Why Unreal Engine 5.3 is a GIANT LEAP for VR

Downloads featured:
1) www.dropbox.com/s/liteuz2ek3r...
2) www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/xooy7r...
Key things that work:
1) Single Pass / Instanced Stereo Lumen and Nanite
2) Things in both eyes that were only in one eye (e.g. grooms, volumetric fog, water)
3) DLSS 3.5
4) Matching Spectator Post Process Volume to VR
5) Plug and play VR device
Things that are still only in one eye:
1) High Quality Translucent reflections
2) Raytraced Refraction
3) OpenVDB / Sparse Volume Textures

[@ibrews]

Thanks for stopping by everyone! On playback I'm surprised how shaky some of the footage looks when I was giving the direct feed of my HMD, especially for Electric Dreams-- I promise it looks much smoother in headset and I didn't feel sick at all!

[@stevenstemmler7573]

Amazing and informative stream! Thank you for taking the time to do this! The Unreal improvements are super exciting!

[@Xodroc]

Thanks again, so much goodness in this stream I needed to know real soon!

[@ibrews]

My pleasure!

[@starchaser28]

Didn't know about stereo instancing, very cool. Thanks!

[@xulipaTV]

The spectator smoothness is a great idea

[@blakemccorkle18]

I just converted from 4.26 to 5.2 for my First Responder Training Simulator and I'm amazed at the performance (lumen in particular.) Now you are telling me it gets better still??! 🤩

[@ibrews]

Yes yes!

[@blakemccorkle18]

I notice my vehicles seem blurry, probably to Lumen artifacts - is there a good work around without disabling lumen?

[@ThyTrueNightmare]

I need some of these course, been doing industry vr development in unreal for 3 years and want to learn more

[@ibrews]

Sign up at AgileLens.com/ue-training

[@markcgpush]

Great stream. Always look forward to your vids, you are one of the few people on yt who seems to cover this stuff, has interesting demos and you go at a good pace. Work in arch viz and will be building a fairly large interior office soon that I can hopefully get working in vr. The lack of good quality mirror/translucent reflections is a huge issue for realism and one I hope epic will improve on soon. Anyway, look forward to your next stream/video 🙂

[@ibrews]

so for the time being, I would still recommend you use 4.27 with Baked Lighting and Raytraced Reflections! That's what we're doing for our most photorealistic VR ArchViz projects.

[@arealvisionvideos]

@@ibrews but we are trapped. ue4 fails with area and spot lights and ue5 has broken the gpu lightmass, there is no easy solution... I think that raytraced reflection in UE4 has lower performance than lumen in UE5. do you think??

[@ibrews]

@@arealvisionvideos totally depends on settings. Raytraced reflections with minimal bounces and samples can run fine in VR (though definitely use the best cards you can. We use RTX 4090s)

[@arealvisionvideos]

I will try to try it, thank you, but GPU Lightmass has a lot of problems with the shadows of the spot lights and the area lights do not work or at least for me in 4.26 and 4.27 they do not work for me...

[@AkashGameDev]

Hey! Thanks for this video! Is the procedure of Pixel Streaming for VR same in UE 5.2 or 5.3? Or something technical has changed on that.

[@agilelens]

as far as I know it's the same.

[@slothsarecool]

Lumen artifacts are still so distracting, it’ll be great if they can fix that eventually, just a matter of time/gpus I guess 😊

[@ibrews]

Agreed

[@SuperJonathanmatthew]

Its amazing how fast computers have become powerful enough for vr like this. Its just unfortunate that prices of gpus have exploded too and don’t seam to drop as fast anymore like in the past.

[@nickg2691]

You may have covered this in the video but I am not all the way through yet, are there any talks of integrating Dynamic or Fixed Foveated rendering into UE5?

[@ibrews]

It’s in the project settings!

[@user-yi3ul9jd1d]

Hi I started a VR project with Unreal Engine a while ago and since 5.2 I have the problem that with OpenXR the image is jumping and flickering in the headset. I tested the simple VR Template in 5.2 with several headsets (Vive Pro2, HP Reverb G2, Pimax Crystal) every headset had the same problem then I activated the steam plugin and everything worked fine. Meta Quest 2 with the MetaXR pugin also worked with Open XR not. In 5.3 I have the same Problem but I cannot get arround this issue because the steam VR Plugin is gone. Maybe you had similar issues and know how to fix it or you can give me a tip where I can place this Problem (Forum or Discord) There are not that many VR Developers out there and I appriciate your effort bringing VR forward. Thanks for your great Videos!

[@user-yi3ul9jd1d]

Seems that the openVR Toolkid causes this problems so I deinstalled it. Now at least Quest2 is working natively with OpenXR. Pimax runs via Steam-OpenXR. PimayXR still has issues.

[@UnboundOrigins]

Hey! Thanks for the video! Would it be possible to get a copy of your DLSS plugin?

[@ibrews]

email me at alex @ agilelens.com to discuss

[@SuleBandi]

Hi Alex, I would also love to get my hands on the Dlss plugin, also the pixel density setting, is this a quest specific thing, or also available for other headsets? (HTC focus3) in my case?

