Havok

Havok
Information
Type	Physics engine
Industry	Video game development
Developer	Havok (Microsoft)
Written In	C++
Operating System	Windows, Linux, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, iOS, Android
License	Proprietary
Release Date	2000
Website	https://www.havok.com

Havok is a real-time physics simulation middleware product, and the name of the Dublin-based company that develops it. The core product, Havok Physics, handles collision detection and rigid-body dynamics for video games, and is sold as a C++ software development kit (SDK) that studios integrate into their own game engines, with ready-made integrations for Unreal Engine, Unity and the web engine Babylon.js. The company was founded in Dublin in 1998 by Trinity College Dublin computer scientists Steven Collins and Hugh Reynolds, was bought by Intel in 2007 and has belonged to Microsoft since October 2015.

Havok's current product line is Havok Physics, Havok Navigation (navigation mesh generation, pathfinding and steering) and Havok Cloth (simulation of garments, hair and other soft bodies), each also offered as an Unreal Engine plugin. Havok states that "more than half of the best-selling games are using Havok technology".

In virtual reality and augmented reality, Havok appears in two ways. Havok lists VR titles such as Stormland and Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot among games powered by Havok Physics, and a WebAssembly build of the engine supplies the physics for browser-based XR toolkits, including Babylon.js, Meta's Immersive Web SDK and Zappar's Mattercraft editor.

Reviewed 6 October 2026. Founding, Intel and Microsoft acquisitions, pricing, SDK release dates, Unity/Unreal/web integration details, VR game list, WebXR toolkit uses and the ICRA 2015 paper checked against the cited sources. About review dates.

History

Founding and early years

Havok was founded in 1998 by Steven Collins and Hugh Reynolds, who worked on real-time physics simulation software for computer games. Collins was chief executive officer and Reynolds chief technical officer. The company, formerly called Telekinesys Research Ltd., started in a Dublin Business Innovation Centre incubator. In 2007 the two founders won the Trinity College Dublin Innovation Award for the spin-out. The company's breakthrough came with the release of the Havok Software Development Kit in 2000, which let developers add physics effects to games and, later, to films.

By September 2007 Havok was headquartered in Dublin, had more than 75 employees (most of them in Dublin) and had offices in San Francisco, San Antonio, Stockholm, Kolkata, Munich and Tokyo. The Register listed BioShock, Half-Life 2, MotorStorm, Second Life and the then-unreleased Halo 3 among the games using the technology, and the films Poseidon, The Matrix, Troy and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory among its film work. Half-Life 2, built on Valve's then-new Source engine in 2004, used Havok as its physics engine.

Intel ownership (2007-2015)

Intel announced the purchase of Havok in September 2007. The price was not disclosed by Intel, but TVC Holdings, which sold its stake as part of the deal, valued the all-cash transaction at US$110 million. Intel said Havok would keep operating as an independent business and continue to offer its products on all platforms. Havok then announced that the PC version of Havok Complete, its package of Havok Physics and Havok Animation, would be freely downloadable for non-commercial use from May 2008; under an agreement with Intel, approved PC game developers could also obtain a commercial distribution license at no charge.

In August 2011 Havok agreed to acquire Trinigy, the maker of the Vision Engine, which was to be rebranded as the Havok Vision Engine. At GDC in March 2013 the company announced Project Anarchy, a free mobile engine and toolkit for iOS, Android and Tizen that bundled the Vision Engine with Havok Physics, Animation Studio and AI tools, with no commercial restrictions on company size or revenue.

Microsoft ownership (2015-present)

Microsoft announced on 2 October 2015 that it had acquired Havok from Intel. Its announcement said Havok had worked with Activision, EA, Ubisoft, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft and others on more than 600 games, and that Microsoft would "continue to license Havok's development tools to partners" while integrating the technology with DirectX 12, Visual Studio and Microsoft Azure. The purchase price was not disclosed.

At GDC in March 2019, Unity Technologies announced two physics systems for its Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS): the default Unity Physics and a proprietary Havok Physics option. Havok Physics for Unity was declared ready for production use with the Unity 2022.2 Tech Stream in December 2022. In April 2023 Microsoft's Babylon.js 6.0 added a Havok WebAssembly plugin, which Microsoft said was free and gave "up to 20x faster performance" together with a rewritten physics API.

On 25 March 2025 Havok introduced a pricing model for game companies with per-title budgets of up to US$20 million: a per-title fee of US$50,000 with no royalty for Havok Physics and Havok Navigation, including their Unreal Engine plug-in versions. As of October 2026 Havok's pricing page lists US$50,000 per Havok product for that budget tier and custom pricing, full source access and all products for larger budgets.

The following table summarizes the ownership history.

Period	Owner or status	Source
1998-2007	Independent company founded in Dublin (formerly Telekinesys Research Ltd.)
2007-2015	Subsidiary of Intel (reported US$110 million, all cash)
October 2015-present	Owned by Microsoft (price undisclosed)

Products and features

Havok describes Havok Physics as "a mature, fully production-ready physics engine that has super-powered hundreds of shipped games". Features listed by the company include dynamic rigid bodies, collision detection, ragdolls, character controllers, a constraint solver plus a direct solver, level-of-detail collision shapes, geometry processing, large world support, physics particles and a visual debugger. Fast-moving objects are handled by continuous collision detection, which is on by default.

