Gear VR Project

LIAM’s Virtual Gallery VR Project

Mobile VR 3D Project Using Samsung Gear VR by Oculus

My Independent Study in the New Media Production and Design at SAIT Polytechnic

VR Development/ Liam Yoo
All Graphic Assets Including 3D, Animation and Video / Liam Yoo
Development Devices/ Galaxy S7 Edge and GEAR VR
Used Tool / Autodesk 3D Studio Max, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effect, Adobe Premiere, Android Development Kit, Unreal Engine

 

A summary of Mobile Gear VR Development Project

Mobile VR has been the one of anticipated technologies among mobile consumers in this era. Using VR for this project has lots of benefits to show new media technologies to audiences since not only development skills also 3D graphic skills are necessary to create VR contents. The development was a big challenge due to my lack of development experiences, but the project is successfully done in the end. The most successful thing of the project is the fact that I developed Gear VR myself. All process of this project required high level of understanding new generation’s game engine, mobile development skills, abilities of controlling VR technologies and 3D graphic skills. I could join the Oculus VR development online community to share VR techniques. I summarized all steps of the Gear VR development process by my independent study.

 

 

Why Gear VR

  • Powered by Oculus – Use more advanced VR tech
  • Specific Guide Line and Most Powerful Android Device

 

Unreal Engine 4

  • Powerful and Amazing Real-time Visualization System
  • Easy to Package VR Project to Many Platforms such as Gear VR, Oculus and HTC Vive
  • Blueprints Visual Based Development

 

Challenges

  • Lots of 3D Graphic Limitations: Most of Postproduction Effects Should be Eliminated- Disappointed from low quality of 3D graphic performance
  • Hard to fix frame rates – it causes VR sickness
  • Lots of Process to export APK file
    • Oculus Developer License Key
    • Android Developer License Key
    • Only works in Galaxy s6,s7,s8 and Note 5,7

 

 


Gear VR Development Process using Unreal Engine

  1. Eligible Devices
    • Samsung Galaxy Note 4, S6, S6 Edge, S7, S7 Edge, S8 and S8+.
  2. Install All software
      • Java SDK
      • Android SDK
      • Unreal Engine
      • Nvidia Tegra System Profiler
  2. Get a Occulus Signature File (osig)
  3. Copy osig file into Unreal folder
  4. Enable Developer Mode on Galaxy S7
  5. Create 3D using 3DS max
  6. Export fbx files
  7. Set up Unreal Engine Project and optimize the project for Gear VR mobile development
  8. Import FBX files into Unreal Engine
  9. Place all graphic assets in the Unreal Engine
  10. Develop using Blueprint for simple simulations and actions
  11. Exporting
  12. Test and debugging

Conclusion

  • For the VR, Oculus Rift or HTC Vive is cheaper and stronger option.
  • Unreal Engine 4 is amazing also easy to use
  • Really good experience to be confident
  • Lots of room for improvement

Failures and Need to be improved

Although the independent study was satisfied project for me, there are tons of room for improvement. It is a great result for the first attempt, but more interactions between the 3D room and users can be a good idea. Moreover, I realized users of VR contents usually allows very limited playing time due to VR sickness and its inconvenience. People tend to prefer and enjoy shocking or terrifying VR contents in 3 to 5 minutes. If I can have another chance to develop VR contents, I will develop a horror game to maximize VR system’s benefits. Overheating issue from aggressive 3D graphic drawing was another concern of this mobile VR project. Performance issue was the hardest one to deal with in this project because VR needs to work 60 FPS consistently.