Unity-Plugin provides a much more flexible solution, which lets the player attach his hand to an interactable, as well as the other way arround. If you take a look at the video i posted, you can see what i mean at arround 0:50 - 1:15.

We are aware, that we could rebuild all this funtionality in Unreal. But like i said in my first post, this would take too much time. Are we maybe missing something here?

Right now it looks to us like if a developer wants to develop for VR and have this functionality, he would be better of using Unity and your Unity-Plugin.

From our understanding, the Unity-Plugin was created with/for the development of The Lab?
That would explain why the Unity-Plugin has so much more content/functionality for the devs to use.

Please let me know if were just missing something here.
Like i said, we would love to swtich our development to Unreal, but it's just not worth it atm.

Thanks,
Angelo

[1runeberg]

Hi @Angelo-Gebauer,

Thanks for the clarification.

I guess you mean the Interaction System that's in the Unity plugin which pre-dates the Input System support. And yes, the Lab does use a version of the Unity plugin and is also used internally for testing.

The UE plugin we released on the other hand is only meant to update the Epic plugin with the new Input System support. VR Interactions in Unreal is still traditionally pretty much the domain of the Epic VR Template and third-party plugins.

Our understanding is that a new VR Template is planned for release by Epic, jsut not 100% sure if this is what you are looking for.

In saying this, I'll bring this up internally if we can develop an equivalent Interaction System for UE.

Cheers,
Rune

[Angelo-Gebauer]

I'll bring this up internally if we can develop an equivalent Interaction System for UE

This would be awesome, i think it would benefit many developers!
Thanks again for the quick answer.

Thanks,
Angelo

[HannahKiekens]

+1 for an open-source solution writen by VR experts

[1runeberg]

With VR being such a young medium, not sure how many would be brave enough to call themselves experts really - always plenty to learn and unlearn, but yeah certainly a lot of VR experience & focus in-house ;) For the system, it'll be ideally a like-for-like implementation in terms of core functionality.

Some features that had to be created for Unity may also not be necessary when a generic Engine implementation is available (e.g. UE's pretty advanced built-in skeletal animation system).

Also, our understanding is that Epic will be releasing a VR Template update/overhaul so that may make this unnecessary.

To be clear, this is something we'd consider doing but cannot guarantee at this point ;)

[Angelo-Gebauer]

Hi @1runeberg ,

do you happen to have an update regarding this topic?

Thanks,
Angelo

[1runeberg]

Hi @Angelo-Gebauer - thanks for the follow-up. however, sorry nothing substantial to report at this time.