Meta is transitioning its support from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5.1 for apps built for the Quest platform. Two of the engine’s headlining features aren’t designed for mobile though, so it’s doubtful we we’ll ever see them on Quest.
In a dev blog post announcing the news, Meta says developers who choose to work with Epic’s game engine should start thinking about using UE5 for their Quest apps. The company isn’t advising devs to upgrade to UE5 if in the middle of a project though; apps based on UE4 can still be distributed to the Meta Quest Store or App Lab.
Still, the clock is ticking. Meta will support critical bug fixes for UE4 until the end of 2023, although devs can access UE4 resources and documentation on Meta’s GitHub repository even after the support is scaled back.
As you’d imagine, Meta says the original 2019 Quest won’t be supported—it’s unceremoniously getting pushed off into the sea—however the company is slated to provide separate binaries for each device soon, which will allow developers targeting Quest 1 an upgrade path. Notably, OpenXR is the only VR API supported by Meta in UE5.
No Nanite or Lumen
Unfortunately, two of the biggest features of Epic’s latest and greatest aren’t coming to the company’s standalone headsets. Released in April 2022, UE5 packs in two new tools called Nanite and Lumen.
Nanite is a virtualized geometry system which uses a new internal mesh format and rendering technology to render pixel scale detail and high object counts.
It essentially works like a continuous Level of Detail (LOD) system that draws detail from the original ‘master’ 3D model. In its developer documentation, Epic Games says Nanite can increase an app’s geometry complexity, higher triangle and objects counts by “multiple orders of magnitude.”
Here’s a look at what Nanite can do for VR games, courtesy of YouTube channel ‘Smart Poly’:
Lumen, the engine’s new dynamic global lighting system, also makes virtual environments look better, as it can use both software and hardware ray tracing for more realistic lighting.
And why not on Quest 2 or Quest Pro? Nanite and Lumen simply aren’t built to work on mobile processors, and don’t support Android at all.
Nanite is currently supported on a host of devices, including PS5, Xbox Series S|X, and PCs with even the most-humble of Maxwell-generation graphics cards. PS4 and Xbox One also support Nanite, albeit experimentally.
Lumen on the other hand is developed for PS5 and Xbox Series S|X, and high-end PCs. Software ray tracing can be done on NVIDIA GeForce GTX-1070 or higher cards, while hardware ray tracing must be on NVIDIA RTX-2000 series or higher, or AMD RX-6000 series or higher. Not even PS4 or Xbox One.
Moreover, Epic says in Lumen’s documentation that there are “no plans to develop a dynamic global illumination system for the mobile renderer. Games using dynamic lighting need to use unshadowed Sky Light on mobile.”
Without direct support from Epic, Meta has little other choice. Granted, many VR creators opt to develop in Unity thanks to its relative simplicity for smaller teams and greater overall market share, meaning more assets and general know-how to go around.
It’s fair to say, it’s uncharted waters. There is literally no guide as to how to do it. It’s been a journey of discovery, and to be honest, we are still learning. Our hope is that others will see what’s possible with this engine and on this platform and understand that it is more than possible to build experiences that are absolutely best-in-class. We don’t want to rely on the qualifier of being “good for a VR game” at all, we just want to make great games in VR. We’ve never been good at accepting that this or that is not possible in VR.
Detailing how Firewall Ultra benefits from Unreal Engine 5 specifically, First Contact cites the focus on real-time lighting and claims UE5 is a good fit for live-service games, stating how “future-proofing our engine choice was an important factor.” Calling lighting a major focus for Ultra across this interview, the team explains why this is important for Ultra’s gameplay:
We don’t consider this merely dressing. When your goal is to create as immersive an experience as possible, the closer we can get to people’s real world experience of light and dark, the richer the experience becomes.
Beyond Unreal Engine 5, First Contact discusses the benefits PSVR 2 brings, clarifying why additional peripherals like the PSVR Aim Controller aren’t required, HDR support, and touching on previously announced features like eye-tracking. 60fps gameplay was confirmed, meaning Ultra will use reprojection to hit 120hz similar to Horizon Call of the Mountain and Gran Turismo 7.
