Augmented Reality Breakfast Served Up (Unity PR)

Since Unity was first released the vast majority of people have used it as a tool to create game content, specifically games for entertainment. But more and more we're starting to see an increase in Unity usage by those outside the games for entertainment industry, and as of late there's been a particularly noticeable pickup in the "advergaming" marketing. For those that don't know what that means, "advergames" are games designed to promote a particular brand or product, so think "advertising + game = advergame". To highlight that surge we put out a press release today:

Augmented Reality Breakfast Served Up

This surging segment of Unity content includes movie studios, musical acts and major food brands, needless to say it's an exciting new market for everyone using Unity!

 

Cool.

I actually was wondering if that Honey Nut Cheerios game was Unity. Now I know!

 

If you look at the cereal box itself, down at the bottom (left side IIRC), it mentions that you'll need to have the Unity Web Player installed. w00t!

 

When can the rest of us start doing AR projects with Unity?

 

There are no time lines to offer just yet, hang in there as we understand just how useful that functionality will be for all of you.

 

Not to sound rude, but were you making a joke there ("...how useful that functionality will be for all of you")?

There is maybe half a dozen threads on the forums where people expressed interest in AR in Unity. Couple of them made plugins/scripts/external apps to showcase AR even.

Unless UT is planning on an interim release between now and 3.0, then the AR functionality could be added as a simple package pretty quickly. Replace the Unity engine dll and provide sample scripts and API documentation.

I know I am simplifying the process, but really, is it that more complicated or does it have to be?

Thanks.

 

Webcam support in the webplayer isn't just about AR, but about a lot of more things.

AR is just the "currently hot way" of using it (at least out of the view of people that think that Raving Rabbits 2 on the Wii with its AR gameplay wasn't totally BS)

 

most people that have implemented AR in unity use the ARToolkit afaik, which UT couldn't just take and put into their own engine. while the ARToolkit is free for 'personal use' you can't just use it for commercial projects. UT would either have to make a deal with them or another company that makes an AR engine, or they would have to make their own AR engine, which would take alot of developement resources, which i personally would rather see invested somewhere else.
the ARToolkit isn't very good either imo, so UT would probably have to make some improvements to it, even if they did purchase it.

 

Hi. The issue is not about an AR engine, there are plenty of those, open source, close source, etc. They can all in time be ported to unity.

As for ARToolkit, you can use it in commercial project, just need to get in touch with Artoolworks. They will charge you for a licence for your project.

The bottom line is about either having webcam support or plugin support for the web player.

We created a head tracking application recently based on FaceAPI and developed a plugin for unity to get a webcam feed in and track it via FaceAPI. But it can only be deployed as a stand alone.

I understand the security concerns allowing third parties to develop plugins (unless there is some sort of sandbox like the native code thing that can be put in place), so at least webcam support would be awesome.

Cheers!

A.

 

Am I joking? No, not at all and I completely fail to see the basis for your question. I stated (clearly?) that we understand the importance those features have, what's "joking" in that?

You are oversimplifying things quite a bit. Aside from contractual business, you have to keep in mind that our engineers are already full-on working on the features we had scoped for 3.0. Adding anything carries impact, of the initial implementation and the addition of anything beyond that (documentation, is it the full feature set that we'd want, etc.). So it's not just a "slap it in and forget about it" thing to do, we have to slot it into the schedule and given our 3.0 plans already underway that's not likely to happen in time for that release. No joke.