Today, during the opening keynote of the inaugural Vision VR / AR Summit , Valve and Unity Technologies announced a new collaboration to offer native support for SteamVR in the Unity Platform, giving developers new reach at no extra cost. Additionally, we will be adding a new VR rendering plugin to further enhance functionality.

The collaboration means that all of Unity’s developers will have access to native support for Valve’s upcoming SteamVR platform. Beyond SteamVR support, Valve has developed an advanced rendering plugin for Unity to further enhance fidelity and performance, bringing consumers more realistic experiences.

Valve co-founder Gabe Newell announced the news during a special video address at the Vision Summit, adding: “We made many of our Vive demos using Unity, and continue to use it today in VR development. Through that process, and in working with VR developers, we found some opportunities to make Unity even more robust and powerful for us and really want to share those benefits with all VR content creators.”

Unity CEO John Riccitiello went on to discuss the news during the Vision Summit opening keynote: “Valve and Unity are both dedicated to creating the highest quality VR experiences possible. That means giving developers every possible chance to succeed, and our collaboration with Valve is designed to do just that.”

Valve will also be providing a talk at Vision, and to celebrate the launch, they are surprising every developer at the conference with a free HTC Vive Pre, the latest SteamVR development system. For more information, please visit http://visionsummit2016.com/