Firewall Ultra arrives later this year exclusively on PSVR 2.
An incredible new demo for Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5 gives us a peek of what photorealistic VR could one day look like.
The footage was shot by indie developer Lorenzo Drago, and features a scene based on Etchū-Daimon Station train station in Toyama, Japan. Take a look for yourself below – you won’t be disappointed.
Between the high resolution assets and shimmering lighting it’s often hard to tell the scene apart from real life.
The demo uses Unreal Engine 5’s Lumen lighting tech to create a stunningly realistic scene that also plays into some horror elements. On his art station page, meanwhile, Drago revealed that the video was shot using “real-time VR tracking to emulate a handheld camera and flashlight.” Note that this doesn’t necessarily mean the experience was running fully in VR with all the demands that would place; the developer could have simply been using a Vive Tracker or similar method to record the clip.
Unreal Engine 5 does feature full support for VR headsets, though, and was recently released to studios to start testing. But it’ll likely still be a few years before big-budget, AAA flatscreen games using the engine start to ship, let alone VR titles.
Of course, we’re a long way off of virtual worlds regularly looking this good. Running UE5 apps at their highest settings is going to be a performance-intensive process, and adding in VR support on top of that will only increase the strain. Not to mention it will take even bigger budgets to develop rich games and apps at this level of fidelity. But this is certainly an interesting glimpse into the kind of quality we could be seeing out of at least PC VR apps within the coming years.
Epic Games announced it’s doubled the amount of cash it raised last year to kick off its metaverse ambitions. Now the company, which owns Unreal Engine and popular battle royale shooter Fornite, says it’s secured $2 billion to further build out its future metaverse platforms.
Nearly a year after its stunning $1 billion raise, Epic has secured dual $1 billion investments from Sony Group Corporation and KIRKBI, the holding and investment company behind The LEGO Group.
Sony has become somewhat of a serial investor in Epic. In 2020 Sony invested $250 million in Epic with the goal of creating “real-time 3D social experiences leading to a convergence of gaming, film, and music. That’s before the ‘metaverse’ buzzword erupted, but it’s clear where Sony was headed.
Now KIRKBI, the private holding and investment company founded by former president and CEO of The LEGO Group, Kirk Kristiansen, is looking to jump into the rapidly expanding metaverse trend.
“Epic Games is known for building playful and creative experiences and empowering creators large and small,” said Søren Thorup Sørensen, CEO, KIRKBI. “A proportion of our investments is focused on trends we believe will impact the future world that we and our children will live in. This investment will accelerate our engagement in the world of digital play, and we are pleased to be investing in Epic Games to support their continued growth journey, with a long-term focus toward the future metaverse.”
Tim Sweeney, CEO and founder of Epic, says the investment will “accelerate our work to build the metaverse and create spaces where players can have fun with friends, brands can build creative and immersive experiences and creators can build a community and thrive.”
Epic says it will continue to have a single class of common stock, and remains controlled by its CEO and founder, Tim Sweeney. This brings Epic’s post-money equity valuation to $31.5 billion.
This week Epic Games released the latest version of its next-gen game engine, Unreal Engine 5. Though the new version brings improvements in many areas, its most notable features are Lumen (global illumination) and Nanite (micro-polygon geometry), which could be game-changers for VR immersion. Unfortunately the company says neither feature is ready for VR developers.
Available as of this week for all developers, Unreal Engine 5 promises to usher in a new era of game development which makes it easier for developers to create games with extremely high quality assets and realistic lighting. That’s thanks to the engine’s two new key features, Nanite and Lumen.
Nanite
Nanite is what Epic calls a “virtualized geometry” system which radically improves the geometric detail in game scenes.
A rea-time scene rendered using Nanite | Image courtesy Epic Games
Previously developers would create high quality 3D models as a sort of ‘master’ reference which would eventually have their geometry greatly simplified (leading to a reduction detail and complexity) before being pulled into the game engine. The same model generally gets several versions with increasingly reduced detail which ‘pop’ between each other depending upon how far the game camera is away from the model (known as ‘level of detail’ or ‘LOD’). This allows the game to show higher quality up close while using the reduced quality models when they are further away to save performance.
Nanite essentially functions like a continuous LOD system that draws detail from the original ‘master’ model, instead of relying on pre-built models with reduced detail. In each frame the system references the master model and pulls out the maximum level of detail needed for the given camera distance. Not only does this eliminate the need to create discrete LOD models, it also means that the range of detail for a model can be much greater, allowing players to see incredibly fine detail—right down to the original polygons of the ‘master’ model—if they get close enough.
Lumen
Meanwhile, Unreal Engine 5’s new lighting system, Lumen, greatly simplifies game lighting thanks to global illumination.
Real-time lighting rendered with Lumen and Nanite | Image courtesy Epic Games
Realistic lighting can be very computationally expensive; without Lumen, many games use a combination of lighting techniques to achieve the look they want while maintaining game performance. A given scene might use pre-calculated ‘baked’ lighting (which isn’t interactive with the rest of the scene) along with a small number of real-time light-sources that cast shadows on certain objects in the scene, and various ‘screen-space’ effects to emulate realistic lighting.
Lumen unifies lighting into a single approach called global illumination, which aims to make every light in the scene—even the Sun—into a real-time light that is interactive with other lights and the rest of the scene. This includes realistic bounced light which spreads color throughout the scene based on the color of the objects that the light hits. For instance, white sunlight shining into a white room with a red floor will cast some red light onto the walls as it bounces from the red floor. Such bounced lighting is an essential component of photo-real lighting.
Both Nanite and Lumen could massively improve immersion in VR thanks to their ability to hugely increase geometric detail in nearby objects (which is especially noticeable with the stereoscopic capability of VR headsets) and to create more realistic and interactive real-time lighting.
“No Timeframe” for Nanite or Lumen in VR
Unfortunately Epic says that neither Nanite nor Lumen in UE5 are ready for VR yet.
“While we have no timeframe to share in terms of Lumen and Nanite support for VR experiences, we are exploring how to bring those UE5 features to additional platforms,” the company tells Road to VR.
But, Epic says, that doesn’t mean VR developers shouldn’t use UE5.
“VR developers can leverage most of Unreal Engine 5’s production-ready tools and features, such as the new UI, the new suite of modeling tools, creator tools such as Control Rig, MetaSounds, and World Partition for large open environments.”
What’s the Holdup?
Though both Nanite and Lumen are capable of creating incredible looking scenes, they aren’t ‘free’ from a performance standpoint.
“Although the advantages [of Nanite] can be game-changing, there are practical limits that still remain. For example, instance counts, triangles per mesh, material complexity, output resolution, and performance should be carefully measured for any combination of content and hardware,” the company warns developers. “Nanite will continue to expand its capabilities and improve performance in future releases of Unreal Engine.”
Lumen, meanwhile, is only designed to target 60 FPS for large outdoor scenes and 30 FPS for indoor scenes on the very latest console hardware. That’s a far cry from the 90 FPS minimum for most PC VR headsets. And with Quest 2 being significantly less powerful than the latest consoles, there’s just no way it’ll be able to handle those kinds of demands. Which may mean that the ultimate limitation in bringing these features to VR is simply performance (or lack thereof).
The same scene rendered for a flat screen compared to being rendered for VR is often less performant in VR due to the need for stereoscopic rendering (and usually higher resolutions). Tricks like single-pass stereo and foveated rendering help reduce this overhead, but may not yet work in conjunction with the likes of Nanite and Lumen.
So it may be matter of optimization and more powerful hardware before it’s practical to bring these features to VR experiences. From Epic’s perspective, Unreal Engine has just a small fraction of VR developers compared to the likes of the Unity engine, on which the vast majority of VR games today are built. Especially with the trajectory of Meta’s Quest 2 as the most popular target platform for developers (and its lack of power compared to consoles and PCs), it seems likely that optimizing Nanite and Lumen for VR is very low on Epic’s priority list.
Hopefully we’ll see these next-gen engine features in VR eventually, but it might not happen for some time yet.
