Category: Tim Sweeney

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Epic CEO Tim Sweeney: Closed Oculus Platform Would Mean ‘Less Income For Developers’

Tim Sweeney Epic Games

Some major questions remain unanswered by Facebook’s Oculus team regarding how open and accessible its Oculus Quest hardware will be to buyers. With some prompting this weekend, one of the gaming industry’s thought leaders commented with some strong language on the situation.

Critically, it is unclear how easy it will be for the average Oculus Quest buyer in 2019 to become developers so they could load up software that runs on the headset without going through Facebook’s Oculus Store. That’s the way it is done today with the standalone Oculus Go headset.

While it is important for developers to get full access to all the computation and graphics power in a standalone headset, certain services might kept active and beyond user or developer control for safety, security or privacy reasons. For example, we know Quest includes a visible external light that is wired directly to the power rail of the headset, and we expect its operation not to be changeable by apps or the end user.

Likewise, Oculus uses what it calls a “Guardian” system which defines safe boundaries for play. Facebook uses the system on Rift today while Valve offers its own “Chaperone” system with adjustable settings on PC. Even Microsoft uses the concept of “Boundaries” on PC with its inside-out tracking system to define play areas that are clear from floor to ceiling. Google’s Daydream OS running on Lenovo’s standalone Mirage Solo automatically restricts head movement to a very small area, but that feature can be deactivated by developers for a dangerous testing session.

The issue here is the same path used by developers to test their apps on computers is also often used by enthusiastic early adopters to become the first to test those apps. On the standalone Oculus Go headset, for instance, you can install stuff from a connected PC, but that’s not nearly as easy as, say, installing Fortnite on an Android phone and bypassing the Google Play Store to do it. The argument could be made that security, safety, and privacy of whomever is using a VR headset demands a more restrictive console-like platform similar to an Xbox, Nintendo or PS4.

It certainly seems like Oculus is heading toward a console approach for Quest, but the company still hasn’t clarified its plan for some of these things. Company representatives, however, made it clear earlier this year that they are aware of the issues at stake when it comes to how they run current and future platforms.

“It’s an existential crisis for us to make sure we get data handling right,” said Max Cohen, head of product for the Oculus Platform, during a phone interview at the time. Jenny Hall, who leads privacy programs for the Oculus legal team, also said “privacy is something that we need the entire community of think about, we can’t just fix it or think about it on our own.”

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney is not one to mince words when it comes to these kinds of questions because his company makes both games, like Fortnite, and the tools for other developers to make games, namely Unreal Engine. When creators use Unreal Engine — and some of the biggest game development teams do — “you pay Epic 5% of gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product per calendar quarter.”

Since Apple, Valve, Google and Microsoft are usually taking about 30 percent of the sale price of each game for the privilege of selling products on those respective digital storefronts, it makes sense why it matters so much to Sweeney that when he has a hit like Fortnite he can get it onto PC or Android while paying 0% of the revenue from that digital universe to Google or Microsoft.

A reply to Sweeney suggested “users don’t read the permission warnings and you can’t push security patches without a central store. I think developer mode is a reasonable compromise.”

When it was suggested that security and privacy are more important than that, Sweeney replied, “Apple’s lousy software distribution and commerce monopoly isn’t the key to the safety of apps; the real driver is their excellent OS security model. The web will always lag hopelessly far behind what’s possible natively.”

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Epic Games CEO: Magic Leap One bietet alle Schlüsseltechnologien

„Magic Leap ist das erste Produkt, das tatsächlich den Nagel auf den Kopf trifft.“ Der CEO von Epic Games zeigt sich von der AR-Brille und den darin verbauten Technologien begeistert und prophezeit der Augmented Reality allgemein und der Magic Leap One im Speziellen eine große Zukunft. Über kurz oder lang werden AR-Brillen laut Sweeny das Smartphone ersetzen – und auch dedizierte VR-Brillen.

