Epic Games launches RealityScan app on AWS; announces 2M MetaHumans milestone at re:Invent

At AWS re:Invent 2022, Epic Games, a leading interactive entertainment company and provider of 3D engine technology, announced that RealityScan, powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), is now available as a free download on iOS. AWS’s highly performant infrastructure enables Epic to cost-efficiently scale RealityScan to support tens of thousands of creators, turning images into digital models of real-world objects that can be used in simulations, architecture, automotive, and film/TV projects.

Building photorealistic 3D worlds has historically been expensive, time consuming and restricted to industry experts. With RealityScan, Epic has brought a professional solution to smartphones, which is only made possible through the processing power of the cloud. RealityScan uses AWS to process and deliver petabytes of captured image data in real-time, build realistic 3D models of the photographed objects, and store millions of digital assets.

RealityScan – which has produced tens of thousands of finalized models and processed millions of photos during its limited beta – uses AWS to process image data in real time and provide creators with a preview mesh. The app then uses Amazon Relational Database (RDS) for PostgresSQL to store session information and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) GPU-based instances to process scanning, as well as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon CloudFront for file storage and transfer to end devices. Amazon ElastiCache is also used to accelerate the experience between creators and the instances, while providing an important security layer. By running RealityScan and the Unreal Engine creator environment – including Twinmotion and MetaHuman Creator – on AWS, Epic delivers integrated, end-to-end content creation tools to build simulations of large photorealistic worlds, without sacrificing performance or real-time precision.

Nathan Thomas, vice president of Unreal Engine at Epic Games, participated in Amazon chief technology officer, Werner Vogels’ keynote at AWS re:Invent to discuss how 3D creation tools powered by AWS can support simulation and the creation of photorealistic digital worlds for use cases such as human training, automotive and architecture design.

“AWS gives us the flexibility to build tools that provide all developers with the scale and high-performance power needed to build photorealistic experiences that blend imagination and real life,” said Thomas. “We’re excited to see how the next generation of creators push the limits of technology to transform how we engage with digital and physical worlds.”

During the presentation, Thomas also announced that two million MetaHumans have been created since the early access launch of MetaHuman Creator last year. MetaHuman Creator uses Amazon EC2 GPU-based instances to support the heavy lift in data processing needed to take real-time digital human creation from months to less than an hour at a high standard of quality, fidelity, and realism. AWS also enables Epic to allocate instances closest to creators worldwide ensuring a low-latency, high-quality experience.

Epic went all-in on AWS in 2018 to deliver the storage, analytics, and scaling capabilities critical to its business, which had exploded with the release of Fortnite. Epic’s product development of the Unreal Engine ecosystem is supported by multiple AWS services including Amazon EC2, Amazon Elastic File Store (EFS), Amazon FSx, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon S3, AWS Lambda, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Amazon SageMaker, and Amazon DynamoDB. Learn more about how Epic Games builds on AWS to empower the next generation 3D experiences.