Havok also states that Havok Physics "guarantees identical output across all supported platforms and targets", with the caveat that this applies to the SDK itself and depends on it being integrated into a deterministic engine. Havok Physics Particles are lightweight physics objects that trade fidelity for speed, suited to objects that are not critical to gameplay and to visual effects, with uses including enhanced destruction, airborne particles and fluid simulation. Havok's website lists Windows, Linux, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, iOS and Android as supported platforms.

Havok releases new SDK versions twice a year, named in the form "Havok 202X.Y.Z". Selected releases announced on Havok's blog are shown below; 2025.2 was the most recent one announced there as of October 2026.

Version	Announced	Selected changes	Source
2023.2	31 January 2024	Path smoothing in the AI (navigation) product, faster Cloth export, physics optimizations for static and keyframed bodies, Unreal Engine 5.3 integrations
2024.1	15 July 2024	154 updates across Navigation, Cloth and Physics; multithreaded write access to the physics world; entanglement resolution for compound bodies; Unreal Engine 5.4 integration
2025.2	18 December 2025	Stable simulation and queries in worlds up to 1000 km (up from 100 km), automatic LOD collision shapes, voxelized proxy-based nav mesh generation, variable time-step mode for Cloth, beta of a rewritten Visual Debugger

Engine integrations

Unreal Engine

Havok Physics for Unreal is an engine-level integration that replaces Unreal Engine's default physics system; using it requires rebuilding the engine. Licensees get access to the integration source code, which is distributed through GitHub or a partner branch on Epic's Perforce server, and access first requires Unreal Engine source access from Epic. Havok says the plugin is updated within two weeks of each Unreal Engine release and twice a year with new SDK versions. According to Havok, its Unreal products had 13 releases for Unreal Engine 5.5 alone. Initial support for Unreal Engine 5.7 was released on 28 November 2025, followed by the 2025.2 integration for 5.7 on 16 December 2025.

Unity

Havok Physics for Unity brings the engine to Unity's Entity Component System (ECS). It builds on Unity Physics, the C# physics engine that Unity and Havok wrote for DOTS, and uses the same input and output data formats, so a project can switch simulation backends without changing physics assets or code. Unity's documentation describes it as a stateful engine whose simulation is more than twice as fast as Unity Physics in scenes with many rigid bodies, because of automatic sleeping of inactive bodies and other caching. The package is a binary-only distribution of Havok Physics 2021.2, without C++ source access or direct support from Havok. At its production release, Unity made it available at no cost to Unity Pro, Enterprise and Industrial Collection subscribers. Unity's changelog dates package version 1.4.2, the latest version as of October 2026, to 5 September 2025.

Web

The Havok web build is published on npm as @babylonjs/havok, described as "The Havok physics engine for the web", under the MIT License. Version 1.0.0 was published on 20 April 2023, the day Babylon.js 6.0 was announced, and version 1.3.14, the latest as of October 2026, was published on 29 July 2026. Havok's own site lists the Babylon.js implementation alongside the Unreal plugin as a ready-made way to use Havok Physics.

Use in VR and AR

VR games

Havok's selection of games powered by Havok Physics includes the VR titles Stormland, Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot and Nintendo Labo Toy-Con 04: VR Kit. Stormland is a VR open-world adventure from Insomniac Games for the Oculus Rift, released on 14 November 2019. Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot was announced by Bethesda at E3 2018 as a standalone VR game. The Nintendo Labo VR Kit for the Nintendo Switch combines cardboard Toy-Con builds, including VR goggles, with VR games.

Valve replaced Havok in its own engine. In a GDC talk, Valve's Sergiy Migdalskiy said its in-house Rubikon physics engine had been in development since 2012 as the replacement for Havok, and Rubikon is the physics engine built into Source 2, the engine of Half-Life: Alyx.

Virtual worlds

Linden Lab uses Havok in Second Life "to simulate physics, gravity, collisions and other in-world actions and interactions". According to the Second Life Wiki, the virtual world was running Havok 2011.2 in production as of 2014.

WebXR toolkits

Babylon.js, whose 6.0 release added the Havok plugin, also supports WebXR; Microsoft's announcement of Babylon.js 7.0 listed several new WebXR features and "full support" for the Apple Vision Pro.

Meta's Immersive Web SDK (IWSDK), an MIT-licensed WebXR framework built on Three.js, has a physics system "powered by the @babylonjs/havok physics engine". Its PhysicsSystem manages the Havok physics world, and objects get a PhysicsBody (static, dynamic or kinematic) and a PhysicsShape with density, restitution and friction; the documentation shows these combined with the SDK's grab interactions so that users can pick up physics-driven objects in XR. Meta's April 2026 developer blog lists Havok physics first among the features IWSDK provides "out of the box", alongside grab interactions, teleport and smooth locomotion, articulated hand tracking and AR scene understanding.

Zappar's Mattercraft, a browser-based development environment built on Three.js for web AR, VR and WebXR content, includes the Havok physics engine for rigid bodies, colliders and constraints.

Research

Havok has been studied as a general-purpose simulator outside games. At the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Tom Erez, Yuval Tassa and Emanuel Todorov compared Bullet, Havok, MuJoCo, ODE and PhysX on robotics-style tests. They found that each engine did best on the kind of system it was designed for: MuJoCo won the robotics tests and the gaming engines won the gaming tests, with no clear leader among them. Havok and PhysX were the least consistent engines on the authors' accuracy measure, which the authors attributed to gaming optimizations that target stability rather than accuracy. The paper gives the ignoring of Coriolis forces in Havok and PhysX as an example of how gaming engines sacrifice physical accuracy to gain stability.

See also

• Game engine
• Unity
• Unreal Engine
• Babylon.js
• WebXR