CEO von Epic Games: Magic Leap One ist magisch

Im Rahmen der GDC 2018 hat Magic Leap das SDK für seine Augmented-Reality-Brille Magic Leap One freigeschaltet, die viele Rückschlüsse auf die verwendeten Technologien zulässt. Tim Sweeney von Epic Games hat sich nun ausführlicher gegenüber Ars Technica zu Magic Leap und Augmented Reality im Allgemeinen geäußert. Der CEO sieht für AR eine große Zukunft, in den nächsten zwei bis drei Jahren könnten bereits 10 Millionen Kunden eine AR-Brille kaufen. Wenn diese vom Produkt fasziniert seien, dann könne man 100 Millionen Anwender gewinnen. Wenn diese ebenfalls zufrieden sind, wäre die erste Milliarde das nächste Ziel.

Magic Leap Unreal Engine

Die Magic Leap One sei das erste Produkt, das tatsächlich den Nagel auf den Kopf trifft (“Magic Leap is the first product where the rubber really hits the road.”). Tatsächlich lesen sich die technischen Features, die das SDK der Magic Leap One offenbart, beeindruckend. Dazu gehören Raumabtastung, Eye-Tracking, die Erfassung von Controllern mit 6 Freiheitsgraden und einige mehr. Laut Sweeney biete Magic Leap damit alle Schlüsseltechnologien. Für folgende Generationen bestehe deshalb die Herausforderung darin, die Hardware weiter zu miniaturisieren. Am Ende soll man AR-Brillen dann nicht mehr von normalen Brillen unterscheiden können. Für VR-Brillen sieht der CEO in Zukunft hingegen keinen Bedarf mehr, da AR-Brillen ihre Aufgaben übernehmen – umgekehrt allerdings nicht. „VR wird niemals in der Lage sein, die reale Welt einzublenden.“ Im Gegensatz dazu können AR-Brillen die reale Welt komplett ausblenden und so ein VR-Erlebnis ermöglichen, erklärt Sweeney.

Bis es so weit ist, sieht der CEO allerdings im Mobile Gaming einen riesigen Trend. Schließlich hätten viele High-End-PC-Spiele seit dem letzten Jahr eine kompetente Umsetzung für mobile Geräte erhalten. Möglich machen das die Schnittstellen Metal auf iOS und Vulkan auf Android, die vergleichbar mit DirectX von Microsoft wären. Durch die APIs habe man ein völlig neues Geschwindigkeits-Level erreicht.

(Quelle: Ars Technica)

Der Beitrag Epic Games CEO: Magic Leap One bietet alle Schlüsseltechnologien zuerst gesehen auf VR∙Nerds. VR·Nerds am Werk!

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Tim Sweeney On Apple AR: ‘There is Going to be an Incredible Rush of Developers’

Tim Sweeney On Apple AR: ‘There is Going to be an Incredible Rush of Developers’

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney thinks Apple’s upcoming iOS 11 update, arriving this fall, will be a huge boost to the emerging AR industry.

Sweeney, whose company makes the Unreal Engine toolset used in creating some of the biggest budget 3D projects, outlined in a blog post this week why he saw this as a huge moment for immersive computing:

Apple’s debut of VR support for Mac and AR support for iOS are true game-changers. Whereas there are a couple million VR enthusiasts today, and early AR hardware from other companies has reached several thousand developers, Apple is bringing this high-powered technology to hundreds of millions of consumers right now.

I believe this is truly the start of the mainstream VR and AR revolution that we at Epic have been striving for, and building for, over the course of many years.  It’s the most definitive event marking the move to high-end technology that will power a new generation of world-class experiences transcending games and storytelling.

With both Unity and Unreal integrating with ARKit for iOS, the two major tools for creating virtual worlds are now available to developers for building apps on hundreds of millions of Apple handhelds. There have been tools developers could use before, but Sweeney thinks Apple’s support for AR could accelerate adoption.

“Apple has an extraordinary history of adopting trends at just the right time that they’re ready for mainstream pickup,” Sweeney said in an interview with UploadVR. “From the buzz among developers we know and we work with there is going to be an incredible rush of developers working to support this…you’re going to see an immense amount of investment very quickly.”

Sweeney suggests the VR market is so small right now it is difficult for teams to justify large investments in content, but with AR suddenly more accessible on hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads it is a potential gold rush for teams investing in the right idea. Of course, there are still major technical challenges to overcome. What does a multiplayer AR game look like, for example? According to Sweeney, a lot of technology still needs to be built to make compelling AR experiences.

“It is an entirely new kind of entertainment experience,” Sweeney said. “We’re going to see a flurry of experiments and successes and failures that all build on top of each other.”

