Epic Games, Maker of Fortnite, Awards UCF Professor Grant to Enhance AR and VR Technology
Epic Games, Maker of Fortnite, Awards UCF Professor Grant to Enhance AR and VR Technology
Epic Games, Maker of Fortnite, Awards UCF Professor Grant to Enhance AR and VR Technology
May 11, 2020
Summary
The company responsible for the online video game hit Fortnite has awarded a UCF assistant professor a grant to develop an immersive technology to take virtual experiences to new levels of reality.
Epic Games provided UCF information scientist and artist Maria Harrington a $25,000 grant to expand her cutting-edge augmented and virtual reality work, which she began in 2016 with a website virtual field trip guide and resulted in the VR 1.0 version, The Virtual UCF Arboretum.
The virtual arboretum provides stunning images that look real because they've been created based on detailed and botanically accurate information.
"These immersive models are different than others, because they are data visualizations of the botanical and ecological information," Harrington says.
Epic Games provided the money through its MegaGrants program, which seeks to encourage development of the unreal engine ecosystem or 3D graphics community that makes games like Fortnite more realistic.
The grant will allow Harrington to explore new techniques to improve the experience and to potentially broaden the collection to initially include botanical gardens and university arboretums from the American Southwest and Pacific Northwest.
The project became a reality because of the collaboration among colleagues from the College of Arts and Humanities, and the UCF Arboretum and Department of Biology, in the College of Sciences, and the Landscape and Natural Resources team at UCF. Harrington's research and experimentation over the past decade has resulted in many programs that have earned local, national, and international recognition.
With any AR enabled device, a user can create a virtual garden of wildflowers anywhere, from the kitchen to the subway station.
The project became a reality thanks to an international collaboration among
the members in Harrington's lab at UCF, The Powdermill Nature Reserve at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and the MultiMedia Technology program of the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences, Austria.
She is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the UCF Nicholson School of Communication and Media and she is part of the university's Learning Sciences Cluster.
Reference
Epic Games awards UCF professor grant to enhance AR & VR tech. (2020, May 11). Retrieved May 12, 2020, from https://www.floridatrend.com/article/29236/epic-games-maker-of-fortnite-awards-ucf-professor-grant-to-enhance-ar-and-vr-technology