Review: Unreal Engine 4 Virtual Reality Projects: Build immersive, real-world VR applications using UE4, C++, and Unreal Blueprints by Kevin Mack and Robert Ruud

This book right here is gold for anyone wanting to get into virtual reality development with Unreal. There is not a lot of handholding, you are expected to understand the basics of using Unreal to get the most out of the book. Rather than trying to explain programming fundamentals or UE4 basic functionality, the authors instead jump straight into actual VR development. That said, they do show how to setup your development environment at the start, but this is mostly for completeness. The book is about VR specifically, which is great because there are already tons of resources for general development that are not repeated here.

Contained in the text a 11 chapters, each building upon each other for how to work with VR in the context of Unreal Engine. We learn about thinking in VR and the established concepts, setting up the dev environment, using a basic VR template and exporting for mobile VR. Navigation and moving around. Interacting with your hands. User interface considerations and solutions. Building in VR. Playing media, including 360 and stereo 3D video. Multiplayer, and more. I’d consider this quite a complete survey and I’m happy the authors stuck to VR only and did not dilute the text with general information.

So overall, I’d consider this book a big success. If you’re looking to get into VR with Unreal Engine, this is the ticket. It is well explained, not confusing at all, and does cover the most essential aspects of creating for virtual reality. Mack and Ruud also spend a good amount of time explaining certain considerations you need to do with respect to VR, such as special locomotion methods to avoid sickness, as well as the performance limits of mobile VR hardware. This is an almost flawless execution and should not be missed.