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Epic’s Tim Sweeney Thinks Full-Body VR Scanners Are Just Three Years Away

Tim Sweeney Epic Games CEO

Epic CEO and video game legend Tim Sweeney was a guest at this year’s GamesBeat Summit where he kept up his pattern of speaking big when it comes to the future of virtual reality.

Sweeney has been a huge proponent of a more believable metaverse for some time now. A big part of that is apparently the introduction of more human-like avatars with more believable interactions in VR.

According to Sweeney, “What we need are inward and outward facing cameras that scan your body. That’s what’s missing. That technology has already been proven to work at a high-end commercial level costing tens of thousands of dollars. It’s probably as little as three years away.”

These cameras would operate like enhanced versions of more gimmicky video game devices like the Microsoft Kinect. Their use in VR would be to increase our ability to communicate non-verbally and recognize individual personalities, in addition to these sorts of social upgrades.

Right now, the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PSVR can track the position of your head and hands in 3D space. The Rift allows for some simple articulation of the fingers with Touch but, for the most part, our ability to physically interact in VR is limited. Even in this restricted state, however, experiences like Facebook Spaces are showing just how powerful even the semblance of body language can be for VR communications and socialization. Increasing these things to the level Sweeney describes could lead to some massively transformative capabilities.

In addition to beefing up our social capabilities with enhanced body tracking, Sweeney also believes that leaps in deep learning technology will also allow VR to host experiences that put traditional gaming to shame.

“That’s going to open entirely new kinds of game scenarios,” said Sweeney. “Today’s best role-playing games aren’t at all convincing. They aren’t even trying to approach reality. But once we have deep learning and input, we’ll be able to do much more advanced interactions beyond just killing monsters.”

Here’s hoping these predictions come true.

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Epic’s Tim Sweeney Confirms Robo Recall’s Funding

Epic’s Tim Sweeney Confirms Robo Recall’s Funding

Robo Recall is a very important game. We labelled the robot-fighting title “very good” in our review, and with its modification system and pedigree coming from one of the industry’s most influential companies (Epic Games), the game is likely to influence others as they think about VR game design.

That makes the amount it cost to make a game like this a key point of interest. Late last year we interviewed Epic CEO Tim Sweeney and talked to him about the budget for the game. He compared the amount Oculus paid to be produced exclusively for the Oculus platform to the size of the budget for the original Gears of War.

Here’s that original quote, which Sweeney confirmed today we reported accurately:

“In 2006, a world class Triple A game cost 10-20 million to produce now they’ll cost up to 100 million. It’s become so expensive and so risky that only massive publishers can really afford to put these kinds of games out…Oculus has been willing to fund third party software that’s exclusive to their hardware. That’s a perfectly acceptable way to jump start an industry…For example, Oculus is funding Robo Recall which has a budget that’s close to the budget of the entire first Gears of War game.”

We looked it up, and found the budget for Gears of War was previously reported by Wired as between $9 or $10 million.

An article from RoadToVR today attempts to zero in on the actual costs of development in that budget, quoting a team size of 15 for the project and doing some math to estimate the rough costs involved in actually producing the project with that team. Sweeney confirmed to us the team size data reported in that article is correct as well.

“UploadVR’s original article quoted me accurately,” Sweeney wrote in an email. “The Road to VR [article] accurately conveys the team size data.”

The problem, though, is that each of these are limited data points that don’t exactly paint a full picture of the deal between Oculus and Epic Games. The game, for instance, is offered for free on the Oculus store. This means Epic wouldn’t see a traditional revenue split from individual sales of the game with Oculus — something a Reddit commenter pointed out on our original article would’ve likely figured into the deal.

“There are lots of numbers involved in budgets for the various parties involved, they span many areas of which direct game development cost is one, and we can’t break them down further for reasons of Epic and partner confidentiality,” Sweeney told UploadVR. “I apologize for sharing partial details this way. In retrospect we should’ve shared team size data only, which would have avoided speculation and conflicting interpretations of the various data points.”

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59% of VR Developers Use Unity, But Devs Make More Money With Unreal

59% of VR Developers Use Unity, But Devs Make More Money With Unreal

Unity Technologies and Epic Games are in a grudge match for the hearts and minds of game developers. And so when you ask which one of them has a bigger or a better business, you get some very different answers.

