Charles River Analytics awarded Epic MegaGrant to bring its Virtual and Augmented Reality development platform to Unreal Engine

In Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality News

August 25, 2020 – Charles River Analytics (CRA), a provider of solutions for government programs and commercial clients across a range of markets including defence, intelligence, medical technology, training, transportation, space, and cybersecurity, has today announced that it has received a MegaGrant from Epic Games to develop and maintain its ‘Virtual Interface for Real-Time User Control during Simulated Operations’ (VIRTUOSO) software development kit (VSDK) for Epic Games’ Unreal Engine.

CRA states that the grant will support the extension of its existing virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR – collectively XR) toolkit into the Unreal Engine ecosystem. According to the company, its open source VSDK provides a free platform that helps to simplify XR development.

“Our collaboration with Epic will marry VSDK’s usability with the broad access of Unreal Engine, helping to bring this incredible tool to the developer community,” said Elaine B. Coleman, Ph.D., Vice President of Commercialization at Charles River Analytics. “We’re excited to break down long-standing XR barriers by dramatically improving ease of use and cross-device interoperability.”

The company added that its VSDK helps to eliminate the traditional roadblock of device-specific applications by allowing developers to design and build one application for a range of visualization, input, haptic, and tactile devices, and utilize a single API for interaction across all of these platforms. Originally applied to improve military medical training and education, the tool empowers developers to generate naturalistic interactions with content through its reaction system, providing an intuitive interaction space, according to the company.

“VIRTUOSO has been an important part of our research and solutions at Charles River Analytics, providing a next generation interface that streamlines development without sacrificing the quality of the XR outcome,” said Arthur Wollocko, Senior Software Engineer at Charles River Analytics. “This is a tool created for developers by developers, and we’re confident this addition to Unreal Engine will be embraced as a significant leap forward.”

More information about Charles River Analytics’ VSDK can be found on GitHub. For more information on the company, please visit CRA’s website.

Video credit: Charles River Analytics / YouTube

About the author

Sam Sprigg

Sam is the Founder and Managing Editor of Auganix. With a background in research and report writing, he has been covering XR industry news for the past five years.