Epic recently announced that they will be releasing the VR editor for the Unreal Engine. The project has been the brainchild of Epic’s Technical Director Mike Fricker since early 2014 back when the original dev kit for the Oculus Rift came out. Since then the project has evolved to incorporate the HTC Vive and the Oculus motion controls. You can see the VR editor in action below.
The tech is pretty impressive, but will it see use beyond the novelty of showing it off in videos like the one above? Epic seems to think so, here’s a quote from Epic’s CEO Tim Sweeney in his post on Unreal’s website.
With a mouse, several operations are often required to transform an object along multiple axes in 3D. In VR, you can frequently accomplish the same result with a single, intuitive motion. This should come as no surprise, as a mouse only tracks two degrees of movement (X and Y), but in VR your head and two hands track six degrees of freedom each: X, Y, Z, and three rotational axes. That’s 9 times the high-fidelity input bandwidth!
While that may be true it still seems like it would be more of a gimmick than anything. Still, I’d love to be proven wrong. If you’re interested you can check out the article from Unreal, linked to above, or wait until March 16th at GDC when Epic will talk in depth about the editor including when it will be released.