At the Game Developer Conference this week PlayFusion, an emerging leader in enhanced augmented reality (AR) for use in entertainment and other interactive purposes has announced a strategic partnership with Crytek.
The partnership will see PlayFusion licensing its ground breaking Enhanced Reality Engine to Crytek in order to have it integrated into their CRYENGINE. This means that users of the CRYENGINE will be able to tap into the the powerful tools and features of the Enhanced Reality Engine and leverage it for creating AR content. The technology has already been used for a number of products including the collectible trading card game (TCG) Lightseekers which PlayFusion created in partnership with TOMY and is also being used for the newly revealed Warhammer Age of Sigmar Champions, which will bring Games Workshops Warhammer universe to life in an AR TCG.
Avni Yerli, Crytek Founder and joint CEO commented on the announcement by stating: “PlayFusion’s visionary technology brings next-level multiplayer augmented reality capabilities to our already powerful game development platform CRYENGINE. Supplementing CRYENGINE with the industry’s most feature-rich and performant AR technology perfectly rounds out our ability to seamlessly immerse people in compelling virtual experiences with an incredible level of realism, the creative and technical strength of today’s global developer community makes this a great time to bring amazing new experiences to life—and these are the best tools for the job.”
PlayFusion have been developing breakthrough artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics technologies for some time now to enable immersive mixed reality (MR) experiences. Now, with the Enhanced Reality Engine, PlayFusion are able to leverage hardware, computer vision, audio recognition, machine learning and deep data to build new expertness all while delivering a compelling experience to the user that is seamlessly connected. Now with the partnership with Crytek, seeing this technology added to the CRYENGINE, more developers will be able to make use of the Enhanced Reality Engine opening the doors to exciting new possibilities.
Mark Gerhard, CEO and CTO of PlayFusion also added: “It’s a great honour to be selected as Enhanced Reality technology partner by the company that not only defined how modern game engines work, but who are the undisputed standard bearer for photorealistic, real-time 3D, we really look forward to working with them to advance the state of the art and to establish the new standard in Enhanced Reality for the industry.”
Elsewhere, Crytek recently announced the latest version of the CRYENGINE, versions 5.5.
VRFocus will be bring you all the latest throughout the week as the Game Developer Conference continues to stay tuned for more.
In CryEngine 5.4.0, the new “Extended Detail Bending” toggle, found in the vegetation shader, provides artists with much more control over detail bending on their branches. For example, new bending allows not only small micro movement on leaves, but also whole branches of trees or chunks of grass. Through this expansion, artists can have one big chunk of grass with phased animations so that movement looks natural. Aiding in the variations, there is also the option to apply a world-space mapped noise texture to simulate random breeze for variations to the movement.