Build for Quest

Packaging your project to run standalone on a Meta Quest has its challenges. More often than not, rendering compromises will be required to have an acceptable experience, and how you craft and design applications becomes a crucial part of the process. In this tutorial we will cover packaging a VR application for Meta Quest and implementing a few optimizations to improve performance.

Prerequisites

• Android Studio 4.0
• Cesium For Unreal v1.16.1 or greater

Clone or download the project files here to get a more in-depth look at the project and solutions provided. Refer to the README for more information on the blueprints and levels corresponding to this tutorial, as well as headset compatibility.

Our design challenge

The biggest challenge when building a mobile application with 3D Tiles is that they are streamed geometry. Many rendering features in Unreal are centered around baked (precomputed) lightmaps or reflections and cannot be leveraged on 3D Tiles. For example, dynamic lights, which are more expensive, will be needed for lighting the terrain.

This VR tutorial project is particularly demanding because we are displaying Cesium World Terrain with rapid movements, thus requiring a large number of 3D Tiles and geometry to be loaded.

It is crucial to leverage as many optimizations as possible to get the most performance out of your packaged application. Several mobile applications do this by using few or no dynamic lights and unlit shaders when possible. Ultimately, achieving a higher frame rate through strategic tradeoffs will produce a better experience than high-quality visuals with subpar frame rate.

Project setup

We will first perform a basic setup to ensure our application runs properly in VR.

Next, we set up all of the required Android support to deploy APKs (Android Packages) to the Meta Quest.

1Follow all of the steps in this guide closely to download and set up Android Studio 4.0. Ensure that all steps were completed carefully before proceeding to the next step.

2Select the Configure Now button located in the project settings at:

Vulkan RHI is the preferable graphics API as it provides more performance and memory optimizations than OpenGL.

Previewing the application on the Quest is a great way to quickly iterate through your changes and deploy to the device to debug.

1Enable developer mode on your Meta Quest. You may need to join an organization or create your own to do so.

2Plug in your Quest and select Allow when the popup for “Allow connected devices to access files?” appears.

New features, techniques, and hardware are released at a rapid pace, meaning more optimizations can be made to further improve performance.

Application Space Warp is a powerful feature for Meta Quest that interpolates between frames, reducing the frame rate required for a smooth experience.  It’s currently only available for Unreal 4.27. Once support is available for Unreal 5, we’ll be integrating it into this tutorial project.