I heard the first time of Unity and had a meeting with a salesmen of them last year in november and since the beginning of this year, they have got a lot of attention within the virtual worlds scene.

For all of you, who haven’t heard of Unity yet or who are wondering what they can have to do with the web3D, this article was written.

What is Unity?

First of all: Unity is NOT another virtual world, nor is it a technology, which originally was created to serve within the realm of virtual worlds, but:

Unity is a multiplatform game development tool, designed from the start to ease creation. A fully integrated professional application that just happens to contain the most powerful engine this side of a million dollars.

So, Unity is right now a platform to develop games. Multi-platform means in this case, that they can deploy their games to Windows, OS X (Widgets too!) and even the Wii - they have announced a iPhone support in the future and finally, they are also supporting the web.

For the web you need to download a pretty small (3MB) plugin and then the Unity application starts running within the browser, directly after the download, without a browser (or even computer) restart, without any nasty popups or whatever.

It works compared to everything else (even compared to Flash installation) absolutely straightforward and quickly.

And now please take a look by yourself, which quality and performance they are able to deliver and then you will understand why everybody is so excited about their development platform for the web3D: (click on the picture to start the demo)

When I saw this the first time last year I was pretty surprised, that this is possible with a simple plugin at all.

They have an awesome physics, shadow and light system (try also this demo) and where it get’s quite interesting: they also created a real-time networked multi-player support, which brings us pretty close, to what we would need to build web3D applications with Unity.

Will Unity work as a web3D platform?

So there are still a lot of open issues, which need to be solved, to make Unity a really viable option in the realm of virtual worlds, but as they are pointing out by themself, they have got a lot of requests in that direction. (Maybe also from these guys: John Swords interviews Unity CEO Dave Helgason)

Having a technology, with which we can develop applications for the web3D, which allows us to run them on Windows, OS X, the Wii, the iPhone and of course on the web, with that kind of quality and performance, would just be amazing.

How to use Unity, when it has the missing features?

Of course you don’t have user created content here - of course you don’t have a in-world scripting language here … and of course it will not replace something like Second Life, Opensim or whatever … but in my eyes we really need such a technology to bring more virtual world applications onto the web itself.

Unity will outrun any 3D Flash or Java based application in terms of quality and performance.  - for sure you still have the plugin issue. But this easy and uncomplicated plugin installation makes me optimistic.

As pointed out in my post one metaverse - different visual layers - I see technologies like Unity as a potential future platform to exactly develop those kind of first, ‘easy to use’, ‘virtual world like’ layers on the web, which are already connected with the metaverse itself, but which are much more user friendly, reduced in it’s complexity and therefore reach a much bigger audience than now.

It will be interesting to see what happens next at Unity (here is their blog) and who will be the first to do a virtual world / web3D project with them  

EDIT: picture has been taken from their website and is also linked to their gallery.