VRguy podcast Episode 24: Nick Whiting, Technical Director of VR/AR at Epic Games - The VRguy's podcast
Summary: My guest today is Nick Whiting, Technical Director of VR and AR at Epic Games. This episode was recorded on Aug 16th, 2017.<br> Nick and I talk about Robo Recall, the unique challenges of VR and AR for game engines, what Epic learned from enterprise customers and much more.<br> <br> <a title="Subscribe on Android" href="http://www.subscribeonandroid.com/sensics.com/feed/podcast" target="_blank" rel="noopener"></a><br> <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-vrguys-podcast/id1071083566" target="_blank" rel="attachment wp-att-25553 noopener"></a><br> <a href="http://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=80685&refid=stpr" target="_blank" rel="noopener"></a><br> <br> <br> Yuval Boger (VRguy): Hello Nick, and welcome to the program.<br> Nick Whiting: Thanks for having me.<br> VRguy: Who are you and what do you do?<br> Nick: My name is Nick Whiting, and I’m the technical director of AR, VR, and XR at Epic Games. I’m in charge of all the acronyms in the group. Yeah.<br> VRguy: You’ve been doing this for how long?<br> Nick: I’ve been active in VR for about four and a half years now. I basically got involved in it when Oculus was getting their Kickstarter ramped up. They said they had a cool little piece of hardware, and they needed some pretty visuals to show on us. After hours, I started hooking up our engine, Unreal Engine 4, to support Oculus and the rest is history as they say.<br> VRguy: Now that you’re four and a half years into it, what’s unique about running VR in a game engine?<br> Nick: I think now that we’re four and a half years into it, we’ve come to the point of maturity where we can stop trying to aggressively catch up to the hardware as our primary task day to day. Now that the SDKs from the major manufacturers have matured and they’ve released commercial products, and other more specialty manufacturers like Sensics have got a much more firm understanding of what the area means. We’re in the exciting portion where we get to experiment with what’s possible and what’s potential of the VR as a medium. I’m pretty excited that now that we’ve done all the heavy lifting to get the car built, we can actually take it for a test drive and start experimenting.<br> VRguy: What are the open issues for you in terms of VR and the game engine?<br> Nick: Right now, I think that the biggest thing is everybody can always use more performance. Since performance unlike traditional games, with VR, you have the potential to make people sick if your product isn’t performing and it’s very, very hard. As a game industry, we’re just getting used to doing standard 1080p high def game engines at 30 and the 60 frames per second. Now all of a sudden, you have to render at even high resolutions, at even higher frame rates. It’s a hard problem. Even internally with Epic’s own games like Robo Recall, we have a team of experts that are constantly looking at performance. That’s their number one problem at the moment. We keep trying to innovate and come up with new ways to make it easier to actually hit the performance requirements of VR.<br> VRguy: How much does that comes from the game engine companies versus the hardware vendors? Valve or Oculus or others, in terms of performance optimizations?<br> Nick: It’s actually nice in VR, I’ve noticed, compared to other traditional bits of the gaming industry. Everybody’s very interested in the medium itself succeeding. Everybody’s been very open. Both Valve and Oculus and so many have all been very forthcoming with what they think are the best ways to get optimizations. They’ll do prototyping in our engine and give us the code and share it freely with anybody, so that something developed at one company can be shared to all the different companies,
