Amazon Sumerian: A way to create VR, AR, and 3D experiences | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Sumerian: A way to create VR, AR, and 3D experiences

aws.amazon.com

274 pointsjeffbarr118 comments

Looks heavily influenced by Unity. Kinda random that Amazon is building a web based Unity competitor. Doubly weird when you consider that this is their second game engine project. They are already building one called Amazon Lumberyard, forked from the serious AAA game engine CryEngine [1], and it appears at first glance to be entirely separate from this one.

Is Amazon really getting value out of all the dev time they are putting into building game engines? I'm not aware of any games built in Lumberyard at all, though I haven't been paying much attention.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/

If they can get some attractive software and prime some devs ready for their new AR device it may be worth it.

> their new AR device

I haven't heard this rumor, care to fill us in?

I'd be interested too, though I'd be surprised if they weren't all at it. Especially those who missed out on the smartphone thing.

Indeed :) Me too... I'm just assuming, given they have a captive audience, the hardware chops to deliver electronic devices at scale and a huge pile of cash, they would be foolish not to be working on it, while Google Glass was a headline failure, the Hololens most certainly is not, it's just received it's safety rating for on site use, the applications I've seen in use in industrial design show that this technology is not going away.

hang on... [edit]

"Amazon working on first wearables to interact with Alexa Company’s ‘smart glasses’ would come with in-home virtual assistant embedded" Sept 20, 2017 oh, look, https://www.ft.com/content/d7862042-9d9a-11e7-8cd4-932067fbf...

    > Is Amazon really getting value
    > out of all the dev time they are
    > putting into building game engines?

What an odd way to think about projects like these. It seems obvious that the answer is "of course not, yet".

You could have asked the same question about AWS in 2001. Why is a bookstore putting all this effort into some online hosting platform for third parties?

AWS was reusing their existing infrastructure and expertise and opening it up to 3rd parties.

I'm unclear why Amazon needs a custom game engine. They must have some plans to enter this area, maybe make their own VR headsets?

I can think of a couple of reasons why Amazon might be interested in VR, from displaying 3D views of their products to constructing a virtual mall for browsing.

Not really. They mostly built a second parallel system for aws and moved to using it several years after launch. Yes they used knowledge that existed in house but it was a totally separate project and mini company

We imagined that Amazon AWS was letting us use a few of their servers that were idle because it was not the Xmas rush. This was a convenient narrative at the time and it explained the competitive pricing. Reality was that it was a different gig.

I believe that was the goal, but like any large endeavor it took a while to get going.

But look at all of the other additions on top of AWS now - you're not just getting bare metals, you're getting an entire stack from the machine to the speech output. They have the bare metal, they're just ramping up the value adds in verticals they know can be huge (plus, building... and I hate the word... synergies with Twitch).

All of that CryEngine expertise was probably going to go down the toilet - am going to assume it's been comparatively cheap for them to get a AAA game engine into their locker.

VR online shopping could be a massive thing one day.

Reminds me of the virtual reality access to the market in the movie Valerian.

Given the hype about running games virtualized in AWS, no it is not unclear. Amazon wants a game engine native to their cloud, rather than a PC engine running on virtualized hardware, so people can start thinking really big about VR or games, rather than "one machine at a time" models.

I think this is one of those things that nobody expects that will be obvious in hindsight. Offloading rendering and game logic/AI to a massively parallel server network will allow MMOGs to break new ground in world complexity and persistence, and sell subscriptions to more people that can't afford dedicated gaming machines.

Also, they can sell to "casual" gamers. Rent a character and just go. Don't pay for more than you use.

I think it would be doable for most current MMORPGS which aren't very timing sensitive so even if you have a couple hundred ms of lag it could still be playable (especially if the game is designed around this limitation).

VR however is one application where network lag would clearly be totally unacceptable. Can you imagine having even 50ms of lag while turning your head in a game? It seems like out of all the applications of "cloud gaming" this would be the least suitable one. It's not even about the game feeling laggy and floaty, it's about not getting sick while playing it.

I guess they could render a huge FoV for every eye and let the client do the actual tracking to mask some of the latency, but I'm not sure how you can make any translation work that way.

I'm not saying it's impossible and it'll never happen but if that's really the objective it seems they're doing it the wrong way around. Shouldn't they first develop "cloud gaming" infrastructure and then move on to the particular niche of VR?

