Towards Cross-Platform Deployment of Unreal Engine-Based Virtual Reality Experiences

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) is increasingly being adopted in industry and research. However, VR development is mostly focused on Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs), while another immersive display modality, the CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE), receives less attention. Additionally, the development of VR experiences for the two differs widely, and work on deploying VR experiences across platforms like immersive VR HMDs and CAVEs remains underexplored. In this work, we discuss three approaches and present a conceptual pipeline for cross-platform deployment of Unreal Engine-based VR experiences. Specifically, we present the concept for a CAVE-Extended VRTemplate, an extension of Unreal Engine's standard VRTemplate, that shall enable VR applications to run across both HMDs and CAVE environments with minimal modifications. In the future, we aim to evaluate the usability of our framework with expert VR users.

Media

Architecture for cross-platform deployment of Unreal Engine-based VR applications across CAVE and HMD setups. In CAVE mode (above), head and controller transforms are streamed via VRPN from a motion capture system and button inputs are streamed from a lightweight Unreal Engine server using JSON over TCP. In HMD mode (below), the application uses the native OpenXR runtime.

Publication

Snehanjali Kalamkar & Jens Grubert. Towards Cross-Platform Deployment of Unreal Engine-Based Virtual Reality Experiences In GI-Edition: Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI) 2025, to appear.