Last week, Epic Games unveiled its Metahumans Creator for Unreal Engine. Now you can meet the first metahumans in VR.
YouTuber ETR VR did a fantastic job adding VR support for the samples that Epic released last week. You can download the ETR demo for free here (PC VR headset required) or check out our gameplay below. ETR also documents the work they put into the demo in this video.
Metahumans VR Demo In Action
Metahumans are fully rigged, high-fidelity virtual character models designed to bring lifelike people into video games. They can look amazingly realistic on platforms like next-generation PCs and consoles. In VR, the extra performance on some PCs can inevitably be compromised.
Even when that is taken into account, these virtual characters are still far more compelling than the ones you will see in many other VR applications. In particular, the hair of the individual characters looks incredibly authentic and the facial details reach an impressive level. As you get close to a character in the demo, you might trigger a reaction in your own sense of personal space, which is quite remarkable.
Hopefully we’ll see Unreal developers use this new tool to deliver more compelling VR characters to interact with. Getting it right is really difficult, but it can add value to a story if developers pull it off.
In fact, Metahumans are another piece of the puzzle for the upcoming Unreal Engine 5, which featured an incredibly impressive tech display for PlayStation 5 last year. However, we still have to see what the platform could possibly do specifically for VR.
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