Scale of the Universe Cary Huang

And another one helps you see just how far it is to Mars.

From nanoparticles to galaxies, we can understand a lot about how our universe works--but it's hard to keep things in context. Can you really grasp how far you'd have to travel to reach Mars? Or wrap your head around the infinitesimally small size of a virus?

A couple of awesome animations will help. The first one, from London-based designers David Paliwoda and Jesse Williams, is an effective way to see just how far away Mars really is. It's shrunk down to a 100-pixel scale. Click here to open the animation.

When you've got Mars down, look at this incredible Flash tool created by Cary and Michael Hwang. It's from last year, and it's the second version of their "Scale of the Universe" animation, but having recently stumbled across it we found it well worth sharing.

You can scroll with a mouse or touchscreen, but I recommend using the slider at the bottom, because then you won't miss any of the lovely animated gifs--from wriggling worms to pulsating Cepheid stars. Click here to open it and enter the Scale of the Universe.

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Epic Games isn't just offering up its ubiquitous current-gen game creation tool Unreal Engine 3 to Oculus Rift developers, but also its next-gen tool, Unreal Engine 4. Epic Games VP Mark Rein told Engadget as much during an interview at this year's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, repeatedly stating he's "super bullish" on the Rift, all the while rocking an Oculus pin on his exhibitor lanyard. "Oh, for sure," he said when we asked about UE4 support for the Rift. "We're working on that now." The Rift dev kit was demoed at CES 2013 running Unreal Engine 3's "Epic Citadel" demo, and Epic's offered support to the Oculus folks since early on, making the UE4 news not a huge surprise, but welcome nonetheless.

The next-gen game engine was being shown off at GDC 2013 with a flashy new demo (seen below the break), as well as a version of its "Elemental" demo running on a PlayStation 4 dev kit (shrouded behind a curtain, of course). Rein was visibly excited about that as well, unable to contain random vocal outbursts during the presentation. "It's a war out there, and we sell bullets and bandaids," he jokingly told us in an interview the following day. The quote comes from coworker and Epic VP of business development Jay Wilbur, and it's fitting -- Epic only makes a handful of games, and the company's real money comes from game engine licensees. In so many words, the more platforms that Unreal Engine variants can go, the better for Epic (as well as for engine licensees, of course). "It's a good place to be -- we try to support everything we can. We have to place some timed bets on things that we feel are gonna be the most important to licensees, and also to us where we're taking games. But because the engine is portable -- it's written in C++ -- a licensee can take and do whatever they want," he said.

Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals, Software, HD

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