Wondering what Amazon’s videogame development engine, Lumberyard, can do for VR? The company has some new examples for you today.
Lumberyard might not be the most prominent engine in the industry right now, but Amazon is trying to build momentum, especially on the VR side. To aid this, it’s this week launched the VR Samples Project, a free showcase of what you can do with Lumberyard in headsets, highlighting three main areas.
The first of these is a video playback demo, a feature Amazon says has been long requested by its community and was implemented into the Beta 1.7 version of the engine, released recently. It’s a pretty basic addition, allowing developers to bring video content into virtual worlds, though it does sport some interesting extras, like support for 360 degree video playback, and applying video as textures that wrap around surfaces like spheres as well as flat walls.
More exciting is the second showcase, highlighting haptic feedback for motion controllers like the Oculus Touch or Vive wands. The demo is set in a room filled with boxes that you can use controllers to realistically throw. Finally, there’s an audio production room. This is essentially a set of musical dominoes, designed to showcase 3D audio to help create immersive experiences.
Lumberyard will be at GDC in a few weeks’ time, for those interested in using the engine.
These might not sound like the most advanced features for a development engine, but it’s important to remember that Lumberyard is a young piece of middleware based on Crytek’s CryEngine, only revealed a year ago and still finding its feet in the industry. Whether or not it will ever have the chance to truly compete with the likes of Unity and Unreal Engine remains to be seen, but giving developers more options is never a bad thing.
