Nick Whiting

Nick Whiting is a software engineer who led virtual reality and augmented reality development for Unreal Engine at Epic Games. He built Unreal Engine 4's original Oculus Rift integration as an after-hours side project, then led Epic's VR group, which made the demos Couch Knights, Showdown and Bullet Train and the 2017 Oculus Touch game Robo Recall. From 2017 to late 2018 he was the first chair of the Khronos Group's OpenXR working group, which developed an open standard API for VR and AR applications.

Whiting later ran Epic's Seattle studio as studio head and worked as a senior director of engineering. After leaving Epic he co-founded kumikai, a studio that applies real-time game engine technology to enterprise and entertainment projects.

Reviewed 27 September 2026. Re-checked every cited source for the Epic Games career, VR demo, Robo Recall, OpenXR chair and kumikai claims, quotes and dates; removed unverifiable education details. About review dates.

Early life and education

According to his LinkedIn profile, Whiting attended the University of Colorado Boulder from 2001 to 2005. In a 2015 interview he said he had a background in biomedical engineering, and that working on VR let him "get into the human interface stuff again."

Career

Epic Games and Unreal Engine

Whiting was a lead programmer at Epic Games, where he worked on several Unreal Engine releases and on Gears of War 3 and Gears of War: Judgment, and he helped lead Unreal Engine 4's Blueprint visual scripting system. The kumikai founders' page credits him with work on Gears of War, Fortnite and Robo Recall over nearly 20 years in video games.

Bringing the Oculus Rift to Unreal Engine 4

Whiting knew Oculus VR co-founders Brendan Iribe and Nate Mitchell from earlier work with them at Scaleform. When they started Oculus, they asked whether they could send him a development kit and whether he would integrate it into Unreal Engine 4. He built the integration "in the late hours" after work. In a 2015 SIGGRAPH interview he recalled that his "friend Nate sent me an Oculus DK1 kit," and that the after-hours integration led to a VR version of Epic's Elemental tech demo, which Oculus used to show its first HD prototype. Oculus showed the 1080p Rift prototype running environments from the Elemental demo at E3 in June 2013.

Whiting told the Voices of VR podcast that the E3 showing gave the project traction inside Epic, but that the deciding moment came when Epic founder Tim Sweeney and engineering director Dan Vogel tried Valve's VR demo room. Programmer J.J. Hazing then joined him, and designer Nick Donaldson and Paul Motter were added to build demos with Oculus. By early 2015 he described himself as the lead of the VR group at Epic.

VR demos

Couch Knights, an Unreal Engine 4 demo that Epic made with Oculus, debuted with the Oculus Rift DK2 at GDC 2014. Two players sit on a virtual couch and control small knights that fight around the room. Whiting was wiring the headset's tracking data onto the players' avatars when he noticed Donaldson's avatar leaning forward during a test match; he later called it "the first time I had truly recognized another human presence in VR." He told Voices of VR that sending body language between two players in a shared space "was a huge lesson to us."

Showdown was built to debut Oculus's Crescent Bay prototype and NVIDIA's GTX 980. Whiting said the team had about five weeks and a content team of two, reused assets from Epic's Samaritan and Infiltrator demos, and slowed about seven seconds of animation to fill the two-minute demo. The demo ran at 90 Hz on a GeForce GTX 980 as the final scene of the Crescent Bay demo series. Epic showed Showdown at the VR Village at SIGGRAPH 2015, where Whiting also spoke at Epic's educational workshop and production session. In a January 2015 MCV interview he noted that Couch Knights and Showdown had been built entirely in Blueprints, without game code. Thief in the Shadows, a Hobbit experience that Epic made with Weta Digital for the Crescent Bay prototype, followed at GDC 2015; Epic lists it among the VR projects Whiting shipped.

Whiting and Donaldson built Bullet Train in 10 weeks for Oculus Connect 2 in 2015. It was used to tune Unreal Engine's VR rendering and to test Oculus's motion-tracked Touch controllers, and it included a time-slowing mechanic and teleport movement designed around the forward-facing camera setup Oculus recommended. At the same conference, Whiting, Donaldson and Ray Davis ran the three-hour Hands on Workshop with Unreal Engine on 25 September 2015, offering one-to-one reviews of attendees' Unreal Engine projects with a focus on performance and VR design. Earlier that year he was one of ten judges of Oculus' Mobile VR Jam 2015, alongside Palmer Luckey and John Carmack.

Robo Recall

Whiting said that after Bullet Train, Oculus asked Epic whether it wanted to turn the demo into a full game, and that Robo Recall "started with the base of Bullet Train as it stood." Tim Sweeney said Oculus initiated and funded the project. Whiting told Road to VR that the 15-person Robo Recall team, pulled from other projects around Epic, was the company's first "proper, dedicated" VR team, after years of borrowing staff for the demos.

For the game, Epic wrote a new forward renderer, partly based on Oculus's work, that allowed MSAA anti-aliasing in VR; Whiting said MSAA made geometry noticeably sharper in stereoscopic 3D. Robo Recall was released free for Oculus Rift owners with Touch controllers on 1 March 2017, with a mod editor that Whiting called "a low friction way to get more people into VR." In October 2017 Epic published his talk "Technical Postmortem for Robo Recall, and Beyond!", which covered the profiling and optimization methods the team used to hold VR frame rates.

By 2017 his title was technical director of VR and AR at Epic Games, overseeing Unreal Engine 4's VR and AR work. In a February 2017 Road to VR interview he said a VR killer app "has to be something that uniquely justifies the medium," and that social VR works because "we track real human motion." In August 2017 Epic announced him as the headline speaker of the VRTGO conference, held in Gateshead, England, on 1-2 November 2017, with a talk on what Epic had learned from building Robo Recall.

OpenXR

Whiting chaired the Khronos Group's OpenXR working group from its start. A March 2017 Khronos news item introducing him as the elected chair quoted the group's warning that "the growing number of devices, each with their own incompatible APIs is increasing fragmentation," and reported Whiting's view that the key issue was timing. At GDC in March 2018 he gave Voices of VR host Kent Bye an early look at the specification's approach to tracking, frame timing and input, including an action-based input model in which applications declare actions instead of binding directly to specific hardware.

He stepped down in late 2018, citing additional responsibilities at Epic, and Brent Insko of Intel's Virtual Reality Group was elected to succeed him. Whiting said he had served "for just shy of two years" and that "Epic remains just as committed as ever to the standard." OpenXR 1.0 was released in July 2019.

Epic Seattle

The kumikai founders' page says Whiting spent several years building Epic's Seattle studio as studio head, and led engineering teams at Epic as a senior director of engineering. Epic opened a Seattle-area studio in 2012 and in 2017 leased office space in Bellevue, Washington.

kumikai

Whiting is technical co-founder of kumikai, which describes itself as "an advanced technology and operational services studio specializing in bringing realtime technology to enterprise and entertainment applications." He founded it with Kathna Eng, formerly studio operations director of Epic Games Seattle. In July 2024 the novelist Neal Stephenson described Whiting as "a former studio head and engineering director at Epic" whose company helps developers who use Unreal Engine to build applications that are not games. Whiting is also on the advisory board of the University of Washington Information School's iStartup Lab, listed as technical co-founder of kumikai.