During its State of Unreal presentation this week, Epic Games confirmed that there are PSVR 2 titles in development using Unreal Engine 5.
Back in May 2020, Epic Games unveiled the next generation of its engine, Unreal Engine 5, which promised big graphical and technical leaps. That demo focused particularly on two big new technologies — Nanite (a geometry technology that lets artists create highly intricate details on objects and surfaces) and Lumen (a dynamic global illumination system for realistic lighting).
Announced in yesterday’s presentation, Unreal Engine 5 is now available to all developers. At around the 26-minute mark in the video embedded below, Dana Cowley, Communications Director, Technology at Epic Games, spoke in front of a large graphic featuring many game studio logos. She then said that Epic was “thrilled to confirm that all of the amazing studios that you see here are a part of the Unreal Engine 5 community, which continues to grow every day.”
Interestingly, the PlayStation VR2 logo was displayed in the top right, even though it’s a piece of hardware and not a game studio itself. That being said, the intent is clear — there are studios who are developing PSVR 2 games using Unreal Engine 5.
2021 was a stand out year for XR. Both virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) saw some technological leaps, some great videogames and a glimpse of the future. Both technologies are shaking up several industries while laying the foundations for the metaverse. To celebrate the year, we’ve chosen some of our highlights as we look forward to what 2022 might bring.
After the Fall
Probably the biggest VR launch of 2021, After the Fall brings zombie-slaying back and makes it more fun than ever. With co-op modes, cross-platform play and constant action, it’s a title that feels perfectly at home in VR. The game is gorgeous – aside from the grisly zombies – and playing on high-end hardware ensures a smooth experience. The intuitive controls allow for a great experience, and while there are some minor flaws, After the Fall is set to be one of the biggest and best VR games in recent years.
Resident Evil 4
The best Resident Evil game finally has a VR option! Armature brought everything that made the game such a standout success and revolutionised it with plenty of accessible VR additions. We loved the new interactive features; cocking and reloading the weapons, the malleable storage system, pulling grenade pins, all of these bring the action to life like never before. While it’s not the prettiest game, thanks to the browns and beiges of the original game, it’s still a great spectacle to behold.
Ragnarock
VR often brings out the best in rhythm games, mostly due to the accelerometers embedded in the controllers. It gives a sense of interactivity that button presses can’t achieve. In Ragnarock, thumping away on the drums feels invigorating and refreshing. It helps that this Viking environment is backed by a soundtrack of rock and metal. Energising your boat of rowers, you bash out rhythms and melodies on small drums in the hopes of scoring well. Even when you don’t, it doesn’t feel like a chore replaying songs, because who doesn’t love bashing drums and creating a foot-tapping moment of bliss?
Pikmin Bloom
Niantic Labs’ games always want us to go outside. They’re urging us to put down the mouse or controller and interact with life outside our four walls. Pikmin Bloom is its latest attempt to get us exercising and interacting with the natural world. It’s more about walking than Pokemon Go, as there’s very little need to stand around. Players must find seeds that hatch into cute Pikmin then nurture the relationship by walking, with the app counting steps. It’s a very sedate experience, it’s one that teams up with the nature around us offering a peaceful escape from our world.
The Climb 2
If there’s a better looking videogame in VR, we haven’t seen it. And we’ve played a lot of games! The Climb 2 is a stunning view, whether climbing snow-capped mountains or high rise skyscrapers. Stopping every few minutes to appreciate the scenery is a joy, and that’s no surprise given the game is running on the Crytek CryEngine. Perhaps better than the view is the feeling of adrenaline when climbing, leaping and saving yourself from a deathly fall. The game gives a light workout to your arms, but it’s entirely welcome. The dynamic objects which could spell disaster at any second keep your heart in your mouth and your fingertips gripping on for dear life. The Climb 2 sounds sedate on paper, but in (virtual) reality it’s a nerve-shredding experience!