I interviewed both John Riccitiello, CEO of San Francisco-based Unity, and Tim Sweeney, CEO of Raleigh, N.C.-based Epic Games, this week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Neither company is publicly traded, so each can selectively disclose numbers that make its business look good. Both are stellar companies that started out in very different ways.

Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 started out in the high end, and it has moved lower through pricing tactics and revisions that enable it to be the foundation of mobile games. Unity’s started out at the low end, enabling mobile devices to run better 2D and 3D graphics. Sadly, we don’t know which company is really in the stronger position because their data comparisons are apples and oranges.

Riccitiello said in a press event and in our interview that Unity-based games were installed more than 16 billion times in 2016, up 31 percent from 2015. The Unity-based games reached a billion new devices since GDC 2016.

He said that 59 percent of virtual reality developers are using Unity, according to a survey by VisionMobile. And he said 38 percent of the top 1,000 free games are based on Unity, and more than half of all Daydream apps are made with Unity. He said Unity is about half of console and PC games, and it has 70 percent of mobile gaming, in terms of the unit numbers for game engine users.

“We’re picking up four or five market share points a year,” Riccitiello said. “Our growth last year was three times the business of the next-largest game engine in the West. More people build an Apple with Unity than anyone else. Ditto with Google and ditto with Microsoft.”

Sweeney said that Unreal Engine had its best year of all time in revenues, and then 2016 revenues doubled the 2015 numbers. He said developers have made more than $10 billion to date with Unreal games.

“We think that Unreal Engine’s market share is double the nearest competitor in revenues,” Sweeney said. “This is despite the fact that Unity has more users. This is by virtue of the fact that Unreal is focused on the high end. More games in the top 100 on Steam in revenue are Unreal, more than any other licensable engine competitor combined.”

Powered by Unreal, Netmarble’s Lineage2 Revolution on mobile made $176 million in its first month on mobile on iOS and Android in South Korea. It had more than 5 million users in its first month, or 10 percent of South Korea’s population. Netmarble said that Unreal was the only technology that could enable 200 people to fight in the same arena at once. The game will expand into the West, China, and other markets soon. Sweeney said it was an example of a developer setting itself apart from others with the Unreal engine.

“There is a new way forward besides a race to bottom and high user acquisition costs,” Sweeney said. “You can find an audience of hardcore gamers and bypass the Malthusian economics of the game industry now.”

Asked if Epic’s revenues were bigger than Unity’s Riccitiello said he didn’t know without the access to the numbers. He figures there are 2 million games built with Unity and a much smaller number built with Unreal.

“I think Unreal does a lot of good things, and I don’t begrudge them,” Riccitiello said. “We’re in a different position than them. We are many times larger in our market impact. Tim is an incredibly smart guy and very outspoken. They have a different revenue stream in that they make games. I could argue they compete with their customers.”

Overall, Riccitiello said he likes market competition, including Amazon and Cocos2d. In the press event today, Kim Libreri, chief technology officer of Epic, said that everyone from hotel designers to car creators are using Unreal to design their cars. Framestore did an educational application where kids get a field trip of Mars, and NASA is working with Unreal technology to visualize a Mars mission.

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This post by Dean Takahashi originally appeared on Venturebeat.

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GDC 2017: Watch John Carmack Hand Tim Sweeney GDC’s Lifetime Achievement Award

GDC 2017: Watch John Carmack Hand Tim Sweeney GDC’s Lifetime Achievement Award

Oculus and Epic Games share a strong and fascinating partnership that’s grown over the past few years. Last night’s Game Developer Choice Awards showed why.

Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney was this year’s recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award, recognizing the work he and his company have done building the Unreal Engine development toolkit over the past two and a half decades, as well as creating blockbuster titles like Unreal Tournament and Gear of War. Handing him the prize was none other than John Carmack, another videogame industry legend and current CTO of Oculus.

“You get a lifetime achievement award for making a lot of great games, or for developing important technologies, or for building a great company that has an impact on the entire industry,” Carmack said after confidently striding onto the stage. “Now, clearly, Tim Sweeney has done all of the above, so this is a really easy call to make here.”

