Unreal Engine

Unreal is distributed with Oculus plugins which make it easy to develop applications for Oculus platforms. This guide contains development information for the Rift, Rift S, Oculus Go and Oculus Quest.

Overview

The Unreal Engine provides integrated support for VR applications that target the Oculus Go, Oculus Quest, and Oculus Rift S headsets. This enables your applications to support stereoscopic rendering, orientation tracking, and positional tracking (on the Oculus Rift S).

This document is your main guide for targeting these headsets, although cross references are provided for the Oculus Mobile SDK and PC SDK developer guides, as well as the Unreal guides from Epic Games.

The easiest way to create Unreal applications is to use Unreal Blueprints, which is a visual programming system. Here is a portion of a Blueprint script which includes Oculus-specific functions:

If you are not already familiar with Unreal Blueprints, Epic Games provides several videos and tutorials to help you get started. You should have a basic working knowledge of Blueprints programming before proceeding with this developer guide.

UE4 Royalty Payment Program

At Oculus Connect 3 in 2016, Oculus and Epic announced that Oculus would pay the royalties for any VR app developed using the Unreal Engine and sold through the Oculus Store, up to $5,000,000 USD in application revenue. In order to participate in this program you must opt in through your Oculus Developer Dashboard. Read more on the UE4 Royalty Payment Program page.

How to Use This Guide

Quick Start: To get started developing Unreal applications for the Oculus headset that you wish to target, please see:

• Oculus Quest and Go: Quick Start
• Oculus Rift: Quick Start

Input: Hand Tracking and Controllers: To handle input events generated by Oculus Touch and Go controllers and through hand tracking, see:

• Input: Hand Tracking and Controllers: Provides general guidance for handling controller input events.
• Mapping Oculus Controller Input to Blueprint Events: Provides a complete Blueprint reference for all controller input events.

Audio

Audio is critical for creating a persuasive VR experience and can contribute strongly to the user’s sense of immersion. See:

• Audio: Provides an introduction to tools to create an immersive audio experience with Unreal Engine apps. This includes Oculus spatialization plugins (OSPs) for audio editing tools commonly used with Unreal, including Audiokinetic Wwise and FMOD Studio, Lipsync and other audio resources.

Rendering

To enhance rendering quality and optimize the frame rendering rate, see:

• Rendering: Describes several rendering features, most of which are unique to specific Oculus headsets.
• Oculus Quest and Go: Testing and Performance Analysis: Describes how to optimize Oculus Quest and Go applications.
• Oculus Rift: Testing and Performance Analysis: Describes how to optimize Oculus Rift applications.

Platform Solutions

• The Oculus Platform supports features related to security, community, revenue, and engagement such as entitlement checking, matchmaking, in-app purchase, VoIP, and cloud saves. For more information on the Platform Unreal plugin, see:
• Platform Solutions: Unreal Getting Started Guide.

Avatar SDK

The Oculus Avatar SDK assists developers with implementing first-person hand presence for the Rift and Touch controllers. It includes avatar hand and body assets that are viewable by other users in social applications. The first-person hand models and third-person hand and body models supported by the Avatar SDK automatically pull the avatar configuration choices the user has made in Oculus Home to provide a consistent sense of identity across applications. For more information, see:

• Avatar SDK Developer Guide.

User Experience

To provide the best possible user experience, see:

• Oculus Dash, Overlays and Input Focus: Describes how to support the the Universal Menu and Oculus Dash from within Unreal applications.
• Splash Screens: Describes how to use splash screens during application load time, and during UE4 Level transition times.
• Social Applications and Revenue: Provides an overview of the Oculus Platform social and revenue functions, with links into the Oculus Platform SDK documentation.
• Oculus Rift: Mixed Reality Capture: Describes how to incorporate live video feeds into your Unreal applications.

Unreal Reference

For a complete reference guide to all Oculus Unreal functions, see:

• Blueprints Reference: Provides a reference for the Oculus Blueprint library.
• Mapping Oculus Controller Input to Blueprint Events: Provides a complete Blueprint reference for all controller input events.
• Documentation Archive: Provides a links to legacy documentation.

Related Features

Facebook 360 Capture SDK

• This sample SDK allows game and virtual reality developers to easily and quickly integrate 360 photo/video capture capability into their applications. It is available for use with Unreal VR applications, and may be downloaded from the Facebook GitHub repository.