Ah, yeah I was thinking more generally than VR. The R&D efforts at Oculus to reduce latency from GPU to viewport indicate that network rendering isn't going to work unless you anticipate and buffer the set of every frame the user could possibly require shortly ahead of time; technically possible for low-fidelity graphics I guess but very inefficient (although now that I'm thinking about it you would have to include all possible states of all non-static game assets as well, which creates a combinatorial explosion; I don't see how it could possibly work).

Regarding cloud gaming, Nvidia has a service in beta, but Amazon seems well positioned for a monopoly in this space (for both developer and consumer use cases) and I'm surprised they haven't been pushing hard for it. I've been using Paperspace heavily for cloud gaming for the last six months and it's a very compelling value proposition. All things considered I'd still rather have a dedicated custom PC, but I can't justify spending $2,000 up front for something that is already good enough at $0.60/hr on demand. You can imagine how big the market could be if instead of selling loss-making consoles you could just push a smart TV app that connects to a cloud gaming service and eliminate the console upgrade cycle. It would also be much easier to lure users from other networks if they don't have to invest $300 in a console to switch. I don't know if it would be a losing proposition for Microsoft and Sony but it could be an entry point for a leaner competitor to get a leg up on the incumbents.

Amazon owns Twitch and presented the Twitch Launcher not too long ago, which is basically a Steam competitor. Game engines are probably gonna be given for free to devs to build games specifically on this platform.

In a word: Kindle.

Amazon et al may anticipate VR becoming HUGE in the future, so they'd best start creating top-tier easy-access infrastructure & tools for supporting it. Each will want to be THE go-to for customers, just like e-book customers mostly go to Kindle (and a few competitors provide solid alternatives, like iBooks); wasn't that long ago most of us watched the e-book reader market explode onto the scene with lots of competition between B&N, Kobo, Sony, Amazon, Apple, and anyone else that could create a viable e-ink tablet. Similar happened with streaming video, with just a few set-top boxes surviving (Amazon FireTV, Apple TV, Roku, and a few others). All these need a solid, cheap, desirable content-creation platform and distribution system.

Next up is VR: when you're going to render content, what distribution platform will you build for? how will you sell it? what's the go-to store for buying virtual worlds? Bezos & co will want you to choose Amazon Lumberyard &/| Sumerian (and Tim Cook & co will persuade accordingly toward Apple rOS, and Facebook is figuring out how to position Oculus, etc).

StarCitizen is based on Lumberyard now. In theory, any game using the right versions of CryEngine can move to Lumberyard as well, for whatever reason they might choose to do that.

Really? It seems like they keep refactoring all the time. Feels like Duke Nukem whenever, which switched engines a couple of times too during development.

Lumberyard is a forked version of CryEngine, which Star Citzen was already using (fairly heavily modified for 64 bit precision) so the move to Lumberyard wasn't as big as it seems. They do however refactor other systems like items and inventory quite often which seems to be slowing down development although the new versions do seem like improvements.

Scope creep also knows nothing of Chris Roberts at the helm a crowd funding runaway train. At this point it's now suffering from Hubble's law of the expanding universe, rather than scope creep.

I think they are at last at a scope now that makes sense for a full release. They had to build a hundreds strong, multi-location production team before even getting up to full steam. Games with significantly less scope have taken much longer, without hurdles like that.

It's a double edged sword, because open development has been what drove the crowd funding to such incredible heights (they made 2 million in 48 hours this week, for a total funding so far of 167 million). But it is also the reason for so many people being negative about it's development. People get fatigued of it.

Charles Foster Kane^W^W^WJeff Bezos: You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... 100,000 years.

AWS will take a shot at nearly every meaningful service that can be shoe-horned into what they do. Some will work, some will fail, they'll keep taking shots. It's really that simple for Amazon. Not much is off limits.

Ten years from now, the majority of AR & VR experiences will not be derived from traditional gaming engines like Unity. They'll be built & live on AWS, GC, Azure or similar. It'll be done so as to remove as many units of labor from the process as possible.

Virtual shopping malls via VR and better product information through AR.

AR/VR in product sales is expected to be a multi-billion dollar market. This isn't a game engine, this is a brand/marketing engine with game mechanics.

To the extent that Amazon makes a profit on AWS (and I guess I'm not sure that they do), it would make sense for them to work on things that cost them money, but increase usage of AWS.

This doesn’t feel like a competitor to Unity, it feels more like what I’ve heard of Second Life being used for.