[@deddrz2549]

Can part of the reason that it doesn't make you sick be the quest using spacewarp to bump the head rotation to 90hz? So fps movement with a higher fps rotation?

[@ibrews]

Exactly, I’m just surprised we don’t see that reflected on the screen here

[@vigamortezadventures7972]

I also herd the lyra animations system will be available for vr ?

[@ibrews]

Ooo who told you that?

[@UmVtCg]

Unreal engine has the performance of thick excrement moving through a funnel

[@bigbrother7274]

Any way or removing the shake for vr players yet?

[@the.virtual.samurai]

Aw darn I missed it

[@ibrews]

at least there's a replay! :D

[@PierrepierreShum]

I tried to do as Alex showed, but Meta XR cannot be loaded in UE5.3. Is there some special setting to enable it? I got the "missing modules" error - where it says the OculusXR modules cannot be compiled.

[@ibrews]

I'm not using MetaXR in 5.3 since there isn't a 5.3 plugin yet!

[@PierrepierreShum]

oh! thanks for getting back@@ibrews

[@greatideas218]

I have a 3070 8gb vram and UE5 VR always crashed for me. What kind of graphics card and vram do you have to have it run so smoothly? Also what do you think would be the minimum to have it run smoothly?

[@greatideas218]

@@MrHocotateFreight I use vive pro eye, so I have no clue why it is crashing other than maybe having a graphics card that is not able to handle UE5 VR. Even some UE4 vr projects give me trouble at times

[@markcgpush]

If it’s of any help I have the same card and vr in ue5 works fine. Even with some more demanding applications. We have the quest 2 fyi.

[@greatideas218]

​@@markcgpush So you mean UE5 VR works fine? The amount of action and activity in this video makes me think that MrHocotate has something higher than 8 gb. But other forums say that 8 gb is fine. Does it not slow down or lag at all?

[@vanda477]

I use UE 5.2 with Quest 2 with link through cable on my 3060 Lenovo Legion Laptop for VR Archviz and it works good with Lumen.

[@bigsky7617]

​@@vanda477is there a big difference between using the link cable and airlink?

[@FPChris]

50:10 So Nanite VR 90fps+ is still years away :/

[@grzes2681]

What pc u have?

[@natemorga]

Does everyone have - Open XR packaging issues? I have Index HMD

[@Lucca_Tomate]

Im looking for cardboard view or how i can mirror the screen 2 times side by side anyone can help me? I cant find nothing (I use 5.2 and cant change to the 4)

[@ibrews]

cardboard view? vr .SpectatorScreenMode 2 maybe is what you want? I demonstrate it at kzbin.infojrcf0RwqSU4?si=7-uD-K8xOtGjm19q&t=3258

[@NextWorldVR]

Another way is to use Oculus Mirror (is in Oculus install folder debug tools folder I think)

[@NextWorldVR]

Cardboard view... Do you mean Stereoscopic, like side by side video? Do you want to output to Google Cardboard? You need to build as an Android App that is the number one tip if so...

[@LironToledo]

Was anyone else's foveated rendering setting greyed out (un-editable) inside the meta quest project settings? Mine is for my current project on ue 5.3 and cant find anything online about it

[@LironToledo]

I have a meta quest 3 btw

[@ibrews]

I think you need to actually be using the Meta fork of Unreal for that particular feature

[@LironToledo]

@@ibrews Gotcha thanks!

[@LironToledo]

Long shot here but are you familiar with a black screen tearing issue that happens on quest devices? My scene runs great on desktop but I cant turn my head without seeing a black plane in my headset (im using quest link)

[@ibrews]

@@LironToledo sounds like due to poor framerate

[@martinmenso6671]

What is the procedure to get DLSS 3.5 to run with ue5.3 in VR preview?

[@ibrews]

As long as there is a blueprint node activating it it runs in VR preview

[@martinmenso6671]

@@ibrews okay thank you, simple to set up? Needs some guidance :) thank you

[@martinmenso6671]

Really need this:) anyone can guide me ? Thanks

[@ibrews]

@@martinmenso6671 kzbin.info/www/bejne/iJK8kHl6lt6XpbMsi=2Z-9YTd5bgaNBZ4w

[@martinmenso6671]

But that is DLSS 3, I want to try DLSS 3.5 for UE5.3. Is that a possibility?@@ibrews

[@user-hp9bg9oq5r]

So you guys got past that 1fps bug that existed since the release of UE? Anyone care to share?

[@ibrews]

What bug?

[@user-hp9bg9oq5r]

@@ibrews I have a Pimax 5K plus. I can't run any VR preview or game inside Unreal without having to deal with stutter and probably 1 to 2 frames per second. I was having so much fun with UE4 and my Rift but it malfunctioned at some point so I ended up with the Pimax. So, long story short, no VR on UE5 for me for so much time. Any ideas welcome!

[@ibrews]

@@user-hp9bg9oq5r reduce your Pimax DPI, reduce pixel density, run with -norhithread, try DLSS

[@ANUBIS_game_dev]

8g for this simple UE53_VR_v0.02 why ? its nothing !!!

[@ibrews]

It has all the projects demonstrated in this video