2020 Virtual Reality Update
The Oculus Quest 2 VR System is hands down the most exciting development in the world of Virtual Reality.
It not only tracks head movement, but also your footsteps and hands!
However, despite all this greatness, Oculus has made it incredibly difficult for developers to launch products to their marketplace due to “quality assurance testing”. As of December 2020, there is still no current Architectural Tour app available on the Quest 2.
While our VR Partner, theViewer, has announced that they expect Quest 2 compatibility in Q1 2021 we have been studying the ability to have fully walkable VR Tours via the Quest and the Unreal Engine.
What We Discovered
The Unreal Engine can build custom apps to the Quest 2 that can be easily side-loaded at our office.
Worlds built by Unreal are incredibly immersive. You can walk everywhere, interact and grab things.
You can easily have acoustic diffusion and custom animations.
Unreal Engine on the Quest 2 works really well for interior environments where the exteriors are represented by 2D Photos.
Unfortunately, for larger environments, the Quest 2 can not handle the amount of information that photorealistic architectural scenes require. Even with optimizations, latency and lag present a significant issue. This is due mostly to the high polycount associated with photo-realistic vegetation.
There is the potential for WiFi powered applications, where all computation is done on a server, and the headset is simply getting Real-Time Video. This would bypass any need for processing directly on the Quest and really be a game changer in the industry.
Summary
The BOLDR team will continually improve our knowlege base of the Unreal Engine and optimiziation techniques. The Unreal Engine and Quest 2 is ready for smaller scale fully walkable VR tours and architectural visualization where custom animations are required. Larger scale walkable tours will be not be a problem if the Quest ever integrates WiFi Powered Applications. Until then, we will keep a lookout for theViewer’s announcement for Quest 2 compatibility and keep an eye out for any other contenders!
