In the nearly two decades since its release for Mac OS X, Unity has expanded to support a number of platforms — desktop, IOS, Android, PlayStation, X Box, Meta Quest, web, and more. And these days, with the power of AI games and AI Companions, it’s helping to create player experiences that are more immersive than ever.
Unity’s engine is certainly popular: 82 of the top 100 games use it to grow their games, and more than 70% of the top 1,000 mobile games were made with it! Independent game developers, in particular, like its ease of use and ability to create in varying game genres and styles, ranging from 2D pixel art to top-shelf 3D graphics. The engine is also a good fit for us, which is why we have a Unity plug-in that allows you to create AI characters, which you can seamlessly integrate into your projects. More on that later.
Cross-Industry Uses
A host of other industries are also leveraging real-time 3D and Unity’s powerful tools to construct and scale experiences. Such fields include architecture, engineering, construction, and manufacturing, automotive, as well as energy, aerospace, education, and retail. For example, Unity’s technology can deliver personalized and immersive training experiences, and you can further elevate these experiences with AI, creating 3D avatars supported with conversational AI for customer service experiences. This is beyond the use-case of generative AI games, which are gaining rapid popularity.
People can also use Unity to personalize shopping experiences, engage with buyers virtually about asset details, and for interactive product configurators. Look at McDonald’s Spain, which recently worked with the Aura from Unity platform to gain granular insights and unique on-device placements, achieving a 64% launch rate and driving 34,500 downloads.
Unity’s Engine and Games
On the games front, mobile studio IEC used Aura from Unity’s Scale Optimizer in 2023 to boost D7 Return on Ad Spend by 41%. To optimize performance, the tool used machine learning to automatically tweak IEC’s marketing efforts.
Unity’s suite of game-ready tools can get a lot done. They can enhance environments, centralize content, streamline workflows, and be employed to connect with teams, tools, workflows, developers, and more. Further, the real-time 3D development engine promotes collaboration among designers, artists, and developers to create interactive and immersive experiences and publish them to a broad range of devices.
Now being previewed is the Unity 6 iteration, which offers quicker rendering, robust lighting options, dynamic AI capabilities, and end-to-end multiplayer workflows. It also offers expanded Web and XR features, better productivity and functionality, and enhancements for creators who build multiplayer games.
As it is, Unity 2022 LTS allows you to build content and deploy it across all major desktop, mobile, VR, AR, and console platforms. It also offers quick prototyping and performance optimization and a fast, flexible platform for programmers. The Unity Editor can be used to create rich game experiences with immediate engagement. From cinematics and world building to animation and rendering, the feature complements tools such as Blender or Maya to bring your vision to life – and more efficiently.
Innovation in AI Gaming
Like Unity, we’re also upending gaming, a swiftly evolving industry that in 2023 brought in some $221 billion in gaming revenue — more than music, movies, and books combined. And AI is shaping its future.
Companies such as DeepMind and OpenAI have developed algorithms to create new games, improve existing ones, and help players enhance their skills. Gaming and AI have also intersected to lure major tech companies such as Amazon and Apple, which now have significant capital in the industry. And to take game immersion to new depths, many studios and publishers are now initiating proof of concepts and building AI teams.
AI is certainly shaping content generation by offering more streamlined game development and paving the way smarter AI NPCs. Using this technology, we at Convai are opening new worlds of possibilities by giving these essential characters conversational AI capabilities, scene perception, and the ability to act based on conversation, verbal commands, and events. Read more about AI companions on our blog where we talk about the future of gaming, and how AI Companions are transforming it.
Popular and Latest Unity Demonstrations
Unity also offers online demonstrations of its operational digital twin, which is powered by real-time 3D to increase site collaboration and efficiency across teams. It also features a marketing demo that showcases a product configurator it created with personalization options, hi-fi images, and solid branding.
Another demo allows you to learn about crafting multiplayer games using Unity Cloud, ECS, URP, and Multiplayer Services, and one that shows you how to create and deploy the newest features of faced-paced multiplayer games.
Unity’s demo team also created and rendered in real time an interactive short film, “Book of the Dead” that spotlight’s Unity’s capability to power high-end visuals for game productions. There’s also “The Heretic,” another real-time production using an array of Unity’s graphics features, with a focus on the High Definition Render Pipeline.
Why People Use Unity
There are advantages to using Unity, which provides an all-in-one platform for building mobile games. For one, it offers the ability to run on varying operating systems, and the 3D development platform is easy to use. There are also fewer coding lines, and everything needed to produce a game can be found at the Unity Asset Store.
People also like the free tutorials and high-quality visual effects, images, audio, and video, and the ability to create, in addition to 3D games, 2D video games that can be played on various platforms. We publish some super cool Unity tutorials on our YouTube channel, to help the community familiarize themselves better with using Convai to create AI experiences in Unity.
Because its development interface is basic and intuitive, the Unity engine allows gaming apps to be quickly created. Further, its platform makes creating multiplayer games such as “Solstice Arena” a breeze, as it gives developers access to a broad range of capabilities.
The company unleashes AI-powered creativity through its Unity Muse and Unity Sentis platforms. While Unity Muse provides AI-driven assistance during creation, Unity Sentis lets you embed in your builds neural networks to produce unprecedented real-time experiences. We are working on our flagship demo- Project Neural Nexus, in collaboration with Unity to showcase the best of Convai and Unity in an amazing playable experience.
Convai’s Unity Plug-in
We offer a Unity plug-in that enables AI characters for virtual worlds. These AI NPCs, which fit any platform or game engine, are easy to create and can talk about anything. With the plug-in, all you have to do is provide the character id, and the character will be added to the project using the Convai SDK for Unity. Read more about it on our blog on integrating Convai SDK into your Unity project.
Our documentation will easen up your onboarding process with Convai. These AI characters can be used to reimagine education, serving as teachers as well as post-surgery clinical aides and tour guides. In gaming, they are nothing short of revolutionary, answering questions, directing you, and taking and acting on instructions. The AI NPCs can converse naturally and dynamically with players and can be made experts at topics. Adding knowledge can also ground them in the lore of the world and their backstories.
The plug-in includes the total conversation pipeline, which includes Language Understanding, Speech Recognition, Text-to-Speech, Generation, Lipsync, Text-to-Action and Narrative Design.
In Summary
Unity and AI are combining to produce game experiences that are more immersive than ever. Likewise, Convai’s Unity plug-in enables conversational AI for virtual worlds, allowing you to speak open-endedly with intelligent characters that listen to and understand you. Our NPCs are also able to perceive the environment and carry out actions, introducing endless new opportunities and experiences.
