Unreal Engine 4 Virtual Reality Projects: Build immersive, real-world VR applications using UE4, C++, and Unreal Blueprints

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.

I am about halfway through this book so far, and already it has propelled my knowledge farther than other resources. Just the thorough discussion of locomotion by itself justifies the cost of the book. The true value though is found in the way the authors take the time to explain why things are being done, not just how. A lot of books become obsolete rather quickly because UE4 changes so fast. But this book's philosophy of explaining why things are done will make it useful long after the engine version changes. It doesn't depend on outside tools, just sticks to the engine. The verdict: Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.

This is a great book to learn not just how, but why you do what you do. It begins to form an intuitive thinking process in the understanding of Blueprint. Hitting chapter 5, and looking forward to the upcoming studies. One issue I will tell you is this - the screen captures in the book are not always legible. Where you have red wire connections, these totally drop out in the printing process. But there is hope - on the kindle version, the screen-caps are in full color and all the wires show up perfectly. I have both paperback and kindle (Kindle is only $2.99 once you buy the book). 5 stars, please write more Unreal books guys!!!

Wow, now on Chapter 4 and the instructor KNOWS how to teach this course. Everything is laid out well and you understand what you are doing when you working with Unreal.

Literally the author talks about using c++ in one section and no place else. The entire book is just blueprints, now if I'm going to get any use out of this book I'll have to convert every example to blueprints. Just disappointed that it would state something that isn't even used in the book.

I'm a beginner and it was very easy to learn from.

More details and cleary, easy to follow and understand.

I'm just a few chapters in and woo boy is this book terrible to learn on. Each chapter feels like it was written by a different person. In one chapter you are tasked with going to a VR template to migrate a pair of mannequin hands. But the hands don't exist any more in that project so you are left screwed. The book does a poor job at explaining WHY you are adding particular items to a blueprint. It just tells you to add them with very little explanation. Other portions like programing inputs didn't work like explained in the book and I had to figure out for myself why it wasn't working. This book doesn't explain how to add a VR body which was something I wanted to learn I didn't want to be a floating orb with hands. If this is your first foray into VR and Unreal I would look elsewhere. All this book did was leave me extremely frustrated and confused.