Ralph Hauwert Discusses The Future Of Unity On New XR Platforms

Following Unity Technologies’ keynote at the Game Developer Conference, VRFocus sat down with Ralph Hauwert, Director of Development at Unity to talk about the future of XR platforms.

Unity use the term XR as an umbrella term, encompassing virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR). As the company continue to empower content creators by providing them with the tools they need to deliver breath taking experience to consumers, Unity have now expanded their range of supported platforms to include more XR products.

Unity have revealed big plans to their platform range and expanded it with the announcement of multiple new XR platforms. This includes Magic Leap, Google Play Instant, Oculus Go and Google Daydream Standalone. The support for Magic Leap One was revealed alongside the release of a Technical Preview for Magic Leap’s creator portal. This comes not long after Epic Games revealed that their Unreal Engine 4 would also be supporting Magic Leap in a similar manner.

Games Developers Conference / GDC 2018 - KeyartThe other platforms announced by Unity see new, exciting opportunists for content creators to reach out to new hardware and audiences around the world. The Google Play Instant support means that Android users will be able to try a small demo of an app or videogame made within Unity near instantly without the need to download anything before hand. More details on Google Play Instant can be found here.

Oculus Go was unveiled last year at Oculus Connect 4 and now with the support in Unity developers can prepare their titles for the platforms release this Spring. With a similar workflow to creating Gear VR content, developers can get to work right away on preparing their products. The Google Daydream standalone platform is another that developers can get to work on right away, adding support for the new six degrees of freedom (6DoF) feature into their already existing Daydreams applications or for a brand new application. VRFocus were able to get hands-on with the Lenovo Mirage Solo earlier this month and experience Daydream standalone.

VRFocus‘ Nina Salomon sat down with Ralph Hauwert, Director of Development at Unity and talked about these new XR platform announcements which you can view in full below.

The Game Developer Conference is running all week long so be sure to check back regularly for more on VRFocus.