Caitlyn Meeks is one of the creators and current manager of the Unity Asset Store, which is a marketplace that is changing game development for both game developers and content creators. She describes how Unity has built an extensible framework where you can extend it’s functionality through the asset store, and so it’s functionality is not fixed with the new features that come from their official releases.
The asset store innovates in many different areas, and it is a slow and methodical process that Unity goes through to eventually integrate some of those features into it’s core engine.
Caitlyn talks about what differentiates Unity from other game engines, and how Unity is responding to recent pressures in the marketplace from Unreal Engine 4. They’re staying the course with their plan and roadmap, and see that they’re focusing on creating a streamlined user experience for game developers. She sees Unity as an unstoppable tortoise who may not always be first to market with all of the new features, but that they’re implemented well in a methodical fashion and with love.
She mentions some of the VR specific plug-ins on the Asset Store including SDKs for Sixense and Leap Motion, Cast AR, CAVE projection systems, and DIS HLA interfaces. She also talks about the free Unity Multipurpose Avatar (UMA) plug-in, which is a Unity-sponsored, avatar creation tool.
Finally, she talks about her vision for how VR will change the humanities and expression in a way that makes us more human and grateful to be alive.
Reddit discussion here.
TOPICS
- 0:00 – Unity asset store. Provides content to game and VR developers, 3D audio, texture and music, and scripts and tools that extend Unity. Exponential growth since 2010. 750k active users forming a community of content producers. It’s an ecosystem where people are helping each other. People can make a living off of selling assets. One of top 3 reasons for using Unity. Bedroom artists who are making $10k-$100k. Senior of artist from Ubisoft making more from the Unity asset store sells. It’s changing game development for developers and content creators.
- 3:08 – How does it differentiate from other engines? Unity is extensible. Asset store can be a stopgap for providing new features. Unity isn’t a static product. New functionality is coming through the asset store. Unity feature list doesn’t include all of the functionality available through the asset store. You don’t need access to the source code to create your dream tool in Unity.
- 4:45 – What are some popular VR plug-ins? First submission from Palmer Luckey two years ago. SDK for Sixense and Leap Motion, Cast AR, CAVE projection systems, and DIS HLA interfaces. UMA is the Unity Multipurpose Avatar, which is a Unity-sponsored, avatar creation tool.
- 6:42 – Binaural audio plug-ins to enable positional audio. New audio implementation in Unity 5 including audio
- 7:20 – Lots of excitement for UE4 and EVE: Valkyrie moving from Unity to UE4, and what is Unity’s approach for counteracting this? Staying the course with a solid product with an unparalleled workflow. Lots of new features coming in 5.0 that have been on the roadmap. Not going to change anything drastically. Always been a bit behind, but they do it well, methodically and with love. They’re an unstoppable tortoise.
- 8:55 – Your vision for what you want to see happen in VR. Fan of Cyberpunk and Snow Crash and Second Life. Coming from an artist’s perspective, and VR will be one of the most significant developments in the humanities and human expression. So many different possibilities for creating worlds and experiences that are beautiful, horrifying, mechanical, alien, etc. Goal is to see beautiful morphologies emerge. See worlds, spaces and scenarios that make us more grateful to be alive and things that make us more human.
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.048] Caitlyn Meeks: I'm Caitlin with Unity Technologies. I'm one of the creators and manager of the Unity Asset Store. The Asset Store provides content to game and VR developers, creators of interactive media. We provide the community 3D models, textures, music, audio, really anything that a game developer or artist or creative person or scripter could possibly want. Tools which extend Unity. There's really nothing quite like it. We've been pretty successful. We started in 2010 and since then we've had a very consistent hockey stick type curve amount of growth with over 750,000 active users. So one of the beautiful things about the Asset Store is our community. Our Asset Store community consists of both users, people who purchase assets on the store to use in their games, and content producers or publishers, people who are artists or programmers, you know, someone who has created an amazing pathfinding algorithm, to someone who's created a brilliant GUI solution, to someone who just creates zombies. The creators in our community can make a lot of money selling these to Unity developers. So in a way, the Asset Store is an ecosystem where people are helping one another. In a way, we saw that people were organically already doing this in our community forums. Someone would share something that they've created and other people would ask if they could have a copy. Someone would post pictures of a model or show an algorithm that they've been working on and others would come asking for it. We just decided to formalize this, you know, we just saw an opportunity there. And it's really taken off. We have people who write us and they say, I can't believe I finished my game on time and under budget. I never would have had I not had the Asset Store. I've had people say the Asset Store is one of their top three reasons for using Unity. Brian Fargo, the creator of Wasteland 2, told me that himself. Richard Garriott. There's just so many people who absolutely love the store. At the same time, we have people who, bedroom artists, bedroom programmers, who have never worked in the industry, who are making tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars off of their assets. In fact, there's even one of our artists who sells environment packs has worked at Ubisoft for over 10 years as a senior artist. He found that he actually made more money selling just a pretty straightforward package of his on the asset store than he has as a senior artist at Ubisoft. And he's actually considering quitting. He might have actually quit Ubisoft just to focus on asset store sales. So it's insane and exciting to see the way it's changing game development, not just for game developers, but for content creators.
[00:03:06.770] Kent Bye: Yeah, so maybe you could talk a bit about how do you see it as a differentiator versus other engines that are out there?