Not an actual competitor to it, but almost like a reimagination without the social aspect, instead just being a sort of world builder. Like Minecraft with real objects

they're big enough that they can justify what appear to be random experiments...although they risk getting tarred with the same brush as Google when they shut them down

Doesn't look like they're intending sumerian it as a game engine at all. Looks like it's to construct enterprise products, like sales-training seminars in VR, with minimal programming.

https://aws.amazon.com/sumerian/ is pretty explicit there.

They own Twitch. They want to expand the games market so there are more people to stream and watch games.

I think the answer is that none of the big companies want to be completely left behind when it comes to the big three technologies (AR / VR / AI). Even though they don't have any big VR or AR hardware this is a way to say they're investing in the space and carving out a niche. They see these engines as a way to sell AWS offerings. One area being servers for games, another being bots and AI and a third being hosting for immersive media. Some immersive technologies will have huge requirements in terms of bandwidth (for instance, offering high def 360 video with lightfields or depth information). They haven't come to fruition yet, but in a decade, who knows?

There is nothing random about the world's most powerful retailer wanting the basis of virtual retail to be based on an 3D engine they control, and not one controlled by an independent third party, such as Unity.

This is clearly based on Goo Create, which went bankrupt a few years ago: https://goocreate.com I never figured out how bought the assets as it was never announced.

Take this screenshot of AWS Sumerian: https://media.amazonwebservices.com/blog/2017/Sumerian-07-Ma...

And this screenshot of Goo Create: https://learn.goocreate.com/manual/editor/create-ui.png

They are the same.

Here is a side-by-side image of the two: https://twitter.com/BenAtExocortex/status/935158702180417536

Wow, too similar to not be a descendant.

Saying they're the same is like saying Notepad2 and Sublime are the same, both have status bars which indicate place in text, both support copy+pasting of text, etc.

If you have a 3d modeling program of some sort, of course it will have an object manager which shows components like your model, the lights, the sky, a position box that tells you current size/rotation information of whatever component, your current viewport settings, etc. And since it's a cloud thing, like Fusion360 it has an asset manager which probably works more or less the same way.

Unless you're fundamentally reinventing the wheel in some aspect, they ARE going to be the same in a lot of places.

You do not understand. I am not saying it is similar or inspired, it is the same app.

I assure you I am not mistaken in this claim.

I don't know why you have to be so condescending with your comment, but as someone who has used Goo Create, I am willing to bet money that it is the same app.

Hm, was I really condescending in my comment? I've gone back to re-read it and it doesn't strike me as condescending, indeed when I wrote the comment I wrote it simply in a matter-of-factly way with no emotion.

But maybe I slipped. Can you please point out which part was condescending? (serious request; am interested in improving my written speech to be both clear and not condescending in any way)

For what it's worth, I didn't find your comment condescending at all and was puzzled at that remark.

Do you have any more proof? You keep saying it "IS" Goo Create but based off of what? These screenshots are similar, sure... but far from proof.

It looks like you have experience in the industry, it'd be helpful if you laid out a bit more explanation because clearly you have more info.

I am also one of the developers of the original Goo Create (worked on it between 2014 and the end of 2016) and I can confirm it is indeed the same app (including colors, icons, etc). Amazon basically just added some integrations with AWS and a new logo.

I'm one of the original devs of Create and yes, they are the same except for the name/logo.

Goo founder here, can confirm this, was acquired after bankruptcy. Nice to see it live on! (still looks exactly the same which is cool)

It is a pity Amazon didn't make the deal earlier. Can you disclose if the Goo team got anything out of the acquisition? Great to see the project lives on!

We got nothing out of it but experience :P

Doesn't really look the same. The both have dark backgrounds but are completely different otherwise.

All that nerd culture love stuff in the beginning bugged me enough that I didnt want to read the rest of the article. For some of us this is a career and we dont really play into to the whole nerd is beautiful movement.

It struck me as one of those "I'm a marketing person who googled a bunch of terms to try to relate" kind of statements.

Same here, it turns me away. If somebody has to tell me what a cool geek girl they are to try and buy credibility, then they are already losing. Maybe I'm just cynical, but my BS detector starts alerting. A real technologist doesn't have to advertise the fact.

I'd rather just read what the author has to say and not even notice who is behind the keyboard.

The name has to be a reference to Snow Crash.

WARNING: "Snow Crash" is a comedy!

Over the years people mentioned the book in comments about metaverses and VR. But nobody said it was a comedy. I was buying it with the expectation of getting some serious science fiction about a topic I'm interested in.

