Yes! Let’s take even more resources away from fixing bugs and improving the documentation! 
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Games, AR and VR are going to become a World Wide Web level technology. The ease with which you can jump around the web from link to link in a Web Browser will become a feature of AR/VR/Game browsers in the future.
It could be that we end up with dedicated VR/Game browsers derived from today’s game engines or hybrid Web/VR/Game browsers derived from web browser technology (WebGL 2.0+, WebAssembly, WebVR).
I should imagine that we will see both strands of technology grow to fill this space. But a key component is the ability to link and portal easily between ‘worlds’.
WebGL is probably the closest to this but even with WebGL >2 (Vulkan) and a fully featured WebAssembly it will not provide the performance and therefore experience of a dedicated game engine running native code.
The first game engine to provide smooth VR portalling will probably gain a massive boost, as players can quickly and easily explore and share more in VR faster and easier.
Well UT already have a dedicated AR/VR/WebGL team this project would be an ideal fit for them.
But Unity has nothing to do with it. It would be first up to browser vendors and VR SDK authors. Currently we don’t even have a proper non limited WebGL support working in browser that would allow decent VR beyond simple stuff.
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Forget AR/VR for a moment. Think of any two games. Let’s make it easy and pick Doom and Halo. Since you’re here, I assume at least some level of familiarity with the coding that goes into a basic FPS. They both have systems to track player information, what guns they have and how they perform, all the meshes and animations and sound effects that go with it, and so on. All of this stuff was written by two different teams. All of this data is entirely incompatible. And you think somehow the engine vendor (not that they’re on the same engine) is somehow going to magically convert all that from one engine to another?
But it gets better! Let’s say I’m playing Forza Motorsport and I want to “portal” into Halo. Do I get a Lamborghini-powered Warthog? Can I keep the Warthog firepower when I switch back to clicking off laps at Laguna Seca? I doubt you had anything like this in mind but even the earlier premise describes extremely unrealistic expectations. Not impossible, but implying a great deal of effort to implement a relatively pointless capability.
At most, Unity would be providing a way for one game to kick off another game with some type of generic data hand-off (hence my earlier comment about OLE; been there, done that, got the scars to prove it). The real – massive, unrealistic – effort would be to get everyone to agree on standards for the data exchanges necessary to make this possible. Hell, Mass Effect couldn’t even pull off complete character importing and they owned both titles at either end of the pipeline.
Where is the incentive for devs and publishers to support all of this? It looks a lot like an over-engineered VR “ALT-TAB” concept.
What you describe isn’t like the web. The web was designed to cross-link related pieces of information. The links are very simple. The data exchanges are very simple (or even nonexistent). The user experience is basically the same (in comparison to, say, user interaction within Call of Duty versus interacting with Portal 2, just to keep the examples in a reasonably-similar category of visualization and viewpoint).
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You just summed up most of these threads he creates.
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@MV10 Why would you expect items to transfer with you, I’m not aware of any games that currently allow items to transfer between games.
Use Case Scenario:
You’re playing a game, your friends are in another game they ask you to join them. You do.
Currently: They would e-mail/text/chat/skype you. When you exit the game you are in. If you find the invite in time you now need to have the game installed, find which server they are on and then join their game.
Future With Portals: In your game a portal request appears, if you accept your friend steps through a portal doorway and asks you to join his/her game. You can accept and follow them through or close the portal and continue your game.
Dynamically the common game engine or VROS would stream in the new game and after a short portalling tunnel effect you would be with your friends playing a game.
There are 3 potential ways to do this:
- Provided by a middleware platform e.g. Steam. Limited to a specific platform/ecosystem.
- Provided by the Game Engine. Potentially limited to games made with the same engine.
- Provided by the OS. The ideal solution as this would allow any game engine or game to use the feature.
Why wouldn’t game developers want a way for people to find their games and share them with their friends.
The idea is to minimize friction, to make the transition from game to game smooth and transparent to the end user.
At least nothing modern. I believe the King’s Quest series allowed you to transfer your character between games.
How much have you used VR? or even gaming platforms? SteamVR and Oculus home already have friend lists and you can invite and join, depending of the game you can even jump to same session. Even consoles have had these for long time.
Only new thing you want is a portal effect and these switch effects/events would be responsibility of the platforms not Unity.
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Good news! We’ve been living in the future for several years!
http://support.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-one/xbox-live/how-to-start-a-party
Good start but game sessions and even points within a game don’t have a unique URL/GPS point you can portal into, at least not a WWW / Universal system for every game do they?
What? Have you ever used Steam or consoles?
And for the web you already have the url system which has post/query parameter support. Nothing prevents you already doing this portal system in basic form with some user interaction. If you think browser vendors will ever allow people to directly portal from another app to another without a lot of security in between you will be disappointed.
Anyways Unity has nothing to do with this as you already have access to Windows API. Rest is up to platforms and browser vendors.
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Transferring data from one game into another, what is this? amiibo?
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I believe you mean Hero Quest (or Quest for Glory) and yeah they did. It was also the only way to play “Paladin” from the start in QFG 3 (you could become one at the end of 2).
Also, the Mass Effect games allowed you to transfer characters.
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Yeah I meant that game. Too many games with similar names and not enough coffee apparently.
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The Phantasy Star Portable series did too
I had a character that I made in the demo in the first game transfer into the real game when I bought it, which I then transferred into the demo of Phantasy Star Portable 2. If I had bought that game, I would have probably been able to transfer it there too and used the same character in 4 straight games