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No Limits - Unity in Cross Industry Development

June 5, 2014 in Community | 6 min. read
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Every industry wants to engage with their audiences in ways that grab and hold attention. Unity, from the beginning, has been designed to be a powerful tool in the creation of imaginative and engaging experiences whether end users are playing games, configuring a car, or walking through an interactive visualization of their new home. Some of the earliest applications built with Unity were of the “serious” kind, so this surge in cross industry uses for games technology is really fun to see. The sheer variety of experiences we’re currently seeing created with Unity is pretty remarkable and is a huge source of inspiration for everyone here. You can see just a small sample of these in the short highlight reel of cross industry projects below...

We’re definitely happy that we’ve had a role in the awesome changes that are making the games industry a more even playing field for developers but we’re also happy to see Unity having a similar effect in a number of other industries.

 

Architecture Visualizations

“Unity provides us with a powerful and versatile 3D toolset, empowering the team at NVYVE to create beautiful and responsive visualizations,” said Adam Simonar, Lead Designer at NVYVE, a company creating virtual environments that allow users to discover architecture such as new homes. “We believe that the architectural industry is experiencing a technological renaissance, providing clients and architects with unprecedented design foresight, and the Unity platform is a huge driving force behind this growth.”

In their Nuovo Condominiums project, NVYVE utilized Unity to create a large 3D visualization of the city of Ottawa, as well as a detailed 3D model of the Nuovo Condos with fully furnished interior suites. Just recently, another of NVYVE’s projects, Minto Longbranch (seen highlighted in the video above) was nominated for 2014 CGArchitect Awards alongside another Android Unity project from Virtual Arts Producciones out of Venezuela.

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Art and Interactive Books/Magazines

Alexx Henry Studios created Art and Skin, a fully interactive digital tattoo “appzine” that allows users to ogle some awesome tattoo photography in full photo-real 3D. “We believe Art and Skin is a cutting edge app that pushes boundaries for editorial content,” said Alexx Henry of Alexx Henry Studios. "Unity has empowered us to create this fully interactive 3D tattoo magazine that is the first of its kind. Combining the xxArray’s incredible 3D captures with Unity’s technology, we’ve been able to employ a forward-thinking approach to deliver interactive 3D art via a mobile app to the world, which we believe will stand the test of time.” The app (already available on iOS) offers users up close rotatable and zoomable views of incredibly detailed tattoos and an interactive insider’s look into the artists’ studios so users can explore each artist’s story.

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Medicine and Training

CliniSpace, from Innovation in Learning (IIL), is a cross-platform application offering an immersive, collaborative and online environment to assist those training in the simulated ED, Ward, ICU, or Mass Casualty disaster sites. "By using Unity, we have been able to create an educational, online virtual simulation center, where medical and nursing students encounter realistic scenarios and problems. As a result, they learn to make decisions, communicate effectively and recover safely from errors," said Parvati Dev, CEO, IIL. "CliniSpace is a cost-effective and scalable addition to all simulator training, and Unity is a compelling solution for helping us bring it to life in the effort to save more lives through hands-on medical training."

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Education, Augmented Reality, and Installations

Unity also enabled Geomedia to launch the National Geographic Earth Explorers tour, which offers users an 3D augmented educational reality scavenger hunt at the Museum of Science and Industry, in association with Global Entertainment Specialist’sNational Geographic Presents: Earth Explorers” exhibit. "We are absolutely thrilled at the top-notch experience the accompanying application offered to exhibit visitors,” said Jeremy Kenisky, Director of 3D/Interactive, Geomedia. "Unity has been a great partner for programming and interactive creation and helped us bring an educational 3D element to the exhibit that really ‘wowed’ users."

The app is an awesome demonstration of the way interactive AR can be used to make learning a more hands on and memorable experience by allowing visitors to participate in the exhibit as if they were real-world explorers, enabling them to access compasses, get an up-close look at virtual versions of animals and earn trophies on their own personal devices.

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The highlight reel at the top of the post also includes:

Aura virtual penthouse and The Canadian visualization from AeonVirtual

Interactive walkthroughs from NVYVE

ZeroLight from Eutechnyx

3D Bike Configurator from Elementals Studios

3D KPI Application with 800xA from ABB Control Technologies

TerraViz from the NOAA

Search & Rescue from Real Visual

I.R.I.S. from Vertigo Games

Oshkosh HEMTT Virtual Training from Heartwood

Labster virtual laboratory from Labster

Surgical Anatomy of the Liver from Emory University School of Medicine

Mobiglobe 3 from Unity Studios

Fracture IO from MPC Digital

BitGym fitness companion app from BitGym

Louvre Lens mobile tour app from Orange in association with Polymorph

 

The projects in the video are just a tiny corner of an incredible tableaux of development happening globally! In case you weren’t aware yet, we recently opened up a new part of the Showcase dedicated to displaying projects (a slightly bigger fraction of them) being created outside of the games industry. Along with the project list, we’ll begin writing up case studies of interesting cross industry projects much like we already do with games. There are a lot more projects like these and we’ll continue adding them to the gallery so you can see what your contemporaries are dreaming up.

We’re committed to making Unity the best possible solution for anyone creating any type of interactive experience. We’ve already announced some big improvements like Unity 5’s Enlighten global illumination and physically-based shading that will help industries like architecture and industrial design achieve the high-end visual realism they need to score big with their clients. Meanwhile, interface heavy design found in training programs, interactive books, and discovery apps will benefit even sooner from the completely new GUI system being launched in Unity 4.6 this summer (if you haven’t already checked out the overview video Rune posted last week, I suggest you do). We’ll also be introducing specialized technologies and initiatives over the coming months to support the ever-increasing role that interactive applications are playing in the world and the increased volume of work that will be available for developers like yourselves because of it.

If you’re working on a project outside of the games space, let us know!

June 5, 2014 in Community | 6 min. read

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