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Background
Saku Panditharatne
Founder
Formerly VR investing & data science @ a16z deal team
BA from Cambridge in Maths & CS
Internships Oculus, other startups
Why build a 'game engine
for programmers'?
Computer graphics is set explode in importance
Game engines may be able to capture a lot of the value that comes from
these new visual computing platforms
AR headsets (Hololens)
VR gaming (Oculus)
Simulation for autonomy & machine learning (e.g. drones, delivery robots)
3D -> VR might be like the switch from 2D->3D games. It was 10 years from
the first hit (Wolfenstein) to the mainstream console (PS2)
The importance of simulation
to augmented reality
Convergence in hardware: Hololens will have an AI co-processor chip
Important to both are: object recognition & computer vision, sensor input and
accurate physical simulation
Most of the code in game engines is about handling and processing content
(3D models, textures, animations) allowing designers to organize it into a
video game
The other important function of game engines is compiling the game for
multiple platforms
What do game engines
do?
Looking at Unreal Engines features
Yellow = extensions
This will change: AR developers likely to be less content driven than game
studios, with more solo app developers
Current game engines
Mostly spin-os of game studios - exception is Unity
Tools are aimed at the specific case of organizing 3D content into a video
game
Not much open source - instead of a package manager Unity has an asset
store
(from Hololens)
The AR/VR Ecosystem
The split of value between core chips, industrial design, and software: the PC
industry was 45%, 10% 45%, smartphone industry is 30%, 35%, 35%
For both VR and AR, it seems that 3rd party software - games and apps -
will be more important than it was for smartphones. The iPhone was
already very useful without the app store.
Unlike during the console wars, computer graphics is already a mature field,
so app & game developers are less likely to compete on graphics
Most promising: a package manager & open source ecosystem around the
game engine (current game engines dont have this because open source is
rare in the entertainment industry)
Cloud services for apps & games (e.g. with AR, spatial co-ordination
between dierent apps - you place a object at a certain latitude and
longitude)
3D content
Always been a hugely expensive part of game development and a barrier for
indie developers
Royalty-based business model SaaS business model for Marketplace model for 3D models
for VR/AR apps created with Asteroid cloud services for VR & AR apps bought on the Asteroid store
Why build a 'game engine
for programmers'?
Computer graphics is set explode in importance
Game engines may be able to capture a lot of the value that comes from
these new visual computing platforms
The game engine is closed source, but with a flexible API for add-ons
By the end of 2017: expand to mobile AR, creating experiences for ARKit or
ARCore
Next year: expand to VR, adding more complex features relevant to high-
quality game development (e.g. asset pipeline)
Launch version with the complex features needed for VR development - June
2018
By using Apples SceneKit for rendering, code can be reused for ARKit
Expanding to other operating systems comes later - most game engines are
designed with Windows in mind, which may not be the platform for AR & VR
Specific extra features for
simulation & mobile AR
Accurate physics engine and representation of robotics (can rely on open
source engine Bullet)
Process camera input (e.g. filters) and sensor and peripheral input
Interaction between AR and the real world (e.g. using SLAM and accurate
physics, rendering)
Headsets and beyond
VR requires expensive, in-depth experiences
AR will likely borrow from tools & design principles developed for VR
In-VR editors have not proved popular, mostly because need complex
interfaces do not translate well to VR
Most VR headsets now just have a Unity plugin, rather than a toolkit of their
own