Instead it starts off with some pizza delivery science fiction parody.

I think you need to listen to reason. Snow Crash is serious business!

Reason is capitalised, unless you mean actual reason.

Why can't it be both?

Keep reading.

Man, I could really go some pizza delivery science fiction parody right about now...

Humoristic books can be also the poignant. Humour does not invalidate an authors observation of human condition.

Serious science fiction does not need to be bereft of comedy. Satirical science fiction, like many of the works of Vonnegut, are hilarious and ludicrous, but no less science fiction for that fact.

I've read comedy science fiction and horror. I don't have a problem with it per se. I just haven't expected it in this case and it was really stupid.

Try:

1. Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge 2. Otherland, by Tad Williams

The GUI is reminiscent of that of goocreate: https://app.goocreate.com https://learn.goocreate.com

It is the evolution of it indeed. Amazon got the code after Goo Technologies went bankrupt, added some integrations with AWS and rebranded it.

omg took me some time to find the actual product page: https://aws.amazon.com/sumerian/

Thank you! I've fished around a bit without success.

Welcome to the future! Throught the magic of Virtual Reality, we can now transform your boring 2D slides into perspective-mapped boring 2D slides [1]! Incredible! /s

[1] https://d1.awsstatic.com/product-marketing/Sumerian/sumerian...

So basically the VRML demos are back.

Yes, of course, but it's IN THE CLOUD, don't you see?

I'm waiting for 10 years from now when we rediscover the ability to write native applications in one language that run on the local OS & processor. No doubt it will be promoted as a magical cure-all elixir.

Welcome to the future, indeed! Where we do simple things in the most complicated way possible.

No more boring screen wipe, dissolve, or fade transitions from one slide to another... Now we have tumbling 3D transitions that induce vomiting to show our bullet-points and walls-of-text.

Steve Jobs was right when he said Powerpoint slides were for people who don't know what they're doing.

This is product launch? Where is the product page? API docs? How does Sumerian relate to Lumberyard, the other Amazon 3D engine?

They demonstrate basic placing of 3D objects in environment, what about UI?

I also did not understood, it looks like half-finished article.

I have a different perspective on all this. Alibaba, recently did something with VR[1][2] Shopping and had good success with it (in China). I think, Amazon might simply be trying to experiment with it to see if it works outside of China. And for this, of course, they need a platform to build on, just like they did with AWS.

I'm also quite curious to know how all this turns out. If we'll be seeing "Total Recall" style ads around us, thanks to Amazon, Google and Facebook, then in which case, we're screwed.

[1] http://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2016/11/28/alibaba-vr-sh...

[2] http://www.thedrum.com/news/2017/07/18/alibaba-merges-online...

What's Amazon really trying to do here?

Taking over the world. I mean, they've been pretty much copying and improving any other web service/tool/cloud service. Why not VR creation and eventually a VR market? It seems to me that this is just like another AWS move towards being in as many markets and fronts as possible.

Maybe they want to evaluate VR commerce. That’s the only explanation that makes any kind of sense to me right now.

I think this may be their first foot in the door towards the inevitable development of a Metaverse/Oasis type VR multiuser environment where millions of people will eventually spend most of their time.

The 2nd coming of VR is cooling a bit right now but with the advent of improved hardware I don't see why it won't heat up again reaching mass adoption within a decade.

If 3D TVs failed to reach mass adoption why would this?

Because 3D in a TV is kinda ok, VR is actually affecting.

I'm not convinced that most people are going to care. 3D was cool, but putting glasses on was too much friction. Putting an entire headset on is, I think, a bridge too far.

Content availability issues aside, I think it's because it's single user. TV is often a social pastime, and if anyone involved has issues with 3D, no-one gets to use it.

> where millions of people will eventually spend most of their time.

I'll try very hard to avoid that. I'd like computers to evolve in a way that we have to spend less time with them rather than more.

Whether for better or worse, the current trend of smartphone and social media usage implies that this is more likely than not.

Yes, and as I wrote I'm trying hard to avoid it. So far so good.

>>>Metaverse/Oasis type VR multiuser environment

If anyone has an app for AR, Amazon has an app for AR.

Maybe they're expecting us to browse the aisles virtually in the very near future?

