Unity is buying Peter Jackson’s visual effects company for $1.6B

Unity has announced that it’s entered a definitive agreement to acquire Peter Jackson’s visual effects company Weta Digital for $1.6 billion.

Weta Digital has worked on hit films including Lord of the Rings, Avatar, Wonder Woman, and Black Widow. Unity says its acquisition will “democratise” Weta’s powerful tools to make them available for more creators.

“Weta Digital’s pipeline represents the most complete toolchain for 3D creation, simulation, and...

10 November 2021 | Development Tools

Unity partners with the UN and Project Drawdown to help create a sustainable future

Unity is often used to create incredible worlds people use to take a break from reality, but a new collaboration uses the 3D content platform to tackle a real-world problem that impacts all of humanity.

A new grant, the Unity For Humanity Environment and Sustainability Grant, has been launched in collaboration with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and Project Drawdown.

Jessica Lindl, VP of Social Impact at Unity, said:

“The future of humanity...

15 April 2021 | Development Tools

Unity flexes its robotic muscles in Object Pose Estimation demo

3D content development platform Unity is showing off how it can improve robotics in a new demonstration.

The new demo is called Object Pose Estimation and shows off Unity’s AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities. Training data is collected in Unity and used to train a deep neural network that predicts the pose of a cube. This model is then deployed in a simulated robot pick-and-place task.

Dr Danny Lange, Senior Vice President of Artificial Intelligence at Unity,...

2 March 2021 | Platforms

Unity’s latest report highlights COVID-19’s impact on gaming

Game development platform Unity has released a report on how COVID-19 has impacted the industry.

The report is based on the world’s largest dataset on COVID-19’s impact on gaming and spans everything from the PC gaming landscape to mobile ad spend.

Ingrid Lestiyo, SVP and General Manager of Operate Solutions at Unity, said:

“In a year where online entertainment content - more than ever -  became the cornerstone of social connections for so many when...

24 February 2021 | Developer

Microsoft launches Xbox Academy to inspire the next-gen of game developers

The next generation of gaming is coming, and the Xbox team is doing its part to inspire new talent.

Xbox Academy will help to teach participants about the basics of game design and development, in addition to using popular tools such as Unity.

Gaming was valued at $151.55 billion globally in 2019 and is expected to reach a value of $256.97 billion by 2025. Just this week, actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt called gaming "the future of storytelling" (while eating an extra spicy...

7 September 2020 | Development Tools