Take a tour inside Unity Labs
Behind the scenes at Unity Labs
Unity Labs creates prototypes, releases new technologies, publishes scientific papers, gives talks, and works with academia and partners on advanced research. We celebrate moonshot ideas: every project and prototype brings us closer to what Unity will become.
Project Mixed and Augmented Reality Studio
Introducing Project Mixed and Augmented Reality Studio (MARS)
This Unity extension gives developers the power to create games and applications that deliver on the promise of AR: apps that react to, and live in, the real world. At Unite Berlin, we shared a sneak peek of this robust toolset, which enables developers to move beyond building against single planes, and to start building in the real world without an enormous amount of custom coding. To stay in the loop on product updates, submit your name?here.
?
“There is much untapped potential for easy content acquisition using consumer devices such as mobile phones and webcams. And we are on a mission to tap it!”
“As we write software for XR, we need to develop systems that support continually changing requirements due to the pace at which innovation is happening.”
“We have to apply Machine Learning to tackle ever increasing complexity and costs - in games, film and science.”
“We built Unity Labs as a space to think further down the road with a heavy emphasis on advanced graphics rendering and authoring.”
“We work with bleeding-edge research of all kinds to explore what game authoring and development will look like in 10 years.”
“Unity Labs Grenoble is pushing the math and physics of rendering for better, faster, stronger graphics. We share our discoveries through world-class scientific publications and open-source prototypes.”
“Technical knowledge should not be the boundary of imagination. Instead, thoughts and intents should be interpreted by the machine to become the next programming language.”
“Autonomous robotics and machine learning open the road to game AIs that are both easier to author and more fun to play with.”
Projects and articles
Speech Recognition and VR
?
Speech recognition is useful for VR not only for simulating conversations with AI agents but also for the user to communicate with any application that requires a great number of options. Typing...
Learn how Google’s Poly works with Unity EditorXR
With our launch of Poly for Unity EditorXR and Google’s new Poly Toolkit for Unity, you can now import Poly models directly into your VR project. Get ready to explore thousands of 3D assets on Google...
EditorXR and SceneFusion Update
Since we first released the pre-alpha of EditorXR in December, we’ve been hard at work refining, collaborating, and experimenting. Today we’ll be covering some of the highlights. Bonus: Our friends at...
Looking to the future of mixed reality (Part III)
In this third and final part of the series we analyze how foundational platforms will and must evolve, and outline our vision of how MR applications will be created and executed.?Part I summarized the...
Looking to the future of mixed reality (Part II)
Thoughts about design.?Part I of this series summarized the current and future issues facing mixed reality and its adoption in the mainstream. In this second part of this series we explore the design...
Looking to the future of mixed reality – Part I
In this 3-part series we analyze areas we believe should be addressed for mixed reality to become mainstream, and not only to improve existing solutions, but reinvent and influence the future and mass...
Multi-material: Using custom Inspectors and Scriptable Objects for UDIM materials
The Unity Labs team is experimenting with bringing film-quality assets, designed for maximum fidelity but non-realtime rendering, into the 60+ FPS world with Unity. Since film and TV formats and...
Animating Inside VR: Mixing motion capture and keyframes
In the Unity Labs Authoring Tools Group, we explore the future of content creation, namely around how we can use XR to make 3D content creation faster, easier, and more approachable. We’ve shipped ...
Experimental Feature: De-Lighting Tool
Photogrammetry is becoming more and more popular in the CG industry. Being able to use a regular camera as a powerful 3D scanner opens an appealing way of creating realistic 3D assets. However, raw...
VFX Toolbox: Experimental Image Sequencer Update
?
?Hey VFX Artists! We are releasing today an update of the Image Sequencer with many improvements. Be sure to download it and give it a try! This update introduce custom material process...
Free VFX Image Sequences & Flipbooks
?
It is not so common to have either resources or budget to author smoke, fire and explosion flipbooks in video game industry. Here are some image sequences we want to share with you under?CC0 licen...
Free VFX Image Sequences & Flipbooks
SIGGRAPH course 2016: An Artist-Friendly Workflow for Panoramic HDRI Image-based lighting (IBL) with high dynamic range images (HDRI) is a well-known concept in the VFX and videogame industries, si...
List View Framework
In order to implement project Carte Blanche’s card system, we developed an extensible framework for creating dynamic, scrollable lists of objects. This article discusses the structure and contents of...
Research papers
Real-Time Polygonal-Light Shading with Linearly Transformed Cosines
?Eric Heitz, Jonathan Dupuy, Stephen Hill and David Neubelt ACM SIGGRAPH 2016 Motivation Shading with area lights adds a great deal of realism to CG renders. However, it requires solving spherical ...
Microfacet-based Normal Mapping for Robust Monte Carlo Path Tracing
Vincent Schüssler (KIT), Eric Heitz (Unity Technologies), Johannes Hanika (KIT) and Carsten Dachsbacher (KIT) ACM SIGGRAPH ASIA 2017 Abstract Normal mapping enhances the amount of visual deta...
Real-Time Line- and Disk-Light Shading with Linearly Transformed Cosines
?
Eric Heitz (Unity Technologies) and Stephen Hill (Lucasfilm) ACM SIGGRAPH Courses 2017 Abstract We recently introduced a new real-time area-light shading technique dedicated to?lights with ...
A Spherical Cap Preserving Parameterization for Spherical Distributions
Jonathan Dupuy, Eric Heitz and Laurent Belcour ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 Abstract We introduce a novel parameterization for spherical distributions that is based on a point located inside the sphere,...
A Practical Extension to Microfacet Theory for the Modeling of Varying Iridescence
Laurent Belcour (Unity Technologies) and Pascal Barla (INRIA) ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 ? Abstract Thin film iridescence permits to reproduce the appearance of leather. However, this theory require...
Analytical Calculation of the Solid Angle Subtended by an Arbitrarily Positioned Ellipsoid to a Point Source
Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research We present a geometric method for computing an ellipse that subtends the same solid-angle domain as an arbitrarily positioned ellipsoid. With thi...
Additional Progress Towards the Unification of Microfacet and Microflake Theories
?
Jonathan Dupuy (Unity Technologies), Eric Heitz (Unity Technologies) and Eugene d'Eon (8i) EGSR 2016?(Experimental Ideas & Implementations track) ? Motivation Current computer gra...
A Practical Introduction to Frequency Analysis of Light Transport
ACM SIGGRAPH Courses 2016Frequency Analysis of Light Transport is a way to express Physically Based Rendering using tools from signal processing - the study of digitalized signals. It particularly...
Real-Time Area Lighting: a Journey from Research to Production
Real-time area lighting has been a long-running quest in games, with many avenues (and dead ends!) explored, but?recent research?has provided a new route to solving this problem. That said, as...