Nearly every valuable and or volume product (not every copy of every product) will be scanned for VR/AR purposes, so you'll be able to actually examine it from most or all angles. There's no scenario where Amazon doesn't do this eventually. The applications for clothing alone (which they're extremely determined to be huge in) makes it a big obvious must. Near-term it'll be ugly, 20 years out it'll be so good as to be the routine way to shop for a lot of products (you won't bother with basic well understood purchases, things in generic boxes, like advil).

Furniture apps using ARKit work shockingly well for this already. I definitely expect to see Amazon support something similar for a lot of products soon, and I think it'd be genuinely useful.

My company did a lot of experimentation with VR shopping. While the idea seems cool, 2D is generally faster and easier than 3D.

>The 2nd coming of VR is cooling a bit right now

It's true and it's unfortunate, we're just starting to see "affordable" hardware with decent performance. I finally pulled the trigger and bought a Rift, at 400 euros for the headset and the controllers it's pretty decent value IMO. Too bad VR seems to have lost some of its hype in the past year or two.

Err.. that's the exact definition of .. hype.

I don't understand, what is?

Exaggerated promotion/excitement for a certain thing/tech in a short time. Which then suddenly disappears when another new think/tech is announced.

Ah I see. My point was that in this case the hype was maybe a bit early, the tech was way too expensive for anything but wealthy early adopters up until a few months ago. I see that Oculus has announced the "Go", set to release early next year at $199. At this price it's no longer early adopter tech.

I'm sure when these affordable VR sets are coming out the vendors are going to make a marketing push, preferably coupled with some big game releases.

Personally I would call it the 3rd coming, VRML in 1995, Virtual Worlds in 2005, and now VR/AR in 2015. Just might stick this time, but it will be slower than they predict.

Amazon builds their own VRML

Gain developers attention. And it worked!

They're interested in AWS use on the backend.

A bit at a tangent, but I was recently looking for software (open source or commercial) that could help me develop a 'interior design / planning' editor. I.e.: given a specific area (outside dimensions), allow to drag walls, doors, etc to create a floorplan, and given that, allow more detailed planning like kitchen, bathroom appliances, etc. Ideally, this would result in a 3d-model which could be imported in a tool like Amazon Sumerian to do a 3d-walkthrough. Any advice on where to look?

We support creating interactive experiences with our https://threekit.com toolset.

Everything old is new again:

We did that exact thing 30 years ago: Auto-Graph Computer Designing Systems' "Kitchen & Bath design". Draw walls on grid paper. Choose placement of items. View in 3d. It was used at home improvement stores to preview remodeling efforts for the consumer. We had a package dedicated to wire shelving, too called ClosetDesign that let you drag objects from a 2D palette onto a 3d surface. It would produce a materials list and even print drilling templates for the support brackets.

And again 20 years ago with Virtus Walkthrough. A visualization tool for architects.

Both companies are long gone. Now you can pick up simple architectural design software on a CD at officemax for $5. There's probably a free package online.

Sumerian is feeling like the same thing "but on the cloud." Maybe I shouldn't knock it. Entire careers were built taking manual processes and "putting them on the computer" so people could do bad work faster.

SketchUp might be the closest thing to what you're looking for.

Try sweet home 3d. It's free and open source and designed specially for home design cad (really great for figuring out furniture layouts).

As far as I know, Sketchup is still available and is pretty good for this kind of work.

We build tools like that over at https://virtualsaleslab.com. Not open source unfortunately...

Integration with other services is the key. This could help offload some of the heavy lifting publishers have to deal with around infrastructure.

Can you explain it little bit further? Which kind of services are we are talking about here?

Recently they have added ARView made with ARKit on iOS. I think moving forward they think the future in AR, VR and provide their vendors and other developer to build on this platform.

This is really forward thinking approach and it is kind of same they had done with AWS in 2000.

Back in the day, I really loved Poser on the Mac. Is there a good web-based or free linux alternative these days? Something you can use to create realistic humans?

MakeHuman is what you are looking for. http://www.makehuman.org/

Or the fork of MakeHuman from its creator [0] - http://manuelbastioni.com/

[0]: I may be remembering it wrong.

I assume this is based on the CryEngine they licensed? Can someone shed some light on the differences between Amazon Lumberyard and Amazon Sumerian?

I think this will destroy some dreams :-/ Mine included, I am/was working about something similar.

Tools aren't a zero sum game, go make your thing ;)

Looks like Sims

Best news to my years. Unity is bloated and needs serious competition. +1 for using JavaScript for scripting.

This looks to be targeting enterprise-style VR products rather than games. Sales training in VR, etc. Lumberyard is their game engine

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