Game Engines for Immersive Visualization: Using Unreal Engine Beyond Entertainment

TL;DR

This paper discusses the transition to Unreal Engine for developing immersive scientific visualization tools, highlighting benefits, challenges, and practical considerations based on real-world use cases.

Contribution

It provides practical insights and guidance on adopting Unreal Engine for immersive visualization, based on the authors' migration experience and use case examples.

Findings

Unreal Engine offers advantages for immersive scientific visualization.

Migration to Unreal Engine presents specific challenges and considerations.

The approach influences research and development workflows.

Abstract

One core aspect of immersive visualization labs is to develop and provide powerful tools and applications that allow for efficient analysis and exploration of scientific data. As the requirements for such applications are often diverse and complex, the same applies to the development process. This has led to a myriad of different tools, frameworks, and approaches that grew and developed over time. The steady advance of commercial off-the-shelf game engines such as Unreal Engine has made them a valuable option for development in immersive visualization labs. In this work, we share our experience of migrating to Unreal Engine as a primary developing environment for immersive visualization applications. We share our considerations on requirements, present use cases developed in our lab to communicate advantages and challenges experienced, discuss implications on our research and development environments, and aim to provide guidance for others within our community facing similar challenges.