How can I place the player into a 360° video in UE4?

Question

I have a 360° video (6 separate videos stitched together into a panorama) with a first person view walking through an environment. I would like to put this in a game engine such that the actor can walk forward and backward and it will feel like they are in the environment.

I have tried this in UE4 but am somewhat new to all this. I'm not opposed to using UDK or Unity if that is easier. I have created a MediaTexture from the video asset. Now I'm trying to create a Material sphere that uses the MediaTexture and reflects it back so the actor is essentially in a spinning sphere. I keep getting stuck with these errors:

I understand that I must next construct a blueprint that reads the actor's movement to play back the video, and also rotate the texture coordinates according to the view of actor.

How can I do this?

Answer 1

What you need is an animated skybox. You'd simulate player movement by scrubbing the animation depending on backward/forward input.

And a basic first person camera gives you the view rotation for free.

I don't if UE4 can do this, and how, but I'd start by checking these tutorials on YouTube and work out the blueprint from there:

• Unreal Engine 4 Tutorial: Skybox Creation - for the basics
• Unreal Engine 4 Tutorial - Time Of Day - for some kind of animated skybox