Yo dawg, I heard you like VR so we're building VR in VR. It might sound like a joke, but that's exactly what Epic Games has been doing as of late. Using the HTC Vive headset and its twin wand motion controllers, developers have been building VR levels within virtual reality, within the Unreal Engine editor.
It's the same Unreal Engine that everyone else uses, but this one has a VR editor overlay that developers can step into, quite literally, and build the world around them, rather than looking through a single pane in the editor window.
"There's no need to learn a user interface," says Epic CEO Tim Sweeney in the breakdown video. "Your brain has been working this way since your were a baby."
In the video we see developer Mike Fricker manipulating columns within a digital world in 3D space, using both hands to lift and rotate them, copying, pasting and snapping them together in a very intuitive manner that would require many more presses and precise movements than in VR, where everything seems far easier.
It really looks like developers are starting to find their feet with VR. Perhaps in the future almost all games will be built with it in mind. What do you think? Are there aspects of your job you could do in virtual reality?
