AI and The Future of Interactive 3D

Since ZG crushed another thread about AI I am stating one with this premise. We are developers. We make applications in Unity. Sometimes those are games, others they are business applications. At the beginning of the year I finished a one year contract to work on an AI app with NLP in Unity and tied its output to a procedurally animated Avatar Performance system. I had to learn about all the domain specific knowledge that arose in a couple of the threads recently that the thread locking mod closed because they did not discuss "games". Bogus. Just because they are unable to understand due to the closeted nature of their career, please stop closing valuable threads of information on a technology that will not only impact the world, the militaries, governments, law enforcement and games, simulations, the sciences, space travel and our day to day workplaces.

By not allowing free form discussion about this technology there is no repository of knowledge an opinions that are Unity dev centric that methods, preferences, techniques and other items of interest that a creative developer can incorporate and run with. This isn't 2008 and the mod should not be locking threads with information that is useful to us in our contract work with Unity. Just because he finds no utility in it at in his star wars studio game dev does not mean it does not have utility to many other Unity developers. For example, users of the Industry bundle will probably be interfacing with AI at some touchpoint in their industry. If there is no repository of AI and Unity then you leave them stuck to go read python devs stuff and try to figure out how that gets into Unity. Did that for a year due to the paucity of materials and posting on Unity and AI beyond NavMesh AI. Painful.

An example. I am developing an application for international guide dog training to identify good candidates quickly and measure biometrics and motion data and analyze it. We are woking with top AI experts in the field of canine bio-mechanics and behavioral science.. It is based around several AI systems that all have to be incorporated into Unity. I had to build an inference engine from scratch that can access the entire corpus of materials and extract answers to queries from handler/trainers. Data from accelerometers, GPS, gyrometers, leash tension as well as AR tracking points an the leash are all AI driven and analyzed. If I start discussing the ins and outs of integrating these with AI it would, under false premises be locked as not pertinent to "game" development.. Same as discussion of LLM/inference engines.

Stop locking AI discussions. They are entirely pertinent and relevant to the Unity development environment. Not everybody makes games with Unity for a living. Hopefully this thread can be allowed to percolate and evolve naturally instead of artifice-ially lock it with the bogus notion that the discussion has no bearing on the one extremely narrow definition of game dev as promulgated by the lock happy mod.. Don't like to argue with him as I respect him..but howzabout a little respect in return pal. It kinda boggles me that the connection between Unity, AI and future development is not readily apparent and that though being non-offensive in nature having a multiplicity of views and loaded with info, false premises that had the benefit of being clarified and techniques discussed as to how to navigate the maze of AI, they were all ceremoniously locked.

 

I am now CTO of a company using unity to build XR apps for medical training, and every job I have held outside my own company prior to this has been using unity for non-games purposes. So I very much agree that closing these threads due to not being about games is very close minded - its about a use case of unity, that should be enough for it to remain open

Yes these threads often devolve into arguments about semantics and specific things not to do with the thread itself, but that should be a threadban for said users rather than closing the thread

Unity is used for a ton of stuff other than games, and this is a forum for unity.

 

I agree too.

Since 2016 almost all of the Unity projects I worked on as employee were business applications. Product presentations and configurators, entertainment installations, virtual sales tools and so on. There was only one game we made in that period and it was made for a chocolate company's marketing campaign.

 

Agreed!

And well said.

There's an entire sphere (or galaxy) of creative experiences opening up via increasing expectations of immersion at the same time as AI is blossoming into a somewhat useful assistant to both implementations and creative element creation, all whilst what we hold in our hands is getting ever more powerful. The m1 chips in the current iPads are bordering on amazing.

 

I agree with things said so far.

 

Today nVidia passed a market cap of one trillion buckaroos after releasing info about it's new AI supercomputer platform. I believe Unity is poised as the best platform for AI applications as it can incorporate text, audio, visual, animation, compilers etc. Try to integrate several python apps and synch their audio/visual/text/inference into a React component for web or an app for an iDevice and yer in a world of spaghetti code hurt. I ain't o compsci genius but I am attempting to make a set of Unity centric tools for creating AI's modules with. I get alot of creative juice from these threads that determine what I should and how i should create these libraries./

And though I like nVidia giving us AI supercomputers most of us will only get to use that in the cloud. The guy who can create the chip that allows such perceived power on iDevices will have millions of hands wanting to give him a wad of cash.

 

The wrath of ZG knows no bounds! But I do hope that we're allowed to expand more on AI and Machine Learning, because even when it's not directly related to game development, it is quite an adjacent topic!

 

Discussions about AI related to game development/unity is perfectly acceptable, and for obvious reasons, very important. HOWEVER long rambling discussions about AI in general that are full of several people talking about "I think this will happen..." are just pointless babbling and real just people sharing their opinions about the future. That is what Twitter is for, or Reddit or even the Unity Discord. There are many, valid discussions to have about AI in this field. Unfortunately the conversations keep getting driven into model discussions or random new applications or just speculative philosophy about it. None of which is valid here.

It is painfully simple, if it is not about UNITY or GAME DEVELOPMENT, go to someplace more appropriate to chit chat about it. I have let the off topic ones go on, hoping the will re-track, but when they don't they get shut as the key topic is clearly expired. I have not giving anyone warnings for driving threads off topic repeatedly, but consider this the last warning. If you can't post on topic, don't post.

Edit: it doesn't have to be about games, but it needs to be about unity OR games, and not just general rambling about philosophy or future speculation. We do don't allow random tech chit-chat here either. This is not social media, it is a tech support and discussion for the UNITY engine. There are places for that other stuff. If you just want talk about the stuff you made (which really seems to be key element in all these posts) then create a thread in MWU and share the details. If you want to share with with the world all your deep and interesting opinions on the future, get a blog, or start a yt channel.

BUT, if you want to talk about the challenges/advantages/tools that are AI and how they relate to game development and/or Unity, please start a thread on a clear TOPIC. (we don't do chit chat thread here, that is the Unity Discord). There is a TON of AI stuff to talk about that is relevant.

And obviously this will be closed because it is off topic.

 

You absolutely are, and probably should be given the importance. But, again to be clear, this forum is for unity and game development. What value is it to have a valid discussion when it just gets buried among random pages of dalle/mj comparisons, model comparisons, how randos think the future might evolve?

AI noise discussions are ubiquitous, (I had one two days ago with the guy fixing my sink). Whether on the news, or at the store or everywhere else on the internet, you can have those discussions. Here, keep them in context of why this forum exists. "Adjacent" isn't really valid, because since we are humans (most of us anyway), that would include politics, cooking, religion and shoes. Those are things that game development adjacent, but not relevant and there are better places do discuss them.