Leap Motion + Unreal 4.9

[AlexColgan]

Hey everyone,

I’m excited to let you know that the upcoming Unreal 4.9 release will include native Leap Motion plugin support within the production build! That means no more compiling the engine from source to get the plugin running.

The Unreal 4.9 Preview is already available, so if you’re looking to start a new project, we recommend building on that release. For existing projects (or projects that absolutely need to be stable in the near term), you’ll want to continue building on the source-compiled options outlined in this post.

Based on some of our initial testing, the Unreal 4.7 Demo Pack should work fine with the 4.9 Preview, except for LeapCharacterExample. We’ll keep you posted on our progress on that front. To avoid confusion in the meantime, we’ve created two separate assets -- the Unreal 4.7 Demo Pack and the 4.9 Preview Demo Pack.

This latest release also includes Image API support, which can be used to create augmented reality applications for VR headsets like the Oculus Rift! Currently, we don’t have a full integration in place, so you’ll want to check out our VR essentials guide to integrate the Leap Motion plugin with the Rift in Unreal. (In related news, we’re looking for an Unreal engineer to join our team -- apply here!)

Thanks for all your support and enthusiasm as we continue working to expand and improve our platform integrations ahead of the 3D Jam!

[vt_training]

Hi,

Could you give some pointers as to how to integrate the Leap Motion plugin into an Unreal 4.9 project? We were able to add a Leap Motion controller to our 4.8 project and with a little code it followed a first person pawn's HMD quite nicely, apart from the jitter.

Now in 4.9 we can't find a way to attach the LM Controller to our player's character. We've tried a number of different methods (adding it as a component or as it's own actor blueprint on the level, etc), all with the same result - the Leap motion controller moves at a different rate as the player, so the hands move away if you move at all. At first we thought maybe there was an issue with our pawn or maps, but even with a default pawn on an empty map, the LM controller behaves the same, and we haven't figured out how to resolve this.

Could you post a screenshot or two of Unreal Blueprints showing how to properly attach a leap motion controller to a moving player or actor, or at least point us in the right direction? Thanks a lot.

[AlexColgan]

It sounds like you're running into the same problems that we did with the LeapCharacterExample, which is why it was temporarily pulled from the Unreal assets. We have some major updates in the works, but in the meantime you may want to stick with 4.8 and use the cherrypick solution outlined in this thread to get rid of the jitter bug.