VR is the stepping stone

I stand under a weathered stone archway, antlike in its looming presence. Through the archway I see a stone effigy to a bulbous, grey robot, its Popeye arms held akimbo as if in mid-stride. I turn my head to the left and see a stone edifice crumbling under a bright, blue sky mottled with cotton-ball clouds.

Beneath me I see the massive slabs of stone that make up the entrance, cobbles so big they could be used to form the sides of a house.

It’s not that the setting is big. It’s that I’m tiny, about the size of an insect.

I click an invisible button and a pair of stubby batons appears floating in front of me. With a quick adjustment, I grow to the size of a human and then flick open a menu on the top of one of the controllers. Pointing the second controller at it, I scroll through a selection of weathered stone columns and then select one with a click.

Outside of the VR experience, but still inside virtual reality, I spend 30 minutes fussing with the location: using the controllers to Spider-Man my way around the scene, shrink, rotate, enlarge, add and delete objects. The world is taking shape around me as I build it.

“Mark Rein was always on my ass. 'Dude, you gotta get that into VR!'”

Finally, running out of time with this build of Epic’s Unreal Engine VR editor, I slip the HTC Vive mask from my face and blink in the dull light of an overcast day which falls through the nearby office window.

Building virtual reality inside virtual reality is less like visiting the chimerical spaces of Inception and a bit more like being at the center of your own little universe, literally.

The experience, on the surface, feels much more like playing than it does working.

I point this out to Mike Fricker, the technical director on the Unreal Engine team, and he agrees.

“We set out to build fun and intuitive VR world-building tools,” Fricker says. “That’s an unintended benefit.”

The decision to design a way for people making VR games to stay in VR while making them was born as a way to help the Bullet Train team on its work in that VR shooter, Fricker says.

But the concept and the desire for the VR in the VR editor has been floating around inside Epic ever since the first VR headset made an appearance at the company. That traces the original process of moving the engine into VR back about two years.

“Mark Rein was always on my ass,” Fricker says. “'Dude, you gotta get that into VR!’ He was like asking for it maybe three or four years ago, but it was two years ago that we started doing some prototypes where we realized that the engine can handle it.”

Epic designed the Unreal Engine to be a desktop application, not to function in a 3D world, so that was an open question. Once they knew it could be done, the team kicked off work on the real thing in early 2015.

Bullet Train

A lot of the work was easier than the team expected it to be, but it still had to solve problems unusual for an editor. Like, how do you move around inside what you’re building? They landed on something that feels a bit like Spider-Man but has you grabbing the world and pulling it past you.

While the tool to drop into VR to create VR wasn’t released to the public until Epic’s GDC keynote last month, the team working on Epic’s flagship virtual reality demo has been building with the tool as long as it’s been around.

Bullet Train started out as an exploration of virtual reality. Tommy Jacob, lead producer on the game, says Epic knew it wanted to do something in VR and that it wanted to do a shooter both because of the genre’s popularity and Epic’s experience.

The game started as a city street with a table resting in the middle of the road. The table is loaded up with guns, and players can pick any of them up and shoot them.

“The focus from the very start was to make holding a gun in your hand feel extremely visceral, extremely comfortable and to build on that mechanic,” Jacob says. “We thought about how we could make shooting a gun more fun, more exciting for the player. That's when we started experimenting with the notion of bullet time and slow motion, catching bullets and throwing them back and things like that.”

But a VR shooting gallery isn’t where Bullet Train ended up. Instead it became a slick sci-fi shooter inside a train station. One that allows you to teleport around the station, grabbing guns, punching bad guys and shooting lots of guns. You can also slow time to grab bullets, snatch rockets out of the air or even deliver Oldboy-like melee combos that leave a pile of enemies in your wake.

“This was something that we knew that this could really take off, and we still feel that way. It could really happen this year.”

Epic’s shift to 4.0 also has a lot to do with Bullet Train’s existence.

“Around that time we realized we needed a VR team to make a first-class thing at Epic,” Jacob says. “We just went all in on it, like this was something that we knew that this could really take off, and we still feel that way. It could really happen this year.”

What’s strange is that Bullet Train remains a demo only with no plans to turn it into a title. It was useful in helping the engine team work out the kinks of developing a game in VR, but that seems to be the end of its usefulness.

Even that day, sitting across from me in a meeting room, Jacob says that they continue to polish the game, improve on it. But Epic has no plans for it beyond a demo.

