Robert M. Luckey 
What is Playstation nathan drake and interior designer Jamie Drake have in common? Aside from their names, maybe more than you think.
It’s no secret that designers are ditching drawing tables and blueprints for programs that create real-time spatial renderings. Virtual and augmented reality and 3D graphics were invented by the video game industry, but are also becoming the norm in the design industry. As a result, the two spheres are seeing talent intersect, and designers and architects are giving up their jobs at design companies for game companies.
A bedroom from FortniteCourtesy of Epic Games
With so many technological advances in 3D visualization, gaming and virtual entertainment companies have been under heavy pressure to hire design professionals to lay out and create spaces and work on material designs for games like Spider-Man and World of Warcraft. . “All the things you do in a traditional interior design business — instead of doing it for physical spaces, you do it for virtual spaces,” says Doug North Cook, assistant professor of immersive media at Chatham University in Pittsburgh. Some big companies like Microsoft and Epic Games are even creating in-house design teams, though North Cook cautions that to land jobs like these, in addition to a design resume, you also need to have complementary experience, including including ‘sophisticated 3D modeling skills and a background in architecture and layout.
Gaming and interior companies use renderings to create rich interiors that look real and authentic. That means looking into the details, like making sure electrical outlets are neatly placed and doors all have buttons. As video games become more realistic, it’s up to designers to create virtual rooms that match the layout and functionality of real spaces, in part to help players navigate games easily. “Using software like Unreal Engine, [architects and designers] now have a full suite of architectural interfaces and tools to extract files from Revit, integrate them and make them fully interactive and working in three dimensions in real time,” says North Cook.
“They do everything an architect would do, [achieving] a level of immersion that makes a game feel like you’re in a real city. All of this is painstakingly created in excruciating and elaborate detail.
To reflect the need for design professionals with video game experience, interior design schools and programs across the country are integrating training into the curriculum. New York Fashion Institute of Technology students use programs like Revit, Rhino and SketchUp for 3D visualization, says interior design department director Carmita Sanchez-Fong. His school teaches such programs so that students who are interested in interactive environments and 3D visualizations can find career paths after graduation, whether in the gaming or design industries.
In 2019, North Cook is launching a new BA program in Immersive Media, in which students will work on virtual and augmented reality projects: “We are taking this traditional architectural thinking and applying it to virtual and augmented reality experiences. We will produce graduates who [have] architectural thinking, but also the skills and tools needed to be highly functional in an entertainment space, a gaming space, or in an architectural firm doing renderings or implementation,” he says.
Spider-Man swinging through the streets of New York Courtesy of Insomniac Games
In video games, real-time renders aren’t always simple rooms and office buildings. Sanchez-Fong says that World of Warcraft “has very creative indoor and outdoor spaces, fantasy-based mythical spaces.” North Cook points to Marvel’s Spider-Man, which released earlier this year, in which Spidey swings on a web around New York City and can enter buildings, explore interiors and climb through ventilation systems. “You go down to sub-levels of detail that you might not expect, where the building has doors, elevator shafts, and HVAC systems,” he says. “They do everything an architect would do, [achieving] a level of immersion that makes a game feel like you’re in a real city. All of this is painstakingly created in excruciating and elaborate detail.
The opportunities in the gaming industry are not only vast, they are extremely lucrative.
The opportunities in the gaming industry are not only vast, they are extremely lucrative. When the highly anticipated game Red Dead Redemption 2 released in late October, it sold $725 million worth of units in three days to become the second-biggest entertainment launch in history. (The single highest-grossing launch? Another video game, Grand Theft Auto V.) In Red Dead Redemption 2, players navigate a rugged landscape as outlaw Arthur Morgan, hunting and trapping in the wilderness. mountains, fishing along rivers and lakes, or visiting a number of towns, outposts and Indian reservations in the five incorporated states of the American West. It’s an immersive cowboy experience, right down to the items for sale in the General Store.
These carefully crafted details are important and speak to players’ desire for highly organized environments. Fortnite, which earns $300 million a month from in-game microtransactions even though it’s free-to-play, is set in a modern-day apocalyptic version of Earth where players roam the outdoors collecting goods to build fortifications, then fight for victory. In World of Warcraft, which has over 100 million registered players and grossed nearly $10 billion in 2017, players navigate the fantasy world of Azeroth, complete with dungeons, spaceships and alien realms. Even in such imaginative worlds, the details still matter in making a player’s experience believable.
An image of Peter Parker’s bedroom in the Spider-Man video gameCourtesy of Insomniac Games
Blizzard (World of Warcraft), Epic Games (Fortnite) and Microsoft are some of the best employers of designers in the gaming world. At the same time, programs like Unreal Engine, originally developed by Epic Games to make Fortnite extremely popular, are now used by architectural firms around the world. “It’s an example of people investing huge amounts of money to create really sophisticated 3D tools,” says North Cook. “This investment has gone from architecture and construction to games and interactive media. This is where the real innovation with 3D rendering, 3D graphics and 3D modeling really happened.
Now is the time for interior design and architecture firms to catch up, he says.
