I’ve decided to dig into Unity this year for some projects. I’ve been impressed by plenty of games made with Unity, but I’m really curious to learn more about non-game projects (and the people making them) that were built using Unity. Karolina Sobecka’s Sniff installation was a project that initially brought Unity to my attention. Last time I was poking around looking for this sort of thing, I came across the as-of-recently-defunct shiftcontrol studios, who produced a number of interesting interactive non-game projects using Unity.
So anyway, installations, live performances, projection mapping, VJ sets, data visualization… please share examples in this thread!
I wish I could have been the first to post a showcase - but I don’t have one.
I am the CTO at Gagarin where we create highly interactive installations for museums and exhibitions. We are on the lookout for new platforms for our development and Unity3D looks like a strong candidate.
It would be great to see some showcases with Unity3D in this field.
We have participated in the development of some training, visualisation and education software so far. Most of which I cannot share yet due to NDA’s. We are also going to enter serious engineering stuff.
One sample that I can show is the educational project intended for engineering students. It needs more development and refinement, but here it is:
I’ve been using Unity for pretty much anything from clinical assessment tools, data collection tools for neuropsychological experiments, data visualization and treatment of neurological and mental health disorders. I’ve used Unity for most of my PhD and converted several research labs and institutes to use Unity for a wide range of R&D projects. It’s a great tool for that!
LOL The ‘FOV2GO’ looks like a victorian stereoscope, you should design it in steampunk style.
Are there any unity non games that don’t use any 3D scenes and are purely GUI based like a vector calculator or 2D function plotter as this is the sort of thing that I would be interested in doing, or to use 3D to plot an electromagnetic field or something similar.
How about self-help type apps? I released a Unity meditation app last fall - picked up by ~3000 users. Am a few weeks away from another self-help app. I’m a game designer, so Unity makes sense to me - 3D effects, texture atlases, shaders, audio streaming, …
Most of non game are architectural walkthroughs or configurators.
You can have a look at my tiny app, which allows the user to load a his own picture and bend or roll it. It could help to imagine how the picture would look when printed on a cylindrical shape like mug or can or pencil: ImageBender
I have also made a template for visualisations with the capability of online edits/save by user.with playerprefs or mysql options.
Though some are “games”, it also regroups more various themes. Our project, the CVNF is a training aid for ship familiarization, so you have spacial awareness functionalities as well as system manipulation.
Terraviz is a an awesome one to take a look at; a multi-user data visualization project, all multi-platform. Really neat stuff.
I work on medical/anatomy and physical visualization software projects, mostly for educational use, in Unity. Unfortunately, I don’t have anything I can share yet due to NDAs.
Also, I’ve heard from a few customers about some really cool non-game stuff they’re doing with my fluid dynamics package on the Asset Store - from pump dynamics to astronomy simulation/visualization. Really neat stuff!
In my opinion Unity is the best game-focused 3D engine out there to do non-game work.
I used Unity to make some physics tutorials for students visiting Fermilab. Most of them were designed for specific hardware, a large upward-facing touch screen, and they made heavy use of its multitouch abilities.
Here’s one example that didn’t: a mechanical histogram that fills up with balls to demonstrate patterns in statistical distributions. Click on it to change distributions— there are about four or five of them (uniform, Gaussian, delta-function, etc.).
I expanded one of my Fermilab demos, a set of magnets that you could use to steer a proton beam, into a general framework for implementing electromagnetic forces and fields in Unity. It’s called Magnetodynamics, and it’s available in the Asset Store. I have several demos of it on my web site, but the Penning Trap demo is most similar to what you’re asking about. It’s still a 3D scene, but there are magnetic (green) and electric (blue) field lines filling the Penning Trap to show where the fields are. The sparkily blob is a simulation of a charged plasma stuck in the trap, all following the correct laws of physics.
To draw lines of steepest descent through arbitrary mathematical formulae, you can create an ExternalField with a user-defined vector field as its “magnetic field” (even if it doesn’t obey Maxwell’s Equations). Then you would add FieldLine objects, and they’d follow the shape of the vector field. Just don’t add any magnetic dipoles, superconductors, or solenoids, since these would disrupt your field. One caveat: I used a third-party Vectrosity package to draw the lines, so this solution would require both Magnetodynamics (for the field simulation) and Vectrosity (to draw the lines).
If you’re interested in using this package, the complete documentation is also available online, so you can check to see if it can do what you want.