That would sound unbelievable if it weren’t for the fact that this is actually Epic’s third VR demo. The others, which include being the titular hobbit in a scene with Smaug, the dragon from The Hobbit, aren’t just demos. They’re rarely, if ever, shown anymore. They were, in essence, a way to test some ideas and then packed away once they served their purpose.

While Epic doesn’t have a VR game to announce or release, that doesn’t mean the company doesn’t value what VR could mean for the game industry. Jacob says there are two sides to how virtual reality fits into what Epic is doing.

“There's the engine side where we feel very passionate about ensuring people that are using our engine have access to the best tools to work in VR,” he says. “That's a no-brainer. The other side is game development, with what we've seen in VR in the past year, particularly internally, because we're all very excited about what we've been able to achieve in Bullet Train.

Minecraft

“I think there's an obvious argument for the game side of Epic to embrace the VR and build something. What that is, I don't know. It's going to depend on what we think is important for Epic games moving forward. I don't think Epic has a game future that doesn't include VR.”

Throughout interviews with the people playing in and building in virtual reality, there always comes a time when they say to ask Sweeney what he thinks.

Unreal Engine VR editor as a Minecraft-like game? Ask Tim.

Bullet Train as a game? Ask Tim.

The future of VR inside Epic? Ask Tim.

Finally, I did.

“I think Minecraft is going to be the ultimate direction of VR, creating experiences that you can not only play as a participant but also contribute to,” Sweeney says. “That's exactly what our goals would be and our engine is all about. Right now it's being manifested through building our VR games, but the next step is to go much wider with this sort of thing. Not only building content but code and live objects that have accurate behavior in the world. That's all going to play out with VR in the next decade.”

And, Sweeney says, eventually Epic will likely build a VR game. Just look at its iterative process, he says. The team has been building bigger, better, more interactive demos. Each time those demos feel more like a game and less like an experience.

“I think Minecraft is going to be the ultimate direction of VR.”

“VR is a platform that is being nurtured right now,” he says, “that we expect will be central to the entire game industry, and we’ll contribute to it. So it’s fundamental to our future, and we’re putting an enormous effort into figuring it out as best as we can in our engine.”

Part of that process includes constantly iterating on the VR editing tool, something that is meant to increasingly democratize the game-making process.

“Right now the Unreal editor is still a true tool for professional content designers, but that's going to open up really quickly,” Sweeney says. “Minecraft has this funny attribute to it — the set of building blocks are so limited, an absolute expert creator's work isn't dramatically better than casual users’ work. That's not the case with Photoshop or 3D Studio, or the Unreal Engine. With these tools, if you have an expert come in, their work is orders of magnitude better than an amateur. So a huge initiative for us is to lower the gap in expertise that's required.”

That means creating smart objects, defining and building templates for things like a castle or a farmhouse, and setting up rules for those things.

“Then you, as casual content creator, you should be able to go and stretch the walls out and say there should be a turret here and a rampart there, and design the castle without having to model it polygon by polygon or draw the individual pixels of it.

“With that kind of approach, you have a great deal of specialization where pros can create object libraries that are modifiable and extensible and parametric, and then individuals can use them to build excellent real-world objects.”

“In 10 years we won't be sitting in front of monitors or smartphones or using keyboards or mice at all, but we'll be wearing something literally with the convenience and form factor of your Oakley sunglasses.”

Sweeney envisions a world where someone could make that castle template and someone else could pay the designer real money to use it in their own little slice of the “metaverse.”

“Then maybe you'd go and buy some furniture or build your own,” he says. “We're not talking about Epic running this business but about everybody in the world being able to collaborate to build things. Free experiences, commercial experiences, whatever, all the way from the Minecraft use case today to the professional game developers building professional games.”

Virtual reality is a big deal to Sweeney and to Epic, both because of the potential uses it drives with the engine and the potential games that can be created.

“I think it's a stepping stone to the future of the industry,” Sweeney says. “I believe we're in this long-term transition to augmented reality, that in 10 years we won't be sitting in front of monitors or smartphones or using keyboards or mice at all, but we'll be wearing something literally with the convenience and form factor of your Oakley sunglasses and that will have 8K displays per eye and it will be your window into both the real world and virtual world.

“That way everything from gaming to computing to professional work is all going to be completely rethought. VR is the stepping stone to that. Right now we're putting on this really big helmet and there's a bunch of really big cables that run to a computer. That's the starting point but, as with the smartphone evolution, the end point is pervasive technology that's in the hands of billions of people.”

Next: Making movies in Unreal.