VR World » Tim Sweeney

Tim Sweeney: Virtual Reality will Literally Change the World

Theo Valich — Mon, 06 Apr 2015 03:14:54 +0000

In an interview with the Gaming Business Review, an online site ran by M2 Publishing, Tim Sweeney detailed recent developments in Epic Games, as well as his visions of the future.

The interview obviously took place during Game Developer’s Conference 2015, which is traditionally held in San Francisco, CA. We highly recommend that you head there and read the whole interview, but we could not miss out on a question that is shaping the industry right now:

GBR: How big do you see virtual reality becoming over the next five to ten years as a business?

TS: Virtual reality and Augmented Reality will literally change the world. They will be the next computing platform. There’s a market for billions of these devices because everybody who has a smartphone today will — perhaps in as much as decade from now — much prefer entertainment in a completely immersive experience that takes advantage of your entire field of view and has full body input through miniaturized cameras and other technologies. But we’re in the early days of it now. Let’s be clear, everything is in the development kit stage. It is for early adopters and what we’re seeing now is really just the Palm Pilot to the platform that will evolve into something iPhone-like in its quality.

There’s no point in denying it, after seeing billions of dollars earned by 3D movies which rely on ‘cheap tricks’ to achieve depth (try finding animated feature movies without 3D being the ‘default’ option), next step will bring us technologies such as Microsoft Hololens, production versions of Facebook-owned Oculus VR (John Carmack keynote) and second-generation Google Glass, which is developed in near-secrecy by the search giant and a practical monopoly in glasses, Italian giant Luxottica.

After operating for almost 20 years as an independent studio, Epic Games made waves across the gaming and development community when they accepted an investment from Tencent Holdings (HKG:0700) last June (2014). The Chinese powerhouse paid up $330 million for 48.4% of the company, setting the valuation just a bit below $680 million.

Tim Sweeney continued to be the CEO, while his lifelong business partner Mark Rein still continues as in his role of Vice President. Not selling themselves outright like idSoftware did with ZeniMax Media, Epic Games continues to be independent studio, consisting out of product (games) and technology development units. Their recent announcement about making Unreal Engine ‘free’ opens a path for even more ‘premium freemium’ titles which base their revenue model on microtransactions.

The post Tim Sweeney: Virtual Reality will Literally Change the World appeared first on VR World.

University of Illinois streams its Parallel@Illinois seminars

Theo Valich — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 01:00:48 +0000

Expanding on its role as CUDA Center of Excellence, University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign is launching a 13-week seminar with focus on parallel computing. Well, GPU Computing, that is. Parallel@Illinois is the name for the whole project of GPU Computing, and this seminar was organized by prof. Sanjaj J. Patel and Wen-mei Hwu.

Under a not-so-scientific moniker Need For Speed Seminar Series, this 13-week course will feature domestic alumni such as Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Dan Roth, Narendra Ahuja, Stephen Boppart, John C. Hart, Tom Huang and Seth Hutchinson, and guests such as Keith Thulborn (UI Chicago), Sam Blackman (Elemental), Nikola Bozinovic (MotionDSP), Mark Johns (Tapulous) and Tim Sweeney (Epic).

More information is available if you visit the official site for Need for Speed seminars from Parallel@Illinois.

The post University of Illinois streams its Parallel@Illinois seminars appeared first on VR World.

Nvidia plans to bridge the 32-bit and 64-bit divide

Theo Valich — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 21:59:26 +0000

When you are designing a workstation product, you’re not designing what your engineers want, but rather what the customer will buy. Workstation market is much more conservative than consumer one, and a lot of design changes have to be made in order to accomodate this, still much smaller market.
Currently, the biggest headache in the workstation world is 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems. While the FX community already went for 64-bit operating system, a lot of organizations are resisting to change and remain in the 32-bit world with its applications and broad compatibility.
This was a big challenge for both ATI and Nvidia, who went out with 2GB or 2GB+ parts (FireGL V8650 and upcoming Quadro FX5800 come to mind) and saw that they had to reshape the drives in order to work perfectly with 32-bit applications.

Nvidia's Quadro CX is getting a twin brother...

This is also the reason why Quadro CX and the upcoming 4800/5800 line-up feature a model geared to 32-bit and a model geared towards 64-bit users. If you want all the latest and greatest that 64-bit world can offer you, you will go for the Quadro FX 5800. If you need broadest compatibility, you will go with the CX/4800, and the problem is solved.

Thus, CX/4800 will be nothing else but a souped up GTX260 cards with 1536 MB of memory, while the FX5800 will be that monster with 4GB of memory.

All in all, I have to agree with Tim Sweeney when he announced his disappointment with Microsoft Vista – we had the ideal chance to bring 64-bit operating system to life and get rid of this duality that only drives application engineers to the ground. I guess we’ll have to wait for Windows 7 to finally wave goodbye to graphics cards that can’t have 2GB of memory or more…

The post Nvidia plans to bridge the 32-bit and 64-bit divide appeared first on VR World.