Chris Evans

Tomorrow, I start a new full-time position as VP Digital Human Research at Epic Games. (And no, this isn’t an April Fools’ joke.) Today, I’m taking early retirement from Max Planck and will become an Emeritus Director. As an Emeritus Director, I will continue to supervise my remaining students, oversee ongoing projects, and wind down my department over the next couple of years, which is a normal process when a director retires. Being a Max Planck director is the best academic job in the world and it has been my great honor to co-found and help build the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. I love the institute deeply. But my statutory retirement age was looming and I’m not done yet. I’ve been working on capturing and modeling human movement for 30 years and it has gone from a fringe topic to something that works robustly and has immense potential. With AI today, scale matters, and achieving that scale increasingly requires industry. In particular, digital humans are moving from research prototypes to foundational technology across industries. At this point in my career, I want to get this technology into the hands of millions of users, while pushing the frontier of digital humans. I know that this is a challenging time for the games industry. Such times are precisely when people get creative, the industry is open to change, and real innovation can take root. Epic Games is the ideal place for this. The talent is deep, there is a compelling vision for how games will evolve, and the commitment is clear. I’m excited to join them and the rest of the Meshcapade team. There is no good way to express on social media the depth of my gratitude to the Max Planck Society, my co-directors, students, post docs, and staff. It has been an amazing 15-year journey because of you. Thank you.