Epic Games has partnered with Academy Award-winning visual effects studio Weta Digital to bring Smaug, one of the biggest, baddest, and last dragons of Middle-Earth, to life via virtual reality.
Attendees at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco flocked to the Epic Games booth, where the game developer showcased the new experience running on the Unreal Engine 4 platform. It involves using a Crescent Bay Oculus Rift prototype, but it's not exactly a VR game since one does not have the ability to move around to avoid being scorched by Smaug's breath of fire.
Called "Thief in the Shadows," the two-and-a-half-minute experience puts the viewer right into the hairy feet of our favorite Halfling burglar Bilbo Baggins, so that means one won't get to greet the charming hobbit a good morning inside the gold-filled halls of the dwarf-home of Erebor. Instead, one gets to be Bilbo himself to experience how it is like to be taunted, threatened, and, ultimately, torched with dragon fire in the end. Benedict Cumberbatch's rich, baritone voice fills the cavernous halls and shimmering coins slide beneath the viewer's feet as Smaug swims around his piles of stolen dwarf gold.
"Smaug circled me, forcing me to turn around in circles to keep track of his motion. His movements and voice became increasingly aggressive -- so much so that I caught myself stepping back as he moved nearby," said Dale North of VentureBeat. "The level of detail in his close-up was astounding -- every scale and tooth was photorealistic. I could almost smell his breath."
"Thief in the Shadows" is not an experience made entirely from scratch. Alasdair Coull, head of Weta Digital's research and development, says they simply took assets of the film The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, including the graphics, sounds, and dialogue tweaked a little bit to become more suitable for VR. Initially, they also added the film's hero, Bilbo, into the mix, but things got confusing for testers so they decided to get rid of him.
Epic Games' VR Smaug is powered by the new NVIDIA Titan X graphics processor and runs at 90 frames per second, which makes for a rich, smooth VR experience.
For those raring to try this out at home, however, Epic Games says it has no plans to release "Thief in the Shadows" commercially. However, it does mean that content makers are showing interest in producing VR content not limited to games, so we can expect more experiences like this in the future.
"It's really fascinating -- there's sort of a combination of real-time sensibilities, film industry, and then VR," said Ray Davis, general manager of Epic Games. "It's this new storytelling medium. And I have no doubt that there will be fantastic VR and there will be VR films, but I have a feeling there's something truly magical ahead of us. I hope it's sooner than later. Some say five, maybe 20 years. Who knows?"
