Epic Games founder believes virtual reality will be indistinguishable from real life within a decade

Shawn Knight

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We’ve had a hunch for a while now that virtual reality is going to be the next big thing. Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney not only agrees, he believes the technology is going to change the world.

During a recent interview, Sweeney said there are some amazing things happening in VR right now and a lot of them haven’t seen the light of day publically. That’s especially encouraging when you consider what we have seen thus far.

The executive added that he expects hardware to double in quality every few years for the next decade. It’ll get to a point – probably about 10 years from now – where it’ll be hard to tell the difference between virtual reality and the real world.

Just exactly when this game-changing platform is going to start taking major leaps ahead in the consumer space is up for debate.

During the consumer electronics show last month, Oculus VR product VP Nate Mitchell said 2015 will be a big year for virtual reality. A year earlier, Valve’s virtual reality lead, Michael Abrash, essentially echoed those same sentiments with a prediction that a great VR system at a consumer price could happen as early as 2015. Sweeney, meanwhile, feels that next year will be a watershed time for virtual reality.

Regardless of when it actually happens, the next decade or so looks incredibly promising for a technology that has been teased for decades.

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Boy oh boy .... you can bet it will bring identity theft to a whole new meaning! Of course, those old porno movies are going to be spectacular! Wooo Hoooooo!!!!!
 
Compare Call of Duty 2 vs. Call of Duty Advanced Warfare, and you're looking at about a 10 year gap in development. So that's the bad comparison benchmark that I'm using to predict what sort of improvement's that we'll see in the next 10 years. But wow, those games look so far apart in appearance that it's funny!
 
The graphics are going to have to get way better.

oh I don't know, consider this.

One side of this face is CGI and the other is real.
18imgqtv2csx1jpg.jpg
 
Is this Epic games founder hallucinating or something?
NOT going to happen in the mainstream (in some lab environment with few supercomputers.... maybe).
Doesn't he see how the games developement and everything has slowed down in last few decades? To make any VR anything close to lifelike, the computers need to be 100+ times faster than they are today. The polygon count .... the real life like physics we have never ever seen in any games before... for a reason (the computers just can't handle it yet).
The graphics are going to have to get way better.

oh I don't know, consider this.

One side of this face is CGI and the other is real.

Still image does not prove anything. We all know we can already today render lifelike still images. All the difference comes from realistically applied physics and stuff. Does this CGI pic come with every single hair separately modelled? Does it move in the wind? Can one move them around with finger? Pull one out (so the skin also is pulled etc.)? What about just cutting his face? is the CGI even skindeep or just skin surface? what about other tissues below skin? if I cut his face will I get to muscles and bone at some point? Realistically flowing blood out of the wound (that you can alter by applying pressure)?

Ou wait... and we STILL HAVE NOT SEEN ANY SMELLBLASTERS :-D
Lifelike VR without smells is just a joke.
 
Is this Epic games founder hallucinating or something?
NOT going to happen in the mainstream (in some lab environment with few supercomputers.... maybe).
Doesn't he see how the games developement and everything has slowed down in last few decades? To make any VR anything close to lifelike, the computers need to be 100+ times faster than they are today. The polygon count .... the real life like physics we have never ever seen in any games before... for a reason (the computers just can't handle it yet).

Still image does not prove anything. We all know we can already today render lifelike still images. All the difference comes from realistically applied physics and stuff. Does this CGI pic come with every single hair separately modelled? Does it move in the wind? Can one move them around with finger? Pull one out (so the skin also is pulled etc.)? What about just cutting his face? is the CGI even skindeep or just skin surface? what about other tissues below skin? if I cut his face will I get to muscles and bone at some point? Realistically flowing blood out of the wound (that you can alter by applying pressure)?

Ou wait... and we STILL HAVE NOT SEEN ANY SMELLBLASTERS :-D
Lifelike VR without smells is just a joke.
Hence my comment...
"I think we are about halfway through the 'uncanny valley' or the creep curve at best."
 
So we are NO WHERE near being able to full render realistic environments in realtime (the keyword is realtime) yet some guy who worked at Epic on cartoon looking games believes in as little as 10 years this will be possible...

Yes we can render photo realistic environments, that react to different situations but none of these are done realtime, many takes several hours of not days to render the scenes this is why cutscenes in games are generally much better looking than the game itself..


It's kinda what deemon is saying, we just don't have the processing power and are a lot more than 10 years off. Maybe when we hit the mutli core terahertz processors it will be possible but based on the fact the current average processor speed is 3Ghz and 10 years ago it was 2.5Ghz so in 10 years the mainstream processor has only increased in raw speed (yes I know their has been improvements etc in efficiency etc etc) but we have only increased 50Mhz a year we have a long long long time before we hit 1000Ghz (20,000 years?).

PS don't start comparing this to super computers we have now, yes they exceed this but take for example the worlds fastest super computer has 3,120,000 cores (32,000 CPUs), a power requirement of 18,000 KW, it is kind of out of the reach of a typical home user .... and it crashes when loading steam :D
 
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