The battle for the next big thing in virtual reality isn't just raging among headset makers; there's also a battle over the 3D engines that power those experiences. Though most of the leading 3D engine makers offer robust support for burgeoning VR platforms, our anecdotal experience has seen creators leaning heavily toward the Unity engine. In total, 11 out of the 12 demos we tried out at last week's major HTC Vive Pre VR event took that route.

Epic Games, the creators of the popular Unreal Engine, want in on that action. On Wednesday, the company announced an ace up its sleeve: full inside-of-VR support. The feature, which will receive its first public demo during March's Game Developers Conference, will allow any owner of a motion-tracked VR system on a PC (meaning, HTC Vive or Oculus Touch) to warp into their in-development 3D worlds and edit them using nothing more than those systems' handheld controllers.

"As soon as we got our hands on the first Oculus, we were intrigued by the possibilities," Epic Technical Director Mike Fricker said in an interview with Ars. "[Co-founder] Mark Rein came to us in 2013 with the first Oculus DK1 and asked about getting an editor in VR."

But as Epic co-founder Tim Sweeney told us, the idea was a "janky" lark until the team got its hands on the HTC Vive's room-scale wand system. "Those really sealed this as a possibility," he said. Since then, Sweeney has really sipped the VR-editing Kool-Aid: "This is by far the biggest revolution since [Unreal Editor's] early days. Every piece of 3D software we use today will move to VR as quickly as possible. It'll be far more productive and intuitive in that future."

Frickin' lasers

The current Unreal Editor VR implementation revolves largely around moving, arranging, and scaling established assets around a 3D environment. Using either the HTC Vive's wands or the Oculus Touch handheld controllers, developers can either walk and teleport around a project's virtual space and make granular edits or pinch-zoom for a seated, puppeteer-style system of manipulating 3D objects from up high—at which point their hands become laser pointers to grab objects more quickly.

"The tools we create will be useful for any game, even 2D games," Fricker said. "The ability in VR to move things 1:1 in space just makes you more efficient. Especially when it comes to repeating that action 1,000 times a day to lay out a level. We think this tool will help any developer create content."

In addition, the company promises an "iPad-like" system that brings up the Unreal Engine's current text elements so that users don't have to pull off their headsets for many basic commands. Epic's proof-of-concept video showed floating menus that allowed a user to scroll and point at the Unreal Engine's menus with their hands—and use a free hand to immediately grab items from the menus to place them in the virtual world. Epic told us that particular portion is still being tinkered with before the VR editor's public debut next month. (Update: Text updated to reflect a last-minute video update sent to Ars by Epic.)

Sweeney and Fricker are convinced that their current Unreal Editor VR implementation will eventually expand to include a full UI system that alleviates any need for a keyboard or mouse, but that will require more experimentation in the meantime.

"The 2D UI adapting to 3D space is probably the most challenging part of this project," Fricker said. "We have a start, of presenting editor panels as floating UI iPads. What's the next thing you want? Maybe to drop the iPad somewhere, resize it, attach it to the wall of your Vive tracking space and configure a static layout like that, so when you navigate a scene, it comes with you."

We'll be interested to see exactly how the experience feels when the company shows off Unreal Engine VR on March 16 in San Francisco. "Having used this, I never want to go back to an old-school monitor," Sweeney said. "In fact, I wish Microsoft would adopt this for Windows so I could use the desktop this way, too."