Did I tell you? I have a new job! I work in an R&D team in AR/VR. We make lots of prototypes, play with cool devices and dream a lot about how to change the world.

We only have one problem. The VR/AR community is not really well defined in Romania yet. Neither in many other countries. That’s why international conference are so great.

So here I was, at Unite 2017 — Amsterdam asking myself if VR/AR is just a fad or it’s really going to completely replace our mobile phones in a few years.

And then I read this and got inspired to resume in a couple minutes read my conclusions after this event.

Keynote

Keynote! There’s no reason to come to a coference if you don’t see it. It’s like a short summary of what’s it all about. Some say you can grade a conference by only the keynote and the free stuff you can get. :D

Basically, Unity comes with 2 main features for Unity 2017.1 and a few promises for the close future.

Timeline. It’s a new, more performant and easy way to create cutscenes, camera work, blend animations, sounds and much more! It’s a little bit like working in After Effects. Artists won’t have to go back and forth on Maya/Blender so much now.

There’s a bunch of cool stuff that are already done using it. One of the most promoted asset was Cinemachine, a brilliant Hollywood-like Camera System. Check it out on the asset store!

Improved Analytics system. In a nutshell, Unity centralizes now in an even friendlier way stuff like Ads, In-App Purchases and so on.

Besides that, they came up with two even cooler features for the near future.

Better graphics — it was more of a teaser, but I can’t wait to see what they come with.

Multithreading and a new compiler. An image is worth a thousand words. So here’s achart about how a scene with 200 000 agents looked like on a 8 core PC. Now I’m getting excited! Also there was a more detailed talk I unfortunately missed. Good thing we have the miracle of cyberspace. Check it out!

Memorable talks

*All this talks can be found on Youtube here.

Day 1

Overview of Timeline & Cinemachine: concept and outcomes

Adam Myhill — Unity Technologies

Mike Wuetherick — Unity Technologies

If yesterday it was a great trailer for this new feature now was the time to learn the nuts and bolts of it. Not gonna enter in details but, if you want to use Unity on its full potential, you should definitely watch it.

Great speakers, by the way!

On a side note. There were so many speakers who had really catchy presentation. However, their overall tone of voice reminded me of someone forced to read outloud some boring text in high-school. You gave life to your own imaginary world, transposed it in pixels and made it work on a 100% mobile! You are amazing and your job is so fun! Sell me some of your enthusiasm, please!

Making Lions Dance — Our workflow and developer tooling for animating animals in a mobile game

Heiko Weible — Wooga

Marijn Zwemmer — Wooga

Wooga guys have a really cute and fun game, and their worklof is really strong. I left this talk with two lessons:

Good(and cute is a bonus) modeling and animations can really make or break your game. Code is still your most powerful weapon! Don’t ever be afraid to build your own tools. Unity is very powerful, but it gets even stronger if you start customizing it to fit your own needs.

Character to player

Olly Nicholson — Unity Technologies

Olly Nicholson presented a really fast pipeline for getting your newly modeled character into a game and start making it run. All this in about an hour, by rigging and attaching animations to it in almost no time. Of course it’s not an universal solution, but maybe its really good to know, especially during prototyping. Lots of powerful tools and presets I mostly ignored in the past.

No picture here, due to the weirdness of how his “autoportretical” character looks.

AR prototyping for the Hololens with Unity

Pierre-Armand Nicq — Ubisoft

David Yue — Ubisoft

yeah, I know..I only found a picture with a Daydream but I really like rabbids

If you want to find out what Microsoft Hololens is about or just curious about ant colonies behavior, this video is a nice starter. In both cases, you won’t really know what happens inside, but at least get a start boost.

Ubisoft seems to start trying the AR waters. It’s still a cold and not really clear water, but if it turns out to be the next big thing, they surely want to be there. If you were into AR for some time, then there’s nothing wow. More of a prototype as many other before. No big company magic in here.