He said that, “by the logic of videogames” the two should be “arch-rivals” that are “destined to do battle in virtual reality with functional weapons.” It’s true; Carmack’s former company, id Software, competed with Epic in the shooter space with its Quake franchise, and both are known for pushing the boundaries of PC gaming. Ultimately, Carmack decided he should instead just “admire the work of an esteemed peer”, adding that there was “a lot to admire over the years”.

Taking the stage, Sweeney said the award “meant a lot” coming from Carmack. In his acceptance speech, he talked about the progress the industry had made, and also the challenges it was facing.

Over the past few years Epic has closely aligned itself with the VR industry, including building its partnership with Oculus. Yesterday the company even released a full Oculus Rift exclusive game, Robo Recall, for free, and Oculus announced its price cut on Epic’s GDC stage. But while they work together, Sweeney has been critical about Oculus’ approach to ecosystem, and its decision to build what he would describe as a walled garden with Oculus Home. Last year, he said the company was treating games from other platforms as “second class citizens“.

Despite being handed the award from an Oculus employee, Sweeney unsurprisingly didn’t stray from that subject in his short speech. “Recently you might have heard me speak up about the dangers of platforms closing down and the walled gardens getting ever increasingly higher walls,” he said. “I think we should all be unafraid to say what we think about these things and fight the good fight together so that all developers in the future have the same opportunities that I had back when I started Epic Games in 1991.”

Carmack and Sweeney have always prided themselves on speaking up inspite of the business dealings of their company, and last night was a great example of that.

Elsewhere are the awards, Owlchemy Labs’ Job Simulator walked away with Best VR/AR Game, and Pokemon GO grabbed Best Mobile Game.

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GDC 2017: Epic’s Tim Sweeney on What Unreal Engine VR Means for Non-gaming Industries

Tim Sweeney Epic Games CEO

VR video games are some of the most immersive, visceral experiences to date. Travelling to fantastic worlds, going brain-to-rotting-noggin’ 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’s primary function in the future.

Enhanced reality devices – especially AR — 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’re on the cusp of a technological evolution, and while games will be driving the early experiences, they won’t be the predominant use for very long.

Of course, all of the various applications, programs and tools will require a base engine for creation, and that’s where Epic Games – and specifically its Unreal Engine – comes in. We had a chance to meet with Epic’s 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.

“VR and augmented reality are going to be the most visually-demanding platforms ever,” says Sweeney. “Unreal Engine was brought up in the days of PCs with big monitors and console games on your television, and we’ve 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’t want world-class, photorealistic, high-detail graphics because it’s hard to see all the little details. You want stylized imagery. But now we’ve gone to these VR platforms and AR, your brain expects you’re going to see realistic objects, and your brain is very sensitive to anything that’s wrong.

“The 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’t cheat, you have to actually do the hard work.

“Creative applications like Oculus Medium, Tilt Brush and Ghost Paint are exposing artistry to computer users that’s much more visceral than ever before. It’s 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’re doing with your hands don’t map very clearly to the actual actions in the world. In VR, it’s 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’s 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.

“Because we’ve now made Unreal Engine ubiquitous — 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 — a variety of companies are downloading it and using it and then talking to us and showing us their projects. They’re doing some amazing things.

“We’re already about two years into that revolution of adoption of Unreal Engine by these industrial companies, and we’re seeing them making real-time engines — and especially Unreal — a much-more pervasive part of their entire production and company pipelines.

“The automotive industries are leading adopters; they’re 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’s just not possible with physical inventory.

“Right 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’re going to be high-fidelity and you’ll be able to preview them in a web browser or in VR and AR. You’ll be able to scale them, scan your room and place them in your environment and see if the couch you’re looking at or the painting looks good before you buy it. And then you’ll be able to customize all of these products, because once you’re 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.

“On the professional side, I’ve been blown away with the amount of progress we’ve 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’s 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’re ready to build them. They’ll experience that with other designers and have product reviews and have multidisciplinary collaboration — it’s going to be awesome!”

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GDC 2017: Epic CEO Tim Sweeney on How we Get to Mass VR and AR Adoption

Tim Sweeney Epic Games

We’re not even one year into the release of the current crop of VR HMDs and mobile headsets, and while sales are in the millions, it’ll still be a while before every household has a VR device or every person walks around the city with AR-equipped glasses. So what will it take for VR and AR to be an omnipresent technology? Price is certainly one important factor, but Epic Games’ founder Tim Sweeney thinks it’ll come down to two things: better optics and smaller form factor.