[00:03:13.401] Caitlyn Meeks: Sure. Well, one of the benefits of Unity is it's extremely extensible. At its core, you can write plugins for the editor and create your own tools, which look a lot like we created them. You can actually create things which sit very closely and are nested very deeply in the editor. which makes it wonderful for creating your own tools. So in a sense, whenever there's a feature that people want from us, and people have asked Unity to implement a better GUI system or to implement a better pathfinding system, there's a good chance that some brilliant genius out there beats us to it on the Asset Store. And I'm personally one of the only people who actually is rooting for other people beating us to market with features because it's fantastic for the Asset Store. NGUI, for example, an extremely popular GUI solution. But what this means is that Unity isn't a static product, and even though you might be waiting for an update from us, new functionality is constantly coming. For example, people gripe about Unity's terrain system, but we have a number of voxel-based terrain systems that are emerging. and they compete with one another, and it's dynamic. And so in a sense, looking at Unity's core functionality, that doesn't really show the entire spectrum of functionality that's available to you. And a big reason that this is possible with Unity and not other tools is just Unity's extensible nature. So you don't really need the source code to the editor to create your dream tool.
[00:04:45.968] Kent Bye: I see. What have been some of the more popular plugins that you've seen people using in terms of virtual reality games?
[00:04:52.551] Caitlyn Meeks: Oh yeah, well it's funny, I remember two or three years ago getting our first submission from Palmer Luckey before there was Oculus and he had created software for pre-processing images for use in a kind of an open version of the predecessor to Oculus. And so it's been something that's kind of been with us from the start. So there's now a number of Oculus-based demos. There's an SDK for Sixth Sense, for Leap. For really any new piece of hardware, you're going to find a way to use it with Unity. I think CastAR is coming out with something. Cave projection systems. It's kind of insane. And for those who are in the more military simulation and training sector of VR, we know we're now having Companies like VTMac are bringing their DIS and HLA interfaces for Unity. So yeah, there's a lot there and we are completely dedicated to it. Also, one beautiful little story is UMA, the Unity Multi-Purpose Avatar. A few years ago, I personally had noticed someone in our community creating an avatar customization system. And my goal with Unity, I'm probably our biggest VR advocate in the company, has been to do anything I can do to get people creating virtual worlds and VR with our tech. So I saw someone creating this brilliant avatar customization system, and we sort of took him in under our wing and sponsored the production of this, of making UMA not just this guy's project, but kind of an open, official Unity-sponsored project. And this is now gaining a lot of traction in the community. We're seeing Richard Garriott use it. We're seeing virtual world folks use it. We're seeing exporters coming to it from other software. It's a pretty cool example of a Unity-sponsored initiative creating a free solution towards furthering VR.
[00:06:43.447] Kent Bye: And can you talk a bit about the binaural audio plugins that you may have started to see some of the plugins to the Unity Asset Store to enable fully immersive positional audio?
[00:06:54.937] Caitlyn Meeks: Well, you know, I think there are some. I mean, Unity by default supports binaural audio. And I know with version 5 we'll have a brand new audio implementation which should make that even further. I believe we're going to have Audio occlusion, I'm not entirely sure on that, but I think we are. So walls and other surfaces will occlude audio. But you're going to find a whole variety of audio tools in Unity and on the Asset Store.
[00:07:20.233] Kent Bye: Cool. And one of the things that I've just observed from the Oculus subreddit is that with Unreal Engine 4, there's a lot of excitement for it, eValkyrie moving from Unity to the Unreal Engine. And I'm just, I feel like the asset store of Unity is sort of like so compelling that it makes people choose that. But I'm just wondering if there's going to be new features in Unity 5 that are going to be able to kind of counteract some of that excitement.
[00:07:44.992] Caitlyn Meeks: Well, naturally we've taken a good look at the environment right now. And, you know, we're staying the course. We have a very solid quality product which has a workflow that is really unparalleled. And, you know, we're not really threatened. And we're focusing on what makes Unity awesome. So you're not going to find any panicked, desperate moves on our part at all. We're completely confident and solid. And yeah, you're going to see a lot of amazing new features coming out with 5.0, but these are things that have already been on our roadmap. You know, we've not always been the first engine. We've not always been the greatest innovator compared to other technologies that have been out there. We've always come in a little late. We've always been a little behind, but we do it really well. We really do it with the needs of our users and the creative workflow in mind. And so we're methodical and we work with a lot of love and we work very, very hard. So, you know, we're the tortoise and we're really good tortoise, I think. We're unstoppable and we're just an extremely optimistic, sparkling company with a growing team and an awesome culture.
[00:08:55.000] Kent Bye: And when you said you're the biggest VR enthusiast and supporter, I'm just curious about what your vision is for what you want to see happen.
[00:09:02.562] Caitlyn Meeks: Well, yeah, probably like a lot of people here at SVVR, I've read my share of cyberpunk novels and Snow Crash and I've spent far too many hours on Second Life and I've been working with VR headsets since the 90s and, you know, I find it really compelling. both in the crudest sense from Ivan Sutherland's Sword of Damocles to the Rift to some crazy scary things I've seen at military trade shows. It's all terribly exciting. For me, I'm very much an artist. I'm very passionate about the humanities and I really feel that virtual reality promises to be one of the most significant developments in the humanities. And not just in storytelling, and not just in video games, but in the broader sense of human expression. And we're going to be creating worlds, we're going to be creating realities that can be beautiful, they can be human, they can be horrifying, they can be mechanical and alien. There's so many possibilities. My goal in life as a creative person is I want to see beautiful living morphologies emerge. I want to see worlds, spaces, characters and scenarios that really make us grateful to be alive. Things that we couldn't have in the normal world and things that make us more human in a sense. Great. Well, thank you. You're welcome. Thank you.
