Setting Up VR in Unreal

Unreal talks to headsets through plugins, and the one to turn on is OpenXR. Open Edit -> Plugins, search OpenXR, tick the OpenXR plugin (and, if you want the ready-made teleport and grab logic, the companion OpenXR Hand Tracking and the VR templates' content), then restart the editor when prompted. Enabling OpenXR rather than a vendor-specific plugin (the old Oculus or SteamVR plugins) is the deliberate choice from the last lesson: you target the open standard, so the same project runs on a Quest, an Index, a Vive or a Varjo without a rewrite.

With OpenXR on, Unreal will use whatever OpenXR runtime your system has set as active - Meta's runtime for a Quest via Link, SteamVR for an Index, Varjo's runtime for a Varjo. This is worth understanding when a headset does not show up: the fix is almost always that the wrong runtime is set as the active OpenXR runtime in the headset's desktop app, not anything inside Unreal. Set the correct runtime active, make sure the headset software (Meta Quest Link, SteamVR, Varjo Base) is running and the headset is awake, and Unreal will find it.

One honest caveat: plugin names and exact menu paths shift slightly between Unreal Engine 5 releases. The principle is stable - enable OpenXR, restart, target the standard - even when a checkbox moves. If you are on a recent UE5, OpenXR is the modern, supported path and the vendor plugins are legacy; do not mix them.

You have two honest routes into VR, and the right one depends on where your project already is. The clean-slate route is the VR Template: File -> New Project -> Games -> Virtual Reality (or the VR template in the archviz-friendly categories). It hands you a project already configured for VR - OpenXR on, the correct rendering settings, and crucially a working VR Pawn with teleport locomotion, grabbable objects and controller models already wired in Blueprint. For learning, and for a fresh archviz scene, this is the fastest start: you get a comfortable, working VR experience out of the box and then bring your building into it.

The more common professional situation is that you already have a lit, materialed archviz scene - imported via Datasmith, lit with Lumen - and you want to add VR to it rather than start over. Here you migrate the VR Pawn and its input assets from the VR Template into your project (right-click the Pawn Blueprint -> Asset Actions -> Migrate), then set it as the scene's default pawn, or place a VR Pawn / VROrigin actor into your level and set the Game Mode to spawn it. The key idea is that something must own the headset camera and controllers - and in Unreal that something is the VR Pawn.

Whichever route you take, do a quick sanity check on units and origin. Unreal works in centimetres, and if your Datasmith import came in at the right real-world scale, VR will be at true 1:1 automatically - a 3-metre ceiling really reads as three metres over your head. Note where the pawn's floor origin sits: you want the pawn's feet on the building's floor, not floating or sunk, so your eyeline lands at a realistic standing height. Getting scale and floor right here is what makes the next lesson's 1:1 immersion honest.

A handful of Project Settings separate smooth VR from a stuttering one, and they are worth setting deliberately rather than trusting defaults. Open Edit -> Project Settings and work through the rendering options. Historically, VR archviz favoured the Forward Renderer with MSAA anti-aliasing over the default Deferred renderer, because forward rendering is lighter per pixel and MSAA gives clean edges without the smearing that temporal anti-aliasing can show in a headset - a real advantage when you are drawing two eyes at 90fps. On modern UE5 with Lumen many teams now stay on the deferred path for lighting fidelity and lean harder on optimisation instead; the honest position is that it is a genuine trade-off between light quality and headroom, and Module 9 is where you learn to judge it. Either way, turn on Instanced Stereo Rendering, which lets the engine draw both eye images in a single pass instead of two - a straightforward performance win costing you nothing.

Set Forward Shading's companion options if you chose it, enable Mobile Multi-View only if you are targeting a headset's onboard chip (Quest standalone), and confirm your Anti-Aliasing Method matches your renderer choice. Set a sensible default and target frame rate and make sure VSync behaviour will not fight the headset's own timing. None of these are exotic; they are the difference between a review that holds 90fps and one that dips into discomfort.

A practical warning: do not treat these as one-time magic settings and forget them. VR performance is a whole-scene property - geometry, materials, lights and effects all spend the same frame budget - so these settings enable good performance but do not guarantee it. Set them now so the stage is right, and return to Module 9 to actually profile and hold the budget on your specific building.

Now the payoff. With the headset on and its software running, click the dropdown arrow next to the Play button in the toolbar and choose VR Preview (in some UE5 versions, Play -> VR Preview). Unreal launches the scene straight into the headset - you are standing in your building. This is a genuine, iterate-in-place workflow: with the editor still live, you can step out of the headset, tweak a material or move a light, and press VR Preview again in seconds. That fast loop is exactly the real-time promise this whole course is built on, now at true scale.

Do not stop at VR Preview, though. Preview runs in the editor with editor overhead; the honest performance picture comes from a standalone or packaged build, or at least a Standalone Game launch, which strips the editor and shows what the client will actually feel. Watch the on-headset frame rate with stat fps or stat unit (Module 9 teaches these properly) and note whether you are holding your headset's refresh rate. If a Quest, decide now whether you are streaming from the PC (Quest Link over cable or Air Link over Wi-Fi, so the PC renders) or targeting the standalone chip - they are very different performance situations.

Finally, do the human test. Put the headset on someone who has never seen the model. Watch where they walk, where they reach, what makes them lean in or step back. That is the first taste of the design-review value the last lesson of this module is all about - and it will also flush out the practical snags (a floor at the wrong height, a controller not mapped, a doorway too tight) while they are still cheap to fix.