The Spotlite: Britelite's Weekly Best

Welcome to The Spotlite: a weekly wrap-up series featuring Britelite's favorite things, happenings, and whatnots... This week, 3D development was forever changed, a driverless party lounge stopped traffic, and many cashed in their sick days and headed towards the Moscone Center.

3-D Giants Give Away Their Tools...For FREE!

In a blog entry posted earlier this week, appropriately titled, “If You Love Something Set it Free”, Tim Sweeney, CEO and Founder of Epic Games, announced that Unreal Engine 4 is hereby available for free download to all. Instead of the previous subscription format, you can now develop in UE4 and only need to pay a 5% royalty off your gross revenue if your creation makes $3K or more. Talk about a boss move.

At GDC, Unity announced that Unity 5 is now available for download. There’s also a new Personal Edition available to entities earning below $100K. In addition, Unity announced they’re launching an alpha that provides native-support for the Oculus Rift into Unity 5. Unity definitely knows what's up.

Epic and Unity now provide their 3D render engines for free, really for the benefit of the entire human race. These guys are no joke. They understand their success lies deep within the development community. More access ultimately means better content. Don’t you love it when technology finds a home within the masses?

Mercedes-Benz F 015 Luxury Driverless Car Roaming the Streets of SF

After random sightings in SF, posted throughout social media and blogs alike, the rumor was finally confirmed. The mothership landed and it self-parked in front of our building. The Mercedes-Benz F 015 Luxury in Motion invaded North Beach around 4:30pm on Wednesday, complete with a camera crew and police escort. Crowds flocked around the futuristic car and couldn’t get enough of its features, like its sleek, “monolithic” profile, its QR code instead of license plates, and its dynamic LED system (blue = the car is driving, white = a person is driving). What’s remarkable about this model, besides the obvious “driverless” feature, is the plush, lounge-like interior complete with fully rotating seats so all four passengers can face each other and have a polite conversation, or even a spirited debate. Point is, the cabin makes the most of your driverless experience and gives you the option to live well as you commute from one life event to the next. Autonomous cars might not be your thing, but there’s plenty of time to get used to the idea; the F 015 is due to come out around 2030. More on this monster in future posts…

GDC!!!!!

GDC 2015 was a god-like wellspring bestowing huge advancements in gaming, especially in the VR world. Oculus featured their new Crescent Bay VR headset along with a few demos created in Unreal, including a Hobbit inspired demo, “Thief in the Shadows”. Valve, in collaboration with HTC, introduced their new VR headset, Vive, thereby throwing their hat in the ring and becoming a contender in the forthcoming onslaught of consumer VR head-mounted devices. Thanks to GDC, we have a feeling 2015 will go down as the year VR truly was born. Get ready, World, there is officially no turning back.