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Keynote insights from Unite 2013

August 29, 2013 in Community | 2 min. read
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Unite 2013 has begun! We kicked everything off with the Unity Technologies keynote address and covered a huge amount of news and insight about the gaming community and Unity’s place in it.

It is an exciting time here at Unity, and we couldn’t be happier to be part of such a vibrant industry. The keynote covered what makes the industry so energetic, where the best opportunities are for developers, and how Unity fits into the picture.

Two of the major announcements, that of the highly desired Unity Cloud ad services, and Unity Games publishing program, demonstrated how Unity is seeing needs beyond technology and moving to address them.

Of course Unity is a technology company at the core, and the keynote wouldn’t be complete without taking a look at some of the wonderful things under production in the lab.

Unity CTO and co-founder Joachim Ante took the stage and discussed the most recently released version, Unity 4.2. To showcase its capabilities, Joachim loaded The Chase, a high-end mobile demo created by the Unity Stockholm team, live on an iPad 4 and discussed the various features used to create one of the most stunning and advanced demonstrations of how Unity can take advantage of the ever increasing power of high-end mobile devices.

Joachim expressed well how the company feels about the overdue GUI system and how glad we are to be making incredible progress on the new tools. Confident enough to demonstrate parts of it and promise delivery in the Unity 4 cycle.

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The biggest announcement on the technical front was undoubtedly the new 2D tools coming in Unity 4.3. They offer an amazing solution for the large number of Unity developers with needs that skew from typical 3D editor workflows and capabilities.

Joachim also demoed upcoming improvements to the Mecanim animation system, including the addition of blendshapes that allow for an incredible and realistic range of motion in 3D characters. He demonstrated this using Mixamo’s Unplugged demo and their exciting FacePlus technology that captures facial animations in real time for the blendshape feature with a simple webcam. He also went on to demonstrate huge optimization improvements and the ability to draw massive numbers of characters animating on screen at the same time.

Finally, games industry legend Richard Garriott talked about the nearly 40 years he's been in the games industry, how things have changed and how Unity has made a lot of the recent changes possible. That was great to hear!

We’ll be uploading further updates to our blog over the next 48 hours with more in-depth info about some of the exciting initiatives and features unveiled at Unite 2013 and touched on briefly in this post. Be sure to check back...

Keynote chapters:

Unity Cloud

Unity Games

GUI demo

2D features

Richard Garriott 

August 29, 2013 in Community | 2 min. read

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