Unity Technology's unfair news release

News & General Discussion
1

A few weeks ago UT posted an official blog release about the use of Unity3d in the advertising business. You can read it here:

http://unity3d.com/company/news/brands-press.html

The showcased project, a game for Cheerios, is an augmented reality based project that runs in the web player.

While it all looks very nice, in order to run AR in the web player one needs webcam support, and this is not a feature of the current release of Unity. Unity fails to communicate this fact, and the news release looks like the project has just been done with Unity 2.6

This does damage to me and my potential clients. People refer to this news release and ask me to create a similar solution based on what they read in there and I fail to explain them why I can’t deliver them a solution that others (Boffswana in this case) did for their clients.

As a paying customer, I think I deserve a fair explanation of this situation.

2

Webcam Support is not supported out of the box, but it is possible.

Unity has listed their features here:

I would refer any of your clients to that page if they are curious about what unity can, but is not limited too. To go beyond that feature set, it is possible, but requires other technologies.

The article doesn’t claim that Unity has Webcam support, Unity doesn’t claim it, the article simply states accomplishments of a developer (Boffswana). The project has been done with Unity 2.6, along a creative solution by the developer to achieve this end result.

Cartoon Network has an MMO (FusionFall) which uses Unity with additional features they developed. It uses Unity, but along with it, the developers have extended Unity’s feature set so that their game is possible.

3

I assume you refer to plugins as the way to extend Unity basic functionality. There are a few webcam plugins for Unity around and a few examples of AR apps that has been created with plugins. However, none of those will work inside the web player.

The news release is misleading because it doesn’t mention that custom solutions were necessary to achieve this. Unlike with standalone apps, to modify the functionality of the web player the developer needed assistance from UT and this is the missing piece of the news. Instead it looks as though this kind of apps are possible with the basic features Unity offers…

4

It took us less than a day to wrap some existing webcam code libraries out there into DLL+osx lib that could be used in Unity Pro.

Whats the problem? Not being able to code? Wanting to get everything handed on a silver platter?

This is definitely not UTs fault!!!

(And no - please dont ask for the code - this is something you should try yourself as a learning experience)

/Thomas

5

Thomas, I would appreciate you change your tone and read carefully what I wrote and what the problem refers to.

In case you didn’t understand, I’ll repeat: problem is not in Webcam/AR support in general, but in the fact that such a solution it’s not supported in the web player.

6

Hi Bartek,

I’m sorry if we caused any confusion.

Web cam support is not possible with the current version of Unity web player nor it is planned for 3.0. It might however be included in one of the upcoming minor releases, so stay tuned! :wink:

Boffswana owns Unity source code license and uses a custom web player.

7

Thanks Robert!

This explains a lot and it’s exactly what I needed/wanted to know.

As far as I am concerned, this thread can be closed.

8

In this case unity works with a webcam directly, but how?
It use some undocumented features?
And what about privacy stuff, it don’t ask me want I or not to switch on my cam!

9

That project was done through source license. Its no feature present in the regular unity as such you can’t use it.