Null Byte readers are no strangers to the powers and benefits that come from learning how to code. By knowing only a handful of programming languages and platforms, an intrepid developer can create everything from best-selling apps to spyware in the comfort of his or her own h ...more
In this software tutorial you will learn how to create an island terrain in Unity 3D game engine. PART 1 covers creating a new project and exploring the interface. PART 2 covers terrain extrusion and texturing. PART 3 covers Trees and further environment topography. PART 4 cov ...more
Do you love video games? Would you devote your free time to creating your own game—one superior to the games you already have? Or at least one that has more Neil Patrick Harris jokes? There is good news and bad news. There are many software options for making all sorts of vid ...more
Game design is among the fastest-growing industries in tech. What once was a passing hobby or niche job has become a thriving industry with a huge variety of work. If you are interested in learning game design, either as a hobby or a profession, then The 2021 Complete Learn to ...more
Unity 5.6 was just released on March 31, and it will be the last entry in the Unity 5 cycle. With all of the new features, it looks like Unity 5 is going out with a bang. We already covered some updates that were added to 5.6 during the beta, especially things pertaining to m ...more
Fresh off shipping an augmented reality game for Magic Leap, Resolution Games has farmed another $7.5 million in funding through a Series B round. The round was led by MizMaa Ventures, with new investors including venture capital firms GP Bullhound and Fly Forever, as well as ...more
Whether you've always dreamed about making your own video games for fun or a career, now you can make the dream a reality with The Unity 2D Game Developer Bundle. Not only does this complete course include a ton of content, but it's not often you get to learn such valuable ski ...more
In its goal to push the visual quality of real-time rendering to a new level, Unity is starting the new year off right by releasing a sneak peek at its upcoming interactive rendering improvements via a short, three-minute first-person interactive demo called "Book of the Dead. ...more
The side-scrolling space shooter (Think R-Type) is one of the oldest and most basic of video game genres, which makes it a great place to start for novice game designers. This video will show you how to make such a game, called "Schnoopter", in Unity3D, an excellent free onlin ...more
If you've ever wanted to make your own video games and not known where to start, try Unity3D. It's a game development engine for the PC that has a free basic version and allows you to create pretty good 3D games easily. This video series will teach you the basics of Unity, inc ...more
Leap Motion created gesture control for all sorts of things, including virtual reality, long ago, but developers must build in support for their tracking peripheral to use its full potential. As a result, they've created an "Interaction Engine" for Unity, the primary platform ...more
You've spent untold hours playing your favorite games. You know what you love. More importantly, you know what can be improved upon. The distance between vision and reality is not as far as you think. You just need a bit of training. That's where The Hands-On