GDC 2015 presentations

The Game Developers Conference took place last week in San Francisco. As I am starting to see more speakers publish their slides, I am creating this post to keep track of some them (this list is not meant to be exhaustive).

For a more extensive list, Cédric Guillemet has been garnering links to GDC 2015 papers on his blog.

An artificial light that looks like light from the sky

http://www.coelux.com/

The Italian company CoeLux has apparently managed to create an artificial light which uses a material that mimics the atmospheric scattering, to look like sunlight and light from the sky. Judging from the photos and videos available on their website, it seems the look is very convincing.

As they point out, this could have a serious impact on architecture, as available sunlight is a factor in the design of buildings. Unfortunately, at this stage it is a prohibitively expensive product for the average consumer, and likely targeted at the construction industry. But it might be only a niche for some years before expanding to a larger scale.

The news websites PetaPixel and Colossal have previously covered this topic last month, and included some larger product photos made available by the company. But the most interesting coverage might be the one by Lux Review, who met CoeLux at an exhibition booth and made the following video. From their article:

No, the light source doesn’t move… yet. No, the colour temperature isn’t dynamic… yet. The void height needed is a metre. It consumes 340W of electrical power, but that will come down as LEDs improve.


Update: a YouTube channel presented a way to build such an artificial window at home. See: Building an artificial window.

John Carmack on Oculus at GDC 2015

John Carmack, the CTO of Oculus VR, gave a talk at the Game Developers Conference that just ended this week. Various topics are addressed, including the story behind Samsung’s Gear VR and what’s coming next, the democratization of virtual reality, the work on the API, the unsolved problem of controllers in VR, or the use of real-time ray tracing in VR.

John Carmack’s GDC 2015 talk.

It is a fairly long video (1h30), and as often with him, there are no pictures to see, just hear his personal views and insights on the work he is currently taking care of.