Other than games, and, I guess, other than architectural visualization, which seems to be the other major usage for game engines.
What’s out there?
From time to time I dabble in electronics (mainly 'duino of various persuasions), and RC and the occasional robotics. OpenCog is a well-known robotics library (C++, boo, hiss) and I was surprised to find that Unity is used as a simulation environment for testing certain types of OpenCog systems.
That got me wondering what else people are using it for beyond the obvious normal game/viz projects.
I haven’t used it personally for anything robotics-related at all. And so far my only real robotics tinkering has been modifying an RC car into a self-driving (GPS + Netduino) thing that roams around the yard. We have almost 6 acres so I’ve always thought it might be nice to build an automated lawn mower, and I’ve pondered simulating that inside Unity. I think it would be a lot of fun to write.
I wonder how well it work to drive a real lawn mower using just normal RC controls? Have that information fed back into a Unity screen so you could mow your lawn with a RC controller.
I wonder if you could setup your automated lawn mower similar to the same way you set up race car AI in Unity racing game? With a predefined path it could follow to mow your lawn and add a few smarts over time to make it more autonomous. The ability to go around trees automatically as part of the normal additions.
My wife and I have built and flown a lot of racing drones with FPV (video) and I was planning the first mower as RC-controlled with video. It was easy to add a spare video RX to the house AV system, it’ll be trivial to put one on a mower so I can literally mow the lawn from my couch over the TV.
I know I saw a job listing a week or two ago that Boeing was looking for Unity Developers to help them develop some simulations for their newest planes
Eh, their focus is less on fitting into the ‘game’ description (Whatever that may be, its a very blurred definition) and more on other elements such as interactivity, educational or experimentation.
There are better examples of non-games on that list; I wouldn’t worry about it too much!
