Unite 2015 Boston Conference Highlights

Sessions

Unity’s Pete Moss demonstrating the HoloLens during Unite’s keynote.

Like all conferences, Unite had plenty of sessions. These sessions spanned the range of Unity development, but if you took an “eagle eyed” view of all the sessions, you’d notice a common theme. That is, virtual reality (VR). Virtual reality was represented all over the place and if you were unfamiliar with VR, then the expo had you covered. More on that later.

Unity obviously sees VR as the future and they want all their developers on board. From the few VR related sessions that I did attend, the messaging was consistent. Developers determine the future and those developers are you!

Needless to say, Unity is taking advantage of this opportunity. Since the release of Unity 5.1, it now provides native support for VR. All you have to do is click a checkbox and you can work in a VR world. In fact, not too long ago, we produced a video tutorial series on that very subject.

That said, Unite provided plenty of other sessions besides VR. One session called “Writing Shaders: YOU can do it” talked about the basics of writing simple shaders to a standing room crowd. Never have I seen an audience held at rapt attention for a code heavy session at three in the afternoon. While the session was deep, the overall message was that it’s possible to understand.

Another session titled, “Best Practices for Multiplatform Distribution” covered the process used to port the game “School of Dragons” to several different platforms. The most impressive part of this talk was how the developers configured Unity to enable or disable assets and shaders for the build depending on the platform. It goes to show that not only can you write scripts for your game, but Unity provides deep scripting control of the actual editor itself to suit the needs of your business requirements.

School of Dragons shows that build process can be just as complex as the game itself.

Finally, one of the interesting sessions was a Q & A session with all the managers of the various subsystems of Unity. Each manager provided a roadmap, and then opened the floor. Being that this site is iOS based, I had to ask a burning question since WWDC 2015. That is, will we see an open source Swift be ported to Unity. The answer, unfortunately, is no. Cue sad trombone here.

Unity’s roadmap shows an exciting future!

Expo

Project Morpeus at Gamescom 2015, Photo by Sergey Galyonkin

If the sessions were the brains of the conference, then the conference floor was the beating heart. Through a pair of double doors presented a large showroom floor with scores of vendors showing off their gaming tech.

The first booth in the floor was, not surprisingly, a Playstation booth. Unity has just announced native support for Sony’s VR headset also known as Project Morpheus.

Sony was demoing a couple of headsets in a cops and robbers game that combined the VR headset with the Playstation Move. Players held glowing controls in place of guns and took part in high speed shootout. It was an excellent use of the technology that was never short of willing participants. Throughout the entire conference, long lines snaked around the Playstation booth just to get a chance to try it out.

Sony wasn’t the only vendor demoing VR tech. There was lots booths featuring different perspectives of the technology. One booth had participants ride stationary bikes to power their craft. Another demo featured a strange suit coupled with fake gun. In short, VR was everywhere and if you had not experienced it before, you had plenty of opportunities to do so.

That said, there can be no doubt that Google stole the show. They had a small booth to feature their Project Tango initiative. Project Tango is a tablet that does augmented reality. In their booth, they had attendees aim nerf guns with Project Tango tablets attached to them. The tablets projected a shooting gallery at the far wall with targets to hit.

Project Tango was a big hit at the conference!

When a attendee beat a certain score, they won a prize – a $600 dev kit for Project Tango itself. This wasn’t known at first. Half way through the first day, people started walking around the conference with boxes. When word got out they were toting actual hardware, the Project Tango booth got very busy.

The second day before the start of the sessions, a massive line formed outside the expo. There looked to be hundreds of attendees. Later in the day, when Google ran out of dev kits in their booth, they announced they would be giving out more dev kits to the first five attendees to show up at any of the Project Tango sessions. I didn’t bother to look, but I imagine that there were attendees camping outside the session rooms like an iPhone launch day.

That said, the expo also allowed you to sign up for one on one sessions with Unity’s developers. And of course, if the convention wore you out, there were free back rubs to ease your sufferings.

All in all, it was really great conference with lots of good times.

Me, with a perpetual grin, throughout the entire conference.

Where to Go From Here?

Unite is a really fun conference. If you are Unity developer, you have to go at least once. It’s the equivalent of going to WWDC. Besides the things I mentioned, Unite also featured an awards ceremony, lots of floating parties, and game stations placed through the conference floor.

Unite, at its core, isn’t just about one thing. The total experience is far greater than each individual part.

What’s truly great about the conference is that everyone you meet has a passion for games. People use Unity because they love it, and being in a conference full of them will infect you with enthusiasm that will make you want to get out there and make your own games.

Where you at Unite and if so, what was your favorite part of the conference? Let me know the comments! See you at the next conference! :]