Tim Sweeney, chief executive of Epic Games and a graphics guru for the past 25 years, said in a speech that we may not need displays of any kind in about 10 years, if the promise of augmented reality achieves its full potential.
If we can see the equivalent of a 40-feet screen on our glasses, as augmented reality promises, we won’t have any need to sit down in front of a TV and watch a big screen made out of big sheets of glass, he said.
“I believe that augmented reality will be the biggest technological revolution that happens in our lifetimes,” Sweeney said in his outstanding speech. “If we had this AR display, the deep thing to realize is this. Once you have an augmented reality display, you don’t need any other form of display. Your smart phone does not need a screen. You don’t need a tablet. You don’t need a TV. You just take the screen with you on your glasses wherever you go.”
Sweeney, whose company makes the Unreal Engine 4 tools that developers use to make high-end console and mobile games, made the prediction as part of a long talk on the future of graphics and game creation technology.
But it won’t happen overnight, and it depends on the continued progress of both game technology, retina displays that paint images on our eyeballs, and fully immersive virtual reality goggles, said Sweeney, who reiterated the prediction in a more detailed interview with GamesBeat. The progress toward the display-free world will be gradual and continuous.
Sweeney believes that mobile games will take a big leap forward in 2016 as new low-level applications programming interfaces (APIs) enable game makers to use the full computing resources of a device, which is important in resource-starved smartphones and tablets. He said the low-level APIs have made mobile devices ten times more efficient at running mobile games, enabling them to do a lot more than run 2D graphics.
He is very excited about what will be enabled by APIs such as Apple’s Metal, the Vulkan open-source technology from the Khronos Group, Microsoft’s DirectX 12 in Windows 10, and other advances in web-based 3D graphics.