Epic Games has scanned the show host and media personality Geoff Keighley into Fortnite for this year’s The Game Awards Island of the Year vote, so you can encounter a lifelike version of Big G while you’re trying out all the nominees and minigames for yourself.
“The Game Awards Vote in Fortnite, which debuted last year, has been refreshed with a batch of new Islands to check out and vote for, an Arena in which to test your combat prowess, and a slick new host: the one and only MetaHuman Geoff Keighley,” an Epic Games blog post says. “This year’s digital Keighley is clearly much improved over 2023’s version. Where last year’s hologram look was created using greenscreen video capture, this year’s makes use of MetaHuman to deliver a more realistic depiction.”
MetaHuman technology aims to allow anyone to create realistic human models in Unreal Engine 5: “MetaHuman is a complete framework that gives anyone the power to create, animate, and use highly realistic digital human characters in any way imaginable.” It doesn’t just happen instantaneously, mind you.
“I saw Epic’s announcement of MetaHumans in Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) earlier this year and thought it would be incredible to see what was possible around The Game Awards,” Keighley says. “I spent a full day at 3Lateral in Manchester, England, to get scanned as a MetaHuman. You sit in a scanner and do tons of different face poses. Then they scan your body too. The results speak for themselves. I truly feel like I have a digital double!”
The model of Keighley does look impressive, but it’s not the first time The Game Awards host has been scanned into a video game. Death Stranding had numerous cameos featuring the likenesses of various gaming and cinematic celebrities, including Keighley, who appeared as the Luden Fan.
I’m not sure which model is better, although I will say that to my untrained eye, they both look pretty similar. But Keighley’s model in Fortnite will probably do much more than just hover over the ground talking at a player, so I guess we’ll have to wait and see if all that time getting scanned for The Game Awards vote was worth it.
If you don’t want to tune into The Game Awards 2024 via Fortnite, you can watch it on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok Live, or other social media sites on December 12 in the US and December 13 in the UK.