VR/AR Concerts
Sadly, in 2021 the global COVID-19 pandemic is still a thing. This means that artists, musicians and film studios are looking for new ways to interact with fans. VR and AR experiences are a booming business and a guaranteed path to extra revenue in a world where concerts are being cancelled or moved from date to date. Through VR apps like Oculus Venues and MelodyVR, you can still attend the gigs of your favourite stars. Megastars Billie Eilish, Lewis Capaldi and Khalid are leading the way, and the adoption of low-cost headsets will make these experiences even more common in a post-pandemic world.
Wizards Unite is Closing
Sometimes you can have too many eggs in a basket. Niantic Labs has seen massive success with their headline game Pokemon Go and their latest release, Pikmin Bloom. This has perhaps overshadowed Harry Potter Wizards Unite; it certainly didn’t help that players didn’t shift from pocket monsters to waving magic wands. Wizards Unite just wasn’t sustaining itself, making $39.4 million in lifetime revenue compared to the $1.1 billion from Pokemon Go in 2021 alone. Sometimes a smash hit brand just isn’t enough.
Haptic Feedback
As VR technology evolves, so too does the need and want for more haptic feedback. We’re beyond rumbling controllers and racing seats that thud and jerk along with a game. Companies like HaptX, Meta and Tesla are all investing heavily into technology that will encompass our entire bodies; gloves that mimic the pressure and weight of physical objects when in a digital world; bodysuits which can react to impacts or environmental changes in a metaverse space. Each of these companies showcased their tech in 2021 to the astonishment of pretty much everyone, for better or for worse.
Facebook rebrand
If you somehow missed Facebook rebranding to Meta, you must have been living under a rock! Mark Zuckerberg shook up the tech world by announcing his company Facebook would now be known as Meta. Why? Because he envisions the future of the internet as the metaverse, a term first coined in the novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. This future, according to Zuckerberg, will be an extension of our physical selves into the digital landscape of web 3.0, through VR and AR technology. Meta wants to help usher in this technological revolution using its power, influence and money to research and launch new hardware and software which will take us into the next evolution of the internet.
Metaverse
The metaverse is here! Well, kind of. The latter half of 2021 has been awash with talk around a metaverse. What was once a concept that few people acknowledged has now become a buzzword that even your grandmother knows (Thanks Facebook… oh, Meta). Whatever your thoughts on the metaverse, it’s coming up fast. In fact, to some, it’s already here. If you’re playing Fortnite or Roblox then you’re already on the first rung of the ladder, and projects such as Somnium Space, Decentraland and The Sandbox are waiting for you to jump in. This ownership driven, decentralised digital space is an important change to the way we use the internet. Are you ready?
Unreal Engine 5
2021 finally saw the release of Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5, bringing a dearth of powerful development tools to the industry. With so many developers utilising Unreal Engine to create their projects, this new iteration gives us a glimpse of what’s to come over the next decade. Launching with an interactive ‘“experience” collaborating with The Matrix Awakens, players and creators have seen the potential and it’s revolutionary. The level of detail and fidelity UE5 will bring is likely to change the landscape of games, from battle royales to VR puzzlers.
Sony’s 8K headset
As reported by our very own Peter Graham, Sony unveiled a prototype VR headset with not only 8K visuals (4K per eye) but also ultra-low latency. This bodes well for the company’s future, given they are soon releasing an upgraded VR headset for the PlayStation brand. Will we see this fidelity over there? It’s unlikely, but the new technology could make waves in industrial and medical avenues. This jump in technology bodes well for the future of Virtual Reality.
Niantic Lightship
If you’re an AR developer, then 2021 was a good year. Niantic Labs, the company behind pretty much every hugely successful AR mobile game, released their ARDK tools for developers to use. What does this mean? Well, it means that the software they use for their titles, including mesh mapping and semantic wrapping, two features that track and map the world seen through a smartphone camera, as well as their multiplayer API, can be utilised by any development team. This sharing of technologies can only benefit the AR community as a whole and further achieve great things in the world of AR.
