At Unity, VR and AR are have both short- and long-term visions. The short term effort, over the next 6-12 months, is directly aimed at making the task of creating high quality VR and AR content easier for our developers. It consists of several key projects :
The longer term effort is being managed by Unity Labs, a newly-created entity inside Unity in charge of exploring the future of game and VR/AR related technologies, and examining what repercussions those technologies will have for our developers and our mission of democratizing game development.
This long term vision is based on an effort to imagine how, if we take VR and AR together as a single piece of technology, they could end up completely transforming the way we create and interact with content within the next decade. With a merged, coherent and powerful AR/VR technology millions of users would then create, play and learn in virtual worlds created by Unity developers.
But this is also about imagining a future where game authoring will be made easier through creating and developing within the VR worlds themselves. A future where creating triple-A games is within the reach of ever smaller creative teams. A future where assets understand each other. The glass knows it is on a the table and can fall. The wheel knows it can connect to the car and propel the car forward. Assets have metadata. Assets are smart and thus contribute to a far easier and simplified authoring experience in order to produce far more sophisticated games and content. Assets are part of a semantic ontology that provide the foundation for AI assisted authoring. Worlds can be procedurally generated with neuro evolution algorithms: mixture of genetic and NN+machine learning algorithms. The definition of a developer and gamer is blending. The possibilities are enormous. Custom designed economic policies based on generic blockchain technologies? What if we give worlds creators the possibility of defining their own economies and connect them together securely? These are only few examples of the technological components that will most probably be required to build such such virtual worlds (or metaverses if we keep in trend with the literature!).
What is interesting about the metaverses is not that we will see the exact replica of the Oasis being created in the next year; but rather how they provide us with a powerful metaphor to start thinking about the future of game authoring technologies.
Creating and managing such virtual worlds presents very complex technological and authoring challenges that need to be addressed and will help us frame our vision toward providing our developers with the best possible tools and features in a not too distant future.
Unity Labs is already contemplating multiple research projects into the most important areas:
These are just some of the different areas we are committed and focused on. Unity is dedicated to making VR/AR development as frictionless as possible for our developers and as rich as possible for their users.
Unity Labs is a newly created entity inside Unity in charge of exploring the future of game and VR/AR related technologies and what it means for our developers and our effort at democratizing game development.
Image Credit: NASA/JAXA.
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