A new Substance Painter to Unity workflow

Nicolas Wirrmann — Allegorithmic

I left this talk convinced that “PBR shading is the best kind of shading” — for realistic kind of models — and that Substance Painter and Designer are the coolest and fastest ways to texture your model.

Doing everything just in Photoshop is nasty. Believe me, you need to check this out. But then again, I’m more of a beginner when it comes to 3D modeling, and maybe it’s just the programmer in me talking.

It already is widely used in the industry. Moreover, the best thing is that it is smoothly integrated in Unity.

You must check it out! No excuses! Here’s a link. Also look at the talk before that, so you can see how fast and easy it looks.

Day 2

The Unity Particle System: Features, Tips and Beyond!

Karl Jones — Unity Technologies

Richard Kettlewell — Unity Technologies

What are particles? Should I learn more about them? They aren’t that hard. Most of the work is already done in the background, anyway. You can just sit back and let them enhance your graphics.

Also, wow! shaders are not that hard and for sure not useless to know about. HLSL format is really powerful and actually this talk gave me the courage to try some stuff on my own, after I defeated my fear of the ugly syntax.

Bonus: All the slides are actually made in Unity.

Real world maps in mixed reality: building a location-based game in 20 minutes

David Rhodes — Mapbox

A simple to use plugin which integrates world maps into your Unity project. You can now be as awesome as Pokemon Go is — or was.Not mind blowing but really good to know that something like this exists and doesn’t need to be re-implemented or integrated with some web-purposed API.

VR/AR/MR

Ok, so that’s the main reason for which I came all the way to Amsterdam. What’s new? Is the Hype still here? When it’s going to get mainstream?

I played with daydream. Cheap and fun. Would definitely consider buying it for myself. I really enjoyed the feel of the controller, especially the touch. Got a little nausea, but it was the game’s camera fault. My opinion is that it’s the easiest way for now to reach mass consumers.

Oculus Rift — The new version (I previously worked on DK2) is much more comfortable, has headphones incorporated and the controllers have a really nice feel. Definitely worth a look. If you consider buying those you still have to make sure your GPU is good enough. Also it comes with two cameras and if your not really in front of them things stop working as they should. More powerful, immersive and expensive than Daydream, but not as easy to setup.

Microsoft came up with this, but they weren’t allowed to open it so..uhm..not much to say. Maybe a really cool MR headset. Who knows. Although, I like that there are no cables. But then again, it could have been empty inside.

WebVR is something I really can’t wait to happen. Is already here, but I wait for it to actually happen. Don’t get me wrong, for powerful stuff I’m ok with downloading and installing stuff. But I’m bored of installing an app for every small prototype/demo/model showcase .Asked around and people with more insight then me were pretty confident that it should be really stable and used on a large scale sometime next year.

Final Thoughts

It was kind-of short — 2 days— or it was just really fun for me. However, the talks were really educative, future oriented and most important, some of them inspiring. I came back home with a real “I want to build stuff” feeling. Furthermore, lots of free food and drinks.

I have to be honest, though. I was kind of dissapointed because I haven’t actually seen a tendency of gaining popularity (besides for devs) for VR/AR. It’s still a niche industry. I am worried that this domain needs to break into every consumer’s house before the hype fades. That’s why I got so excited about Google Daydream and ARkit, although I’m not an Apple fan. (Sadly, they weren’t present at Unite, but when were they Indie fans, anyway?).

Still, VR/AR are here to stay. VR might be the future of gaming. I see no reason for which the headsets can’t get as popular as any gaming console. On the other side, AR is more of a powerful tool, and my thought is that it should become indispensable for many businesses in years to come.

Another valuable point for me was learned actually from talks about how professional teams work, organize and keep being creative. That and also seeing you can actually succeed and have a living as a company by doing simple, yet intriguing games. Great input, lessons to remember and fun.

Ow, and Amsterdam. Thanks for being such a refreshing but somehow weird host!

BODY WORLDS museum — Amsterdam

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