M+E Daily

Game engines are not just for video games anymore. They’ve been playing an increasingly significant role throughout the media and entertainment ecosystem – as well as other industries entirely – and that trend is only growing, according to executives at ICVR, a Los Angeles production studio focused on interactive content developed with game engines.

“It started with virtual production” in movies and expanded into the medical industry with vision therapy and physical therapy, as well as virtual events for multiple industries, Ihar Heneralau, co-founder and CEO of ICVR, said Oct. 20 during the online Media & Entertainment Day event.

In M&E, game engines are being used extensively in augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), he noted during the Cloud & Virtualization breakout session “The Game Engine Revolution.”

The Unreal Engine from Epic Games and Unity from Unity Technologies are the two most popular game engines today, he pointed out. “In a nutshell, they are toolkits for creating experiences that are rendered in real-time, that are interactive…. and they’re often used in 3D,” he said.

Other industries started using these engines over the past decade or so because the engines “became more or less” toolkits that automate a lot of low-level programming, he noted.

Unity has become the go-to engine for mobile games and AR, according to Chris Swiatek, co-founder and chief of product at ICVR. That is because the engine can be packaged in a lightweight way and it runs well on many different types of devices, he said, noting a large amount of pre-made toolkits and assets are available on the Unity Asset Store,

If you have played a game in 3D on a mobile phone, it was almost certainly made using the Unity engine, he told viewers, pointing to the popular mobile game “Pokemon Go” by Niantic as just one example.

AR requires sensing devices like cameras or smartphones and tablets using LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) to take the world around us and place a virtual layer on top of it, he noted, explaining the devices interpret the data through software including computer vision.

“Apple has been leading the charge and really doing developers a huge favor by making widespread the hardware necessary in order to run an AR experience,” he pointed out, noting its latest iPads and iPhones feature LiDAR.

AR is now transitioning from phones to wearable devices, with common use cases including games, training, medical, marketing, education and productivity, he said.

The Unreal Engine, meanwhile, is one of things his company is especially excited about, he said, noting it provides excellent out of the box lighting and rendering, and is the most capable game engine for reaching photorealistic quality. It also offers built-in cinematic tools and a rapidly expanding toolset – all making it especially good for virtual production and VR, he noted.

Technology has reached the point where photorealistic (or high-quality, stylized) real-time rendering is possible, and the Unreal Engine is leading the charge on this, according to Swiatek.

The Unreal Engine’s capabilities are being increasingly used by filmmakers, in part because its ability to project virtual environments onto huge LED walls on studio sets is an improvement over green screens.

It’s a superior technique to green screens because it provides emissive lighting and natural reflections, and “also reduces a lot of the work you have to do in post touching up reflections,” Swiatek explained, adding: “It also allows you almost God-like control over the scene in terms of what you can do with scene changes, lighting, moving around environment objects and so on.”

His prediction is “we’re going to see this tech become a lot more powerful as time continues,” he said.

The Unreal Engine has been used extensively on Disney’s “Star Wars” TV show “The Mandalorian,” he pointed out, noting it has used the LED wall technique. Over half the shots from season 1 were shot that way and the LED wall final pixel shot percentage will increase more as the tech continues to mature, he predicted.

ICVR has used an LED screen for one of its own projects and “another big use case is live virtual events,” he said, pointing to a recent John Legend music program that used it also.

Additionally, the technology was used by singer Katy Perry during the recent virtual Tomorrowland Festival, the Weather Channel has used it for a typhoon infographic and it’s also been used in the popular League of Legends eSports competition in which real camera footage was combined with virtual scenes and virtual VFX, Swiatek noted.

And “this tech is getting better by the day,” he said, predicting even better visuals and more tools are coming. Therefore, game engines will remain a staple across industries, he predicted.

The technology has helped bring people together during the COVID-19 pandemic and he predicted it will continue to do so post-pandemic as part of a “permanent, remarkable shift in the way people interact though a kind of a hybrid interaction model” between physical and virtual worlds.

Click here to access the full presentation.

M&E Day was sponsored by IBM Security, Microsoft Azure, SHIFT, Akamai, Cartesian, Chesapeake Systems, ContentArmor, Convergent Risks, Deluxe, Digital Nirvana, edgescan, EIDR, PK, Richey May Technology Solutions, STEGA, Synamedia and Signiant and was produced by MESA, in cooperation with NAB Show New York, and in association with the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA) and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS).