In early February, Unity held an AR/VR summit in Hollywood to bring together the developers and creatives that use Unity to create groundbreaking experiences for these two emerging mediums. I was asked to do a presentation on the ways that we have added interactivity to immersive cinema in some of our VR projects at Mirada, and as you can see in the above embed, they have now posted a video of that presentation on their official channel.
Check it out if you’re interested, and if you want to see more of the presentations, they are here on the official Youtube channel for the event. It was a really great conference, you should definitely check these videos out if you have any desire to create VR or AR, or if you are just interested in the sorts of thinking that go into making the hardware, software, and content for these new mediums.
There are a few roundups of all the different announcements and events that were packed into the 2-day event here, here, here, and here. And this post goes into a lot of detail on the thinking of some of Unity’s senior developers and thought leaders when it comes to VR and AR:
In February 2015, [Sylvio] Drouin joined Unity as the Executive Vice President of the Unity Labs program with a focus on building the future of storytelling in VR and AR. Today he is sitting across from me, eagerly chatting about what is coming next: an accessible Unity platform built natively for VR.“VR is a conduit to make authoring easier,” Drouin declares, and accessible VR development is exactly what Unity is aiming to create “before the end of the year.”
“VR is a conduit to make authoring easier,” Drouin declares, and accessible VR development is exactly what Unity is aiming to create “before the end of the year.”“Virtual reality attracts all types of storytellers, from artists to game developers” he says, “we want to make its creation accessible to them all.”
“Virtual reality attracts all types of storytellers, from artists to game developers” he says, “we want to make its creation accessible to them all.”
It is a fantastic interview of Sylvio, I suggest reading it to see where their heads are at and where Unity is going. And here is a great roundup of the different finalists for the Vision Awards that was part of the Summit. My personal favorite moment of the event (for a lot of reasons) was this announcement from Gabe Newell, head of Valve:
We are living in exciting times!