Category: Unreal Engine 4.25

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Unreal Engine 4.25 Improves Support for HoloLens 2, Magic Leap, Adds Azure Spatial Anchors

Unreal Engine 4.25 launched this week bringing a host of improvements to the engine’s XR functionality. HoloLens 2 and Magic Leap saw the most attention, including the addition of Azure Spatial Anchors, Microsoft’s cross-platform system which enables shared augmented spaces across devices.

Unreal Engine is one of the most popular game engines for building XR content. Each release brings improvements to the engine’s XR capabilities with new features and bug fixes. This week Unreal Engine 4.25 was released and saw a host of improvements, especially to HoloLens 2 and Magic Leap.

Epic Games says that Unreal Engine now offers production-ready support for HoloLens 2. This comes after a range of bug fixes and new capabilities now supported in the engine, including Microsoft Spatial Audio, App Remoting from packaged UE apps, mixed-reality capture, and beta support for Azure Spatial Anchors.

Image courtesy Microsoft

Azure Spatial Anchors is Microsoft’s cloud-based system which allows AR devices to recognize discrete real-world locations between sessions and to synchronize and share the position of spatial content between devices for multi-user applications.

Image courtesy Magic Leap

Magic Leap also saw a bunch of improvements to streamline development in Unreal Engine 4.25, including the ability to set up shared world experiences using new features of the Magic Leap SDK like GameMode, PlayerController, and GameState. Epic also says it has improved the AugmentedReality interface to make it easy to port smartphone-based AR projects over to Magic Leap.

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On the VR side, Unreal Engine 4.25 sees a range of bug and crash fixes, and SDK updates.

Oculus’ OVRPlugin has been updated to version 1.45, along with an update to Oculus Audio which adds support for ARM64 on Quest. SteamVR has been updated to 1.5.17 and SteamAudio, Valve’s positional audio system, has been updated as well, now with support for high-quality stereo layers and dynamic geometry.

For more detail, check out the complete release notes for Unreal Engine 4.25.

The post Unreal Engine 4.25 Improves Support for HoloLens 2, Magic Leap, Adds Azure Spatial Anchors appeared first on Road to VR.

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Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4.25 Adds PlayStation 5 & Xbox Series X Support, Improves HoloLens 2 Support

Unreal Engine 4.25

Holiday 2020 looks set to be a big one for gaming fans with the next generation of consoles from Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) and Microsoft scheduled to arrive. As one of the most popular game development platforms Unreal Engine is gearing up for the new hardware with its latest edition 4.25, whilst continuing to enhance its mixed reality (MR) support.

Unreal Engine 4.25

The big news is that Unreal Engine 4.25 is the first edition to initially support PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, with further optimizations coming throughout the year. With PlayStation 5 previously confirmed to support PlayStation VR this should now make it possible for VR developers using UE4 to bring their project to the upcoming console.

Epic Games notes that 4.25 next-gen features include: “platform-specific functionality, such as new audio advancements, initial support for online subsystems, and early support for TRC and XR certification requirements.”

As for MR, Unreal Engine 4.26 improves support for Microsoft HoloLens 2. There are performance improvements, support for MR capture from a third-person camera view, initial support for Azure Spatial Anchors and the ability to enable HoloLens remoting from packaged Unreal Engine applications via a command line. Magic Leap has also seen smaller improvements such as support for its latest SDK while the Leap Motion plugin was removed from the engine as it is no longer supported.

Unreal Engine 4.25

The update also sees platform SDK upgrades including:

  • ARCore 1.7
  • ARKit 3.0
  • Oculus 1.44
  • OpenXR 1.0
  • SteamVR 1.5.17
  • Magic Leap 0.23

There are plenty of other new features and improvements to interest current and budding videogame developers. Real-time ray tracing is now officially production-ready, the platform now has built-in support for LiDAR data; making it easier for users importing, visualizing, editing, and interacting with point clouds.

A brand-new media output pipeline has been added for those wishing to create high-quality movies and stills for marketing materials or cinematics. On the audio side, Unreal Audio Engine now supports sound field rendering and convolution reverb processing to make content even more immersive.

Take a look at the full set of Unreal Engine 4.25 release notes and don’t forget that the software is free to begin experimenting with if you’re interested in videogame design. For further updates on the videogame engine, keep reading VRFocus.