Many of the gaming industry's biggest companies have been biding their time with virtual reality. They wanted to wait to see if the chicken and egg scenario of hardware and software availability would work itself out and now it seems that in the eyes of EA at least, they have. EA has just announced that it's forming a new studio, known as Frostbite Labs, to develop games and experiences exclusively for virtual reality.
EA had said it would wait and see on VR, but it's throwing a lot of eggs in that basket now. EA's announcement (via Gamespot) included that it had brought 30-40 developers into the new fold, so whatever it is putting together will not be a dinky little indie game, this will be a solid mid-range effort.
They are a "highly specialized" and "highly talented," team, according to EA and are expected to have a big influence on the direction that EA's developments take in the future. Indeed if the first game out of Frostbite Labs does well, EA may well move more developers over to the new platform.
However it's not just game development that the new studio is going to work on. It's also working on the idea of "deep learning," which is in essence adding more automation to the developing process. In one example, a developer could - in the future - input a time of day and year and the engine would automatically render a scene to those specifications.
That could save developers a lot of time and energy in hand crafting environments, thereby freeing them up to develop more gameplay elements and deeper stories. They're also going to be diving deeper into character development to try and make interacting with in-game actors that much more realistic in the future.
