Is Unity Robotics Dead?

Unity Engine
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From what I can tell, there has been no movement from the Unity team for the past year or two on robotics work. I’ve been attempting to do a mixed reality project with a robot in the loop and got some things working with the tools available now, but it there are at least a few rough spots that are currently left as an exercise for non-Unity developers to fix/implement.

It makes me wonder whether I should spend more time here or try a different framework/engine that might have more longevity/flexibility (WebXR, Unreal) for my medium-low fidelity use case (I just want to see LiDAR and maps in mixed reality with a headset localized to the robot map… Foxglove is already very capable of this using ThreeJS, so maybe WebXR would be more flexible…)

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It appears so… Sad, as i think there’s a lot of untapped potential here.

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Definitely. I guess we need more prolific consumer level robotic platforms before we see more investment from Unity. Mixed reality with robotics seems like such an easy slam dunk, but maybe not enough people have the vision (no pun intended) yet.

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Hey @age9000 , I’m interested in doing something similar but in my case I intend on using VR instead. Have your heard anything from the Unity staff concerning the Unity-Robotics-Hub? Does it still receive support from anyone? I’m only starting to do some research into finding a platform to integrate ROS2 into a simulator that supports VR. Do you have any tips for a beginner.

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It’s very dead. Our whole team was laid off years ago. It’s unlikely there is a single person left at Unity who is familiar with the Robotics repos at this point.

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Yeah seems sadly yes. Actually I managed to use lidar pointcloud map message with ros in unity and successfully made a navigator in unity with external ros path planner. Unity publishes lidar pointcloud msg and subsceibes next move point msg. It works rather good comparing to another gazebo simulation environment.
However in order to make this, I had to fork official ros-tcp-connector package then port it to python3, and preventing using official pointcloud detector… which indicated how long since last time someone maintained this.