One of our team's many initiatives is to support our developer partners to create VR tools and applications. We are excited to share with our developer community the exciting news that as of today, the free and open sourced VR Tunnelling Pro (VRTP) is now available for Unreal Engine 4.

If you have not used it before, VR Tunnelling Pro (VRTP) delivers ready-to-use plugins that empower VR developers to incorporate a range of comfortable locomotion techniques. Each of these techniques are fully customizable and easily-enabled to make your VR app as comfortable as possible, and accessible for the widest audience to enjoy. VRTP has already benefited developers using Unity and as of today, it is available to Unreal developers too – meaning that Unreal apps may now readily evaluate and incorporate these comfortable locomotion features without impacting schedule or cost, especially since VRTP is free and open-sourced on all platforms.

What is VR Tunneling Pro?

VRTP has become an ongoing collaboration between Oculus and Sigtrap Games to bring readily usable plugins to VR developers, incorporating a variety of comfort techniques for locomotion in VR. Check out the below demo for a 5-minute walkthrough of VRTP, to better understand how the system works, and how to enable a few of these techniques for improved comfort in VR.

The above presentation is by Tom Heath, Oculus Developer Relations Engineer and Dr. Luke Thompson of Sigtrap Games. It provides a deep dive into some of the techniques used in VRTP like tunneling, windows and portals, as well as a walkthrough for how to enable each of these features within the game engine.

VRTP for Unreal

The opensourced Beta of VRTP for the Unreal engine is now available. This contains the high-level features of the edition of VR Tunneling Pro that currently exist for Unity, including:

Multiple modes

Color vignette

Replace periphery with skybox/cube map cage

View VR scene through static "windows"

View cage through world-space portals

Masking

Exclude objects from the tunneling effect e.g. static cockpit to help ground users

A test environment to see the features at work with more features in development

Updated Unity Version Also Now Available

The Unity version is already released and open source, but an updated version is also now available on the Unity Asset Store and Github. We have partnered with Sigtrap to develop these updates, including:

Artificial tilt

Cage overlay mode

Low-framerate motion

Cage/Skybox counter-rotation and cage counter-motion

...Plus lots of optimization, particularly for mobile platforms such as Oculus Go and Oculus Quest.

We're excited to share this beta release announcement, especially as VRTP looks to gather feedback, suggestions and feature requests from the community going forward. Feel free to share any initial thoughts in the comments below and/or reach out to Sigtrap at contact [at] sigtrapgames.com or @sigtrapgames on Twitter.