“To displace monitors and keyboards and mice and become truly the way we do all these things in real life, you’re going to need about 4K resolution per eye,” Sweeney concludes. “And miniaturization that’s much more convenient to wear all day, every day.”

Thankfully, Sweeney doesn’t see these hurdles as issues that will take long to overcome.

“All these things are already happening; Moore’s law alone will get us to 4K per eye,” Sweeney postulates. “There are multiple manufacturers building 4K LCDs that are smartphone-sized, and as soon as they’re miniaturized and built into OLEDs, that’ll be the next step.”

In case you’re not familiar, Moore’s law states the density of transistors a circuit board can hold doubles about every two years, and that means smaller size, greater computing power and reduced weight.

“Reducing the weight is just a matter of componentization,” explains Sweeney. “Remember what computers looked like 20 years ago and what they look like now, and think about everything Apple packs into a tiny iPhone package. If you open it up you’ll see they’ve designed custom circuit boards and custom components that all mesh together in these amazingly compact ways — that’s all coming to VR and AR.”

“I think what we’re seeing in VR is we have not yet even gone through a single cycle in which custom hardware has been built just for the application; we’ve been repurposing cameras and displays and motion sensors from smartphones,” Sweeney continues. “When someone starts designing from the ground up for VR, the results are going to be staggering, not only in the quality and capabilities, but also the ability to be reduced into a more convenient form factor.”

While Sweeney believes the technology will hit great strides in comfort and usability over the next few years, it may be a bit longer until we’re at the point where it’s as ubiquitous as smartphones.

“I think we’re on a 10-to-12-year track until the display part of VR and AR is reduced to the size of your glasses — no more weight, no more inconvenience, something you can wear all the time and make part of your everyday, ordinary life.”

Tim pauses for a second before adding an important and clever clarification, “And if it looks goofy, that’s okay… it’ll Photoshop everyone else’s out in real-time.”

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GDC 2017: Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney Thinks Social Interactions Will ‘Be the Number One Use’ of VR in the Future

GDC 2017: Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney Thinks Social Interactions Will ‘Be the Number One Use’ of VR in the Future

Given that Unreal Engine powers dozens of VR games, experiences and toolsets, it’s no surprise that Epic CEO and Founder Tim Sweeney is excited about the future of the medium. But what does he think will be the killer app for VR?

“I think social interactions are the thing that everybody’s underestimating,” Sweeney affirms. “The applications of VR to mass market social experiences that everybody participates in is going to be the number one use of the technology.”

“We’ve never seen anything like this,” continues Sweeney. “Even if you’re only seeing a low-fidelity approximation of them, you feel like you’re there. We did not have that prior to VR.”

But Sweeney also admits that the technology has to be convincing enough to not be off-putting or grotesque.

“We’ve undergone millions of years of evolution that causes our brains to pick up on very subtle queues on how humans communicate, and keeping digital humans out of the uncanny valley is a big challenge for all game engines, and one we’re investing in heavily.”

The promise of hyper-realistic social experiences that erode distance are both far-reaching and uplifting, and the impact it can have for family members and friends living far apart are life-changing. Seniors who live across the country or perhaps in a completely different hemisphere can spend holidays with relatives. Old friends can participate in emotional reunions. And on-duty military service members don’t have to miss the birth of a child.

However, along with these amazing experiences, Sweeney cautions developers and creators to think about the negative implications that may come along with the technology and design accordingly.

“VR is a completely new medium with the level of realism that’s unprecedented. I think it has immense potential to be used for both good and evil, if we’re going to look at it that way. Game developers are going to have to be very thoughtful about how we approach this, both in our digital work and products we choose to create and also the way we expose social experiences to players. Griefing and harassment are things that are going to feel a lot more real in VR than if you’re just hearing somebody’s voice or they’re just typing text at you. These are real challenges for the whole industry, and we’ve been very thoughtful about that at Epic.”

Sweeney even suggests realistic virtual avatars could end VR harassment.

The transformational and transportational aspects of VR are certainly exciting, and ones that also mean travel times can be reduced from hours or even days to nearly instantaneous.

“It’s teleportation,” Sweeney quips with an enthusiastic smile. “John Carmack said at a certain level of technology, VR is going to be a super power, and he’s totally right.”

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