I’m wondering about the uptake of Unity 3D in business,in particular ecommerce applications. I believe this was asked last year by someone and there wasn’t a flood of responses. Has it changed now, 12 months later. Is anyone doing it? There’s a huge host of “game” apps but what about commercial transactions, shop fronts, etc? Especially for the iPhone?
I don’t wish to be a trailblazer on this and so would like to see some examples. Alternatively, if the Unity engine is not quite approriate, then why?
Unity applications run on the client side so you would have to loop through all ecommerce actions with WWW to a php webservice as a direct database connection is definitely not an option.
On the iPhone I don’t think such a thing makes sense at all due to the regulations in relation to “what the user pays is payed to apple be it app buying or inapp storekit”
I understand what you mean, and when i first discovered unity I thought of that (using it to develop a non-game iphone app and skip the learning xcode part), but I think it would be a very inefficient way to make an iphone app. As dreamora said, you’d have to do everything through php and a web server. You’d be better served with something like appcelerator, which is a similar concept (a meta-framework for app development) but lets you build iphone/droid apps using common web-based technologies(php, asp, javascript, html and mysql).
Thanks for the thoughts so far. I was hoping to be able to code (or even script) http requests with either xml/json-rpc. I’m not familiar enough with Unity to know what’s possible, but even the simplest program can respond to a finger press, and Unity is so much more. One would want to be able to access the world beneath the Unity to access, queues, db’s, etc. It’s sad if it’s not possible. I’ll check appcelerator. Thanks for now.
using XML / JSON is no problem and then using the WWW class.
But you can not use the HTTP requests from .NET, so also not correspondingly related service functionality. You would really do distinct requests and parse in / out data.
Unsure if https:// is supported on U3 (especially webplayer), thats something someone with a corresponding backend for testing would have to test. (I know iphone did on 1.7 which is older than U3 but the iPhone side uses a native iOS functionality …)
One of my customers from italy was actually using Unity to build a virtual mall where you could inspect items, place them inside a modeled shopping cart etc etc etc. Not quite sure what happened to that project but it looked really good and the applications for that would have been real cool…
So, in true programmer form, it seems anything is possible with the correct application of forethought, time and skill…
Agreed
But it is not the holy grail that most would expect unless you have the freedom of doing a standalone and being in a safe environment, cause in this case you can really unleash it (direct DB connection etc)
I have a client who is requesting the ability to do e-commerce in Unity. Anyone have any thoughts or experience regarding the linkage of a 3d world with e-commerce? Think Shopify 3D.
It would be pretty simple to do as long as you had a serverside RESTful API (I prefer ASP .NET MVC4 WebAPI). You’d want to make sure you were using HTTPS and would probably need to generate a session token (and possibly manually set some Authorization headers if Unity allows it) as part of your URL as I’m not sure how/if Unity handles cookies (like forms auth cookies).
Yu are Right; and it’s a Yes, you can do all of that and already tested . on Iphone and android , use Webview to call external add to cart URL and show it right to your mobile.
