It’s not long until the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2018 opens its doors for another year, and 2018 is set to be bigger and better than ever for virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) enthusiasts. Epic Games has announced it’ll be attending, with plenty of talks to support the growth of the Unreal Engine community with more content and learning material than ever before.
Epic Games will be running a booth on the show floor for attendees to play its latest videogames and those of Unreal Engine developers but its the sessions that’ll feature the most info.
Its main event is on the first day for the annual “State of Unreal” opening session. The company hasn’t yet revealed what its going to be talking about but there will be presentations from Epic Games Founder and CEO Tim Sweeney and CTO Kim Libreri, Unreal Engine licensees, partners, and special guests, with some VR sure to make an appearance.
The Unreal Engine programming schedule has been split into four categories: Sponsored Sessions, Partner Sessions, Technical Sessions and the GDC Education Summit.
- Sponsored Sessions will cover topics ranging from cinematic lighting in Unreal Engine, and creating believable characters in UE4, to optimizing Fortnite: Battle Royale, photoreal virtual humans in UE4 and programmable VFX with UE4’s Niagara.
- Partner Sessions will include a range of educational programming from some of the top creators across videogames, AR/VR and VFX, like ILMxLAB talking about location-based VR experiences including the Oscar-winning Carne y Arena and Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire.
- Technical Sessions will offer educational opportunities from the latest techniques in photorealistic virtual humans, to bridging the gap between UX principles and game design to developing the art of Fortnite to real-time VFX and creating VFX in VR.
- The Unreal Engine GDC Education Summit is an all day event open to educators for free, offering new learning resources directly from the Unreal Engine education team covering a multitude of topics.
There’s plenty more going on from Epic Games, head on over to its official GDC 2018 page to find out more. VRFocus will continue its coverage of Epic Games and Unreal Engine, reporting back with the latest updates.