“For gamers, Arm has made it possible to expand the limit of our imaginations” – Kristoffer Benjaminson, CTO & Co-founder of Fast Travel Games.
When Arm and Fast Travel Games started working together, they didn’t know that their experiment would lead to a journey of innovation. This resulted in its core title Apex Construct being in the exclusive club of launch titles for the new Oculus Quest.
Arm is built around our partnerships. Our vast community of more than 1000 software, tools, and service partners support and enable the use of our technology across many different markets and applications.
Overall, the Arm partnership touches billions of people and devices worldwide. It includes most of the largest tech companies such as those from the mobile, semiconductor, gaming, automotive, infrastructure and IoT industries. Collectively, this represents billions of dollars of investment each year and thousands of engineers worldwide.
In order to build an ecosystem that puts smartphones in the hands of four billion people and secures one trillion IoT devices, strong cross-industry partnerships are integral.
The strongest partnerships are forged around simple questions:
These simple questions can lead to business-changing answers – and these are often so complex and intricate that no single company has the resources or capability to address them single-handedly. Similarly, the ability to answer them is not just at the privilege of large companies collaborating, often the agility and specialist knowledge of smaller firms is just as valuable.
This is how our relationship with Fast Travel Games started. The simple question we asked ourselves was; “would Apex Construct, an award-winning PC and console VR game, run on a mobile VR device?”
With Arm’s vast knowledge of mobile, and Fast Travel Game’s expertise in virtual reality (VR), we began to try and answer this simple question. Together, we started experimenting with a set of approaches and tools to help reduce the compute requirements and make them feasible on mobile – while still retaining the same (or at least perceived) fidelity and immersion.
We built custom tools that batched 3D graphics so that they were faster to render. We built positional inside-out tracking out of the standard smartphone camera to enable six degrees of freedom so that the player could crouch and dodge attacks to preserve the immersive experience. We implemented the latest best practices and mobile techniques to ensure that every texture and asset is optimized, every draw call is prodigal, and every pixel is purposefully rendered, so that the game would run in the most efficient and performant way possible.
To our slight surprise, it worked almost straight away; showing that we are closer than ever to closing the gap in gaming experiences between mobile and console. This will only become easier as Arm processors improve every year and Vulkan consolidates as the de-facto graphics API of choice, allowing for a more effective use of the CPU.
What initially started as a technical experiment to try and answer a simple question, ultimately led Fast Travel Games to apply the same techniques and bring the Apex Construct experience to the new mobile SoC based Oculus Quest VR headset, with it becoming one of its featured launch titles.
This experiment was never guaranteed to lead to any successes. In fact, the potential “failure” itself would yield to interesting learnings and help to answer the initial question. Often, no engineer or marketer can fully anticipate which ideas will lead to ground-breaking results, and which will hit a brick wall and therefore need to be abandoned.
But at Arm we love experimentation. It’s this exploration, this adventurer mentality of trying many things, failing quickly and learning from it, that has made Arm a successful partner. Through strong collaborations, constraints that once appeared insurmountable become trivial. This trait is part of Arm’s DNA and works well when partnering with big and small companies alike.
With Arm being at the epicenter of the world’s largest compute ecosystem, what difference can our team make for you? If you are a developer, whether your field is graphics, AR/VR, machine learning, get in touch and let’s ask simple questions together - which will then lead to something incredible when we solve it together.
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