AR/VR in medicine
Many see Augmented and Virtual Reality as something built for games and experiences. Contrary to that view, both AR and VR are breaking down barriers in the world of medicine. Therapists are using VR to virtually visit their clients or help PTSD sufferers acclimate to the world. AR helped frontline workers learn how to care for those ill with COVID, using phone apps to triage patients when needed. Back in the virtual world, surgeons are completing spinal surgeries and trainee medical students are learning how to intubate patients using the technology rather than plastic dummies.
Digital Influencers
In 2021, the world of influencers got a bit more digital and a bit more creative. Since the advent of social media, influencers have become ubiquitous with the software – a selection of people touting products for corporations. However, with graphical software innovations, virtual and augmented reality, plus motion capture, we can now find digital avatars living the influencer life. Though right now, they aren’t trying to sell us anything, except maybe their art. CB from Casas Bahias, CodeMiko and Blu are amazing CGI avatars living digital lives, creating comedy, drama or interactive experiences.
A year ago Epic Games unveiled the first details for Unreal Engine 5, its hugely popular videogame development engine. This week the company has announced the launch of Unreal Engine 5 Early Access for studios to begin playing with the new features, these include continued virtual reality (VR) support utilising the OpenXR framework.
While the announcement concentrates on the amazing fidelity videogames developers will be able to bring to future titles thanks to virtualized micropolygon system Nanite and its global illumination solution Lumen, tucked away in the release notes were some VR specific additions.
The Unreal Engine team has created a new VRTemplate utilising the OpenXR framework as a nice launch point for VR development. “The template is designed to be a starting point for all your VR projects. It includes encapsulated logic for teleport locomotion and common input actions, such as grabbing and attaching items to your hand,” says the release notes. So much so that Epic Games recommends that developers: “create your VR project using the VRTemplate in UE5, because the project settings and plugins are already configured for the best VR experience.”
Unfortunately, if you do create a VR project whilst Unreal Engine 5 is in Early Access then you won’t be able to use features like Lumen because its not supported at the moment. Hopefully, that’ll change in the future so VR titles will look as good as those sample screenshots. In any case, Early Access shouldn’t be used to build entire projects because UE5 is still in development, likely to officially release in early 2022.
Thanks to VRTemplate supporting the OpenXR standard, it should be easy for developers to bring their titles to various VR headsets. VRTemplate currently supports the following devices:
Oculus Quest 1 and 2
Oculus Quest with Oculus Link
Oculus Rift S
Valve Index
HTC Vive
Windows Mixed Reality
In addition to VR, Unreal Engine 5 will continue its support of augmented reality (AR), from hardware such as Magic Leap to ARKit and ARCore SDK’s.
As further features and improvements are rolled out for Unreal Engine 5 during Early Access, VRFocus will keep you updated.
Epic Games today announced that Unreal Engine 5 is now available in early access, including a new template for VR projects built on OpenXR 1.0, the industry-backed standard for building device-agnostic VR and AR applications.
Epic Games is bringing heaps of new features and improvements to the latest version of its game engine, Unreal Engine 5. While some of the biggest features—like the Lumen lighting system and Nanite mesh system—don’t yet support VR, today’s early access release of UE5 includes a rebuilt VR template built on OpenXR.
The VR template in Unreal Engine 5 is designed as an ideal starting point for VR projects. It has basic and extensible functionality for VR locomotion and object interactions built right in.
And because it’s built on OpenXR, developers shouldn’t need to worry about as much headset-specific configuration if they’re aiming to support multiple headsets. The system also supports OpenXR extensions for adding vendor-specific functionality.
The template configures Unreal Engine 5 with settings specific to VR, like automatically disabling the Lumen feature (because it isn’t yet supported for VR headsets).
Epic says it’s “highly recommended to create your VR project using the VRTemplate in UE5,” and notes that the OpenXR VR template supports the following VR platforms:
Oculus Quest 1 and 2
Oculus Quest with Oculus Link
Oculus Rift S
Valve Index
HTC Vive
Windows Mixed Reality
Epic says that the early access version of Unreal Engine 5 isn’t yet suitable for production, but developers looking to experiment can download it today through the Epic Games launcher and can even get access to the UE5 source code on GitHub. The full production ready version of Unreal Engine 5 is expected to release in early 2022 with additional features and improvements.
