Facebook’s recent acquisition of virtual reality firm Oculus for some $2 billion could accelerate VR use, especially in gaming. And Epic Games of Cary has been working with Oculus, preparing to cash in on the opportunity.

In an exclusive interview, WRALTechWire Insider John Gaudiosi talked with Epic GM Ray Davis at the Game Developers Conference last week in San Francisco about the Epic-Oculus partnership as Epic rolls out its cutting-edge Unreal 4 game engine technology.

  • One of the big themes here at GDC is virtual reality. Can you talk about how Unreal has been designed to work with Oculus?

I’m glad to see so much passion and cool demos coming from virtual reality. Couch Fight is a game demo that’s running on Oculus Rift that some of our guys put together for GDC. Oculus has been a great partner and we’re excited with Sony’s new announcement, Project Morpheus. It’s a great time for VR. We’ll see what comes next.

  • What’s Couch Fight all about?

Couch Night is one of our first experiments with multiplayer VR. In the game I sit across from you in a virtual environment with a realistic rendering, so it looks as though they’re coexisting. And then between us we play another game with little toy soldiers that can jump around and bounce and run into physical objects and all kinds of fun stuff. It’s really a magical experience.

  • Oculus also an interactive demo version of Elemental as well.

That’s the real power of VR. It brings experiences you’ve never seen before to life. Once you put it on that VR experience, it’s hugely immersive in the sense of scale and these other factors. It just really blows you away. When we put on that VR and jumped in it’s this massive environment and it’s really a mind-blowing experience.

  • What are your thoughts on VR and what impact that will have on the game industry as you look ahead over the next five to ten years with all these major players now involved?

VR is going to open a lot of new doors for new types of experiences much like touch interfaces and mobile devices five, ten years ago. I’m not quite sure what the killer app or the experience will be, but it’s definitely on the right track. It’s really interesting to see what people are doing with it today.

  • Can you give us a sense of how easy it is to develop for the Oculus?

We did a lot of it with Blueprint. Our designers just hacked in there in real-time and didn’t need a programmer to do anything specific to Oculus. All that’s available today as part of Unreal Engine 4.

Nore: For more about Blueprint and other developments at Epic, read Gaudiosi’s interview with Davis that WRALTechWire published on Monday.

[EPIC ARCHIVE: Check out more than a decade of Epic stories as reported in WRALTechWire.]