![]() “You could put your clothing or your car or whatever into a platform like Fortnite or into a 3D billboard, cutting down all of the systems that currently exist between all of those stations. “You can establish a unified asset pipeline from production and design and prototyping all the way down to marketing,” says Cooper. Physical 3D billboards of the Balenciaga collaboration, rendered using Unreal, are being featured in major cities such as New York and Tokyo, intended to catch the eye of people unfamiliar with Fortnite and build buzz.įashion brands might use Unreal to produce a fundamental set of assets around a collection and transpose them into the physical world or other types of digital experiences. “It's important for us to show the dynamic range of Unreal Engine,” says Cooper. There’s a real race to find talented Unreal and Unity developers right now, says futurist and metaverse expert Cathy Hackl - the technology is advancing so quickly, universities haven’t yet caught up. Unreal and competitor engine Unity (from Unity Technologies) allow users to 3D render virtual worlds in real time, a relatively new development that is shaking up the design world. For Epic Games, a benefit of the collaboration is to raise awareness of Unreal Engine, Epic’s real-time 3D design development software, which has applications beyond gaming in architecture, film and fashion. Fashion activations in the game are more about market awareness - reaching a hard-to-target audience of “young, enthusiastic, digital, native folks”, as Alan Cooper, director, product and consumer communications at Epic Games, puts it.įor Balenciaga, the project shows that its involvement in the metaverse is emerging as a strategic pillar of its business, rather than a one-off marketing ploy. At present, brands cannot sell items on Fortnite independently. So we know that fashion is of interest,” says Levy. “We have lots of different people within our community. Now 50 per cent of players are spending their time in Fortnite Creative Mode, exploring different virtual experiences and creating their own virtual worlds. However, the user base has evolved over the last four years, Levy says. The growth of Creative Modeįortnite was initially best known for Battle Royale, a game mode where players fight 1 versus 100. The video has had 11 million views on YouTube and underlined the appetite for fashion in the Fortnite ecosystem, says Levy. In April 2020, high-profile Fortnite player Lachlan staged a Fortnite fashion show in the game, where players could enter and show off their skins. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.Fortnite players can buy Balenciaga hero accessories reworked into pickaxes and gliders. ![]() Subscribe to my free weekly content round-up newsletter, God Rolls. This may be the path toward changing that, but it’s unclear how long it may take to see the fruits of this investment for Epic specifically.įollow me on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. ![]() And he’s right, given the limits we see on player counts, which means big virtual events must be fractured into hundreds of thousands of instances for everyone to experience the same thing. “Today’s virtual worlds are a limited experience – small scale, siloed, and insecure,” says Craig Beddis, Hadean cofounder and CEO. Product Activation Failed is a similar issue that arises when users are trying to activate a product on their Epic Games account via the Epic Games client. The main point here is about achieving scalability past what Fortnite and the Unreal Engine as a whole may be able to do now. But it would not appear that this tech would represent some mass switchover to relying on the blockchain nor something like introducing NFTs into the Fortnite ecosystem. While Minecraft has banned NFTs and Steam doesn’t allow blockchain games, Epic Games has been a tad more open to the concept, allowing at least a few Web3 games on the Epic Game Store. While Hadean has worked with Web3 metaverses and utilizes blockchain tech in part, it’s unclear the full extent of what role the blockchain may play into all this for Epic. This tech may be a part of how that comes together, in the long term. And I have full confidence Epic plans to expand Fortnite dramatically beyond its battle royale focus in the future, building out a more full metaverse-like world for players to exist in, though they have yet to announce specific plans for that. In the pursuit of further scalability, Epic believes Hadean’s “open platform for distributed cloud computing” may be part of solving that. Epic may have a live event on the Fortnite map, a Travis Scott concert or a scripted monster battle, but it has to be broken up into instances of just 100 players each, the map maximum. You can see the current problem within Fortnite itself.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |