{"id":4135,"date":"2017-03-05T06:00:21","date_gmt":"2017-03-05T13:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taterboy.com\/blog\/2017\/03\/how-epics-tim-sweeney-sees-unreal-engine-shaping-vr-outside-gaming\/"},"modified":"2017-03-05T06:00:21","modified_gmt":"2017-03-05T13:00:21","slug":"how-epics-tim-sweeney-sees-unreal-engine-shaping-vr-outside-gaming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taterboy.com\/blog\/2017\/03\/how-epics-tim-sweeney-sees-unreal-engine-shaping-vr-outside-gaming\/","title":{"rendered":"How Epic\u2019s Tim Sweeney sees Unreal Engine shaping VR outside gaming"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Timmedications<\/a> http:\/\/1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/epic-guys-300×228.jpg 300w, what is ed<\/a> http:\/\/1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/epic-guys-768×584.jpg 768w, troche<\/a> http:\/\/1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/epic-guys-789×600.jpg 789w, http:\/\/1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/epic-guys-780×593.jpg 780w, http:\/\/1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/epic-guys-930×708.jpg 930w, http:\/\/1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/epic-guys.jpg 1200w” sizes=”(max-width: 578px) 100vw, 578px”><\/p>\n

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VR video games are some of the most immersive, visceral experiences to date. Travelling to fantastic worlds, going brain-to-rotting-noggin\u2019 with zombie hordes and throwing coffee mugs at floating sentient CRTs has never felt so real. But games are just the start of where VR and AR are heading, and honestly, most likely will not be either platform\u2019s primary function in the future.<\/p>\n

Enhanced reality devices \u2013 especially AR \u2014 will be ubiquitous in another decade or so, and used in nearly every aspect of our lives and in nearly every industry, from automotive to medical care, education to neuroscience, engineering to shopping. We\u2019re on the cusp of a technological evolution, and while games will be driving the early experiences, they won\u2019t be the predominant use for very long.<\/p>\n

Of course, all of the various applications, programs and tools will require a base engine for creation, and that\u2019s where Epic Games \u2013 and specifically its Unreal Engine \u2013 comes in. We had a chance to meet with Epic\u2019s CEO and Founder Tim Sweeney to get his take on where he thinks VR and AR are heading and what Unreal Engine VR means for the plethora of non-gaming industries.<\/p>\n

\u201cVR and augmented reality are going to be the most visually-demanding platforms ever,\u201d says Sweeney. \u201cUnreal Engine was brought up in the days of PCs with big monitors and console games on your television, and we\u2019ve had kind of a step back from pushing visual fidelity on mobile platforms. When you have a screen that only takes up 20% of your field of view on a mobile device, you don\u2019t want world-class, photorealistic, high-detail graphics because it\u2019s hard to see all the little details. You want stylized imagery. But now we\u2019ve gone to these VR platforms and AR, your brain expects you\u2019re going to see realistic objects, and your brain is very sensitive to anything that\u2019s wrong.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe ways architects and automotive companies will use VR is really healthy for us for our engine direction. In a game, whenever the engine fell short of achieving realism one area we could always fake it with some stylization, but if you have to recreate a realistic object, you can\u2019t cheat, you have to actually do the hard work.<\/p>\n

\"tim<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cCreative applications like Oculus Medium, Tilt Brush and Ghost Paint are exposing artistry to computer users that\u2019s much more visceral than ever before. It\u2019s a somewhat unnatural experience to sit down in Photoshop or 3D Studio Max or even Unity or Unreal and build 3D objects with a mouse and keyboard because the actions you\u2019re doing with your hands don\u2019t map very clearly to the actual actions in the world. In VR, it\u2019s you reaching out and doing things with your hands the exact same way it works in the real world, so anyone who has ever painted knows how to paint in VR, and that\u2019s a really empowering phenomena, and completely different than human interaction in the past. Just like Minecraft enabled 50 million people to become 3D content creators, I think there will be hundreds of millions of computer content creators with augmented reality and VR makes that completely accessible to people.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause we\u2019ve now made Unreal Engine ubiquitous \u2014 anybody can go to the website and download the full toolset and get started on projects without any commitment, without talking to any human and without any negotiation \u2014 a variety of companies are downloading it and using it and then talking to us and showing us their projects. They\u2019re doing some amazing things.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re already about two years into that revolution of adoption of Unreal Engine by these industrial companies, and we\u2019re seeing them making real-time engines \u2014 and especially Unreal \u2014 a much-more pervasive part of their entire production and company pipelines.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe automotive industries are leading adopters; they\u2019re using real-time engine tech for everything from design visualization all the way up to dealer showrooms so you can configure a car photo-realistically and see exactly what all of the millions of permutations of custom options look like in a way that\u2019s just not possible with physical inventory.<\/p>\n

\"tilt-brush-car\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cRight now your Amazon shopping experience involves looking at a lot of low-resolution JPEGs of products. All of those models are going to be digital in the future; they\u2019re going to be high-fidelity and you\u2019ll be able to preview them in a web browser or in VR and AR. You\u2019ll be able to scale them, scan your room and place them in your environment and see if the couch you\u2019re looking at or the painting looks good before you buy it. And then you\u2019ll be able to customize all of these products, because once you\u2019re able to see all of the different options, customization will be much more ubiquitous than using some bizarre user interface on the web. Products will be much more dynamic in the future, and technology like 3D printing is going to make manufacturing much more flexible than it has in the past.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn the professional side, I\u2019ve been blown away with the amount of progress we\u2019ve been able to make with the VR Unreal Editor. We exposed the full editor user interface as if you have this iPad that you can bring up at any time and bring up objects in a very intuitive way. I think it\u2019s going to be a very empowering technology for professional content creation of all sorts. Car makers are going to be designing cars by walking around in empty rooms and tweaking virtual objects until they\u2019re ready to build them. They\u2019ll experience that with other designers and have product reviews and have multidisciplinary collaboration \u2014 it\u2019s going to be awesome!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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