https://onezero.medium.com/the-metaverse-is-already-here-and-epic-games-built-it-1a097d55f2dc
Courtesy Epic Games/DMLA
Last week, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared his sweeping vision for a virtual world known as the metaverse, I watched a live talk which covered almost exactly the same topic from engineers including Heiko Wenczel of Epic Games during the Digital Media Licensing Conference. Facebook’s ideas about the metaverse left me underwhelmed, but Epic’s absolutely blew me away. Zuckerberg can sink his billions into creating virtual worlds if he wants. But make no mistake — the metaverse is already here. And Epic Games built it.
Outside the tech community, most people know Epic Games for its flagship video game Fortnite. Fortnite is the most popular video game in the history of the world. The game has 350 million players worldwide, who spent a collective 3.2 billion hours playing Fortnite in 2020. More than a quarter of pre-teens in the United States play the game, and top players can earn millions of dollars per year by competing in more than 100 official tournaments.
Inside the tech world, though, Epic is mostly known for its Unreal Engine. The Unreal Engine is a game engine originally developed in 1998. Game engines handle the complex physics underlying modern video games. They dictate how objects move within the game, how they act on each other, how they’re lit, and more.
Relying on an engine like Unreal to handle these basics gives game makers a blank canvas on which to build complex worlds. They can focus on a game’s characters and stories, rather than worrying about how a tree should blow in a virtual breeze, or how the explosion of a projectile might reflect on a character’s helmet. More than seven million tech professionals use the Unreal Engine today, both at Epic and beyond.
As the pandemic struck in 2020, players of Fortnite (which is built using the Unreal Engine) started to realize that the engine allowed their game to serve a totally different function than the one for which Epic had designed it. Fortnite is officially a battle royale game, which means that players are often trying to kill each other, albeit in a cartoony way. But as lockdowns forced billions around the globe to hunker down in their homes, Fortnite players began to use the game’s virtual world for other purposes.
Artists like Ariana Grande partnered with Epic to hold massive, worldwide concerts in Fortnite. Over 640,000 people attended Grande’s 2020 concert — orders of magnitude more than could attend an Ariana Grande concert in person. Tired of endless Zoom meetings, some Silicon Valley venture capital firms started holding virtual meetings in the game. Bored and lonely teens increasingly turned to it as a place to hang out with friends, with no battling necessary.
These alternate uses of the virtual world of Fortnite did not go unnoticed at Epic — nor did they begin with the pandemic. As early as 2016, Epic said that immersive virtual worlds built using the Unreal Engine were on the way. As with many things in the world of tech, the pandemic simply served as a catalyst, catapulting the adoption of virtual worlds at least five years into the future by accelerating trends that were already well underway.
As I learned firsthand during Epic’s presentation at the Digital Media Licensing Conference, though, the company has ambitions that extend well beyond repurposing a shoot-em-up videogame into a virtual hangout venue. (I volunteer for the DMLA, which puts the conference on.) Epic’s master plan involves using the Unreal Engine to create immersive, photorealistic “digital twins” — virtual copies of real-world places in which people can interact in natural, fluid ways.
To that end, Epic has partnered with or acquired a variety of companies focused on cloning real-world places. Recent acquisition Quixel, for example, specializes in scanning real-life objects, creating virtual copies that are richly textured and can be lit and animated by the Unreal Engine. For example, Quixel can scan a real-world plant, drop it into a virtual world created with the engine, and have its leaves convincingly blow in a virtual breeze, or subtly reflect the glow of a virtual sunset.
Quixel’s objects become the building blocks from which designers create virtual worlds. Want to build a virtual Wild West saloon? Quixel can supply you with period-appropriate virtual tables, chairs, wall textures, and more, primarily scanned from real-world objects. They can even give you virtual tumbleweeds for Unreal’s imaginary winds to blow past the entrance of your saloon. The company’s Megascans library, which Epic now controls, already contains thousands of these real-world-derived objects, and its acquisition of 3D company Sketchfab adds millions more.
Epic has also acquired Capturing Reality, which takes things one step further by scanning entire environments. As the New York Times demonstrates, the company’s tech can use nothing more than a cellphone camera in order to recreate real places (like an alley in Manhattan or a street in China Town) in three-dimensional, photorealistic detail. Again, these environments can be loaded into the Unreal Engine and manipulated according to a creator’s desires. World-builders can even use Epic’s Metahuman Creator to populate their virtual environments with incredibly realistic synthetic people.
Combining these technologies, one could visit a real-world place and scan it in exquisite detail using Capturing Reality, importing it into the Unreal Engine to create a virtual twin. They could then fill their environment with any virtual object from Quixel’s catalog, or use the company’s tech to scan objects of their own and place them into their virtual world. Finally, they could use Metahuman Creator to clone themselves or their friends or colleagues, placing them into the virtual world as controllable avatars. People could log in, take over the virtual version of themselves, and explore the environment, interacting with it and with each other just as if they were really in the physical place.
In their presentation, Epic shared an example of how this works in practice. Using these techniques, the company has created a virtual version of their Detroit lab. Before new hires visit in person, they can take control of a virtual avatar and wander around the space, exploring a virtual version of their future office and even learning about the equipment they might use in real life. They can even move outside to a virtual outdoor meeting space beside a pond, where other colleagues can log in with their own avatars and carry on conversations while walking around the space. Because Epic Games is a tech company and tech people love silliness, their engineers couldn’t resist placing some virtual alligators into their imagined pond as “something to talk about” during their meetings.
These kinds of virtual worlds are extremely powerful tools for remote collaboration. In addition to training and orienting new hires remotely during Covid-19, Epic’s virtual space provides a totally new way to interact with remote colleagues. Large gatherings held on platforms like Zoom often fall flat in part because everyone is in the same space, yet only one person can talk at a time. Epic’s virtual worlds, though, use video game-inspired technologies like spatial audio to create the impression that you’re genuinely walking around a physical space, not sitting in a video call.
Imagine a large networking event held in one of Epic’s virtual worlds. One hundred of your colleagues are present at the event, which is held in a clone of a real hotel’s conference center. As at a real-life event, your colleagues have naturally divided into small groups and are having conversations in different parts of the room. As you sidle your avatar up to one of these groups, the audio of the group’s conversation fades in, and you can hear that they’re discussing a new project.
You edge your way into the circle, wait for a lull, and jump into the conversation. Controlling your avatar, you nod, laugh, and perform other real-world actions to signal how you’re feeling about the conversation. You discuss the project and share your ideas. As the conversation dies down, you walk away from the group and join another one. The first group’s conversation fades out as you walk away, and the new group’s voices fade in. You see an old colleague in the group, and ask if they’d like to take a walk. The two of you exit the conference center and walk beside a virtual lake as the sun sets. Because you’re far from your colleagues indoors, no one else can hear you, and the interaction feels private and personal. You and your colleague catch up. Alligators idly swim past.
These kinds of rich, customized interactions are nearly impossible to create with a blunt tool like Zoom. But building on decades of refinement in the video game world, the Unreal Engine can deliver them relatively effortlessly. One company, Surreal Events, is already doing just that. Combined with Epic’s new object and environment-scanning capabilities, Epic Games has created a complete workflow that allows designers to scan real-world places, import them into the engine, populate them with realistic custom avatars, and let real people control those avatars, interacting in naturalistic ways that would be impossible in existing platforms.
In short, Epic has built the metaverse.
The extent to which businesses and individuals adopt Epic’s technologies remains to be seen. For its part, Epic has made many of these technologies available for free, at least for small users. You can use Capturing Reality’s tech to scan your living room and Metahuman Creator to duplicate your family members right now. Whether your boss will soon abandon the comforting familiarity of Zoom to hold meetings in a virtual garden, though, is another story.
Several industries have already taken the metaverse plunge. Many new car commercials produced during the pandemic aren’t shot in real locations, but rather are shot using virtual cars placed into virtual worlds within the Unreal Engine. Car companies have realized that it’s way cheaper to photograph virtual cars in a 3D-scanned virtual location than to schlep a film crew and a bunch of heavy vehicles to a real-life location for a multi-day shoot — especially during a global pandemic. It’s also way easier to re-create the same shot for multiple cars in different colors or trim styles virtually than to do it in the real world. Especially because virtual tech is more environmentally sustainable, it’s unlikely that companies will go back to the old way of shooting car ads even when the pandemic abates.
Likewise, an increasing number of television shows and even feature films are shot using virtual set technology, in which a 3D scan of a virtual world is projected onto a giant LED screen behind real actors. This technique uses the Unreal Engine to essentially place real-life people into the metaverse. As a camera operator pans across the real actors, for example, the Unreal Engine lights and updates the image on the LED screen in real-time, creating the convincing illusion that the camera is panning through the virtual space. Hits like the Mandalorian are shot in this way. Again, it’s way cheaper and more flexible than building real sets, or the traditional method of shooting in front of green screens and doing massive amounts of post-production to insert actors into virtual worlds after the fact.
These real-world use cases raise the fascinating question of whether a consumer metaverse like Facebook’s is really necessary at all. The metaverse is already a fantastically useful space in which to shoot movies and photograph products such as cars. It’s a helpful space for remote meetings and employee training, too, especially for employees who happen to have a disability that prevents them from traveling to an in-person office. It will almost certainly be adopted in other industries, like education. Do we really want to be able to hang out socially there, too? And more to the point, does Facebook really need to spend $10 billion to make the social metaverse a reality?
Although Epic’s metaverse has already arrived, that’s no guarantee of its future success. Tech is littered with examples of first-movers who failed to capture big markets — just ask Kodak how their digital camera business is going. Especially since Epic makes the Unreal Engine available to outside companies, Facebook could cheerfully license the company’s tech, build a social metaverse, and direct its massive stream of users there, cornering the metaverse market.
Ultimately, that might be exactly Epic’s goal. The company has had major hits with games like Fortnite. Epic may be completely satisfied selling services and software to metaverse builders of all stripes, and directing the resulting rivers of revenue into what it does best: building highly profitable video games. Given Epic’s preeminence in the metaverse tech space and Facebook’s massive user base, it seems natural for the companies to work together on bringing the metaverse to fruition.
A joint Epic and Facebook metaverse could very well be in the cards. Expect there to be alligators.
