Epic's new app can bring the chair in your room into your game

• Epic Games, the developer of the popular game Fortnite, has launched a new 3D scanning app.
  
• The RealityScan app lets users scan objects in the real world and import them into games and projects.
  
• Currently in a limited beta for iOS, Epic says that it will expand the availability and add Android support later this year.
  

Epic Games has developed a new app that can let you scan the chair in your room and bring it right into your game or project, all with the help of your smartphone camera.

The new app, called RealityScan, lets you scan objects in the real world and import them into the virtual world – be it in a game you’re playing or a project you are working on.

In a video demonstration, Epic Games shows how you can scan any object and move it into the virtual world. The scanned objects look like handcrafted 3D models, and to be fair, it’s not something that we have not already seen in other apps like Photogrammetry, for instance.

To develop the app, Epic Games used the talent pool from Capturing Reality, Quixel and Sketchfab – companies that it has acquired over time. The efforts also include talent from Unreal Engine, the Epic-owned gaming engine that powers a wide range of games across the world.

Aimed at improving the development tools available to its creators

While it seems like a fun idea to simply scan real-world objects and import them into the virtual world, as an end user, Epic has a far more important purpose behind developing RealityScan.

This app, once finished, will allow developers and game creators to drastically reduce the time it takes to manually create in-game content, since they can simply scan an object in the real world and import it into their projects, and only have to further optimise them if needed.

The RealityScan app is currently only available on a first-come first-serve basis to iOS users via Apple’s TestFlight platform. Since this is a limited beta, you might want to reserve your spot if you are interested in trying the app out.

Epic says that wider availability is being aimed for in the coming weeks, and an Android release later this year.


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