IBM and Unity announces a partnership that brings Watson’s AI functionalities to the popular gaming engine, with built-in VR and AR features.
The two have launched the IBM Watson Unity SDK on the Unity Asset Store. Available for free, developers can integrate the AI into VR and AR games, with relative ease, directly within the game engine.
Previously, games developed by Unity that utilized VR and VR have managed to become popular. But other developers may have struggled with difficulties due to the high cost of hardware and lack of premium titles.
2016 and 2017 were both supposed to be the breakout moments for VR, but still, no mainstream adoption happened. With the partnership, things are changing.
The SDK is the first of its kind to bring scalable AI services to Unity, according to a blog post from Unity product marketing manager Nathan Ventura. It also marks another step towards bringing both VR and AR applications to enterprise use.
"As AR and VR technologies mature, there is increasing interest coming from the enterprise market for innovative applications in marketing, design, engineering, manufacturing and analysis," said Ventura. "Unity is the market leader in AR and VR for consumer use cases, as well as rapidly emerging as the market leader for enterprise AR and VR."
With the partnership, IBM and Unity are planning to help the adoption and the development of VR and AR business with applications that bring contextual expertise and AI capabilities directly to employees.
The SDK allows developers using Unity, to configure games and projects to understand speech, talk with users, and understand the intention of a user in natural language. According to Ventura, speech recognition is one of the key features of the SDK, as Watson's capabilities lets developers to build accurate speech recognition into their project, which can be used to trigger in-game events, for example.
Watson's Vision API on the other hand, lets developers integrate real-time visual recognition into their Unity projects.
Previously, IBM AI has shown its capabilities during the 2018's Grammy Awards, and had also gone great with playing games, like Jeopardy!.