Edgar Alvarez, Engadget
Last year’s Game Developers Conference was ruled by virtual reality. From Sony detailing its PSVR launch plans to Oculus showcasing the first batch of games for the consumer Rift headset, you couldn’t swing a Meowth at the event without hitting a VR booth. But perhaps fueled by the success of Pokémon Go in 2016, augmented reality has become the new industry darling. That’s not to say VR has been kicked to the curb completely, but at GDC 2017 we saw the emergence of AR as a compelling technology for gaming and beyond.
Take Epic Games, the maker of game-development platform Unreal Engine: It showed the potential of high-end augmented reality with “Project Raven.” The company has created a tool that lets content creators, like filmmakers, merge visual effects with live-action shots. Epic Games said at its GDC 2017 keynote that in TV or movie shoots, a single computer-generated frame typically takes an hour to render and days of editing before it can resemble a photoreal image. With Project Raven, which will be coming to Unreal Engine later this year, a director of photography can essentially get a live preview of what a CGI scene will look like. For Hollywood, this could be a game changer.
Epic Games has also partnered with Chevrolet to create an experience for Google Tango that gives users a 360-degree view of a Camaro ZL1. The software uses 3D depth-sensing features from a compatible device, such as Lenovo’s Phab 2 Pro, to show different angles of the car as you configure it to your liking in real time. Right now it only works when you change the ZL1’s color, but there may be options to tinker with the rims, headlights and other parts later on. Epic says the idea is to give you a more immersive view of your dream car rather than imagine it by looking at mockups from still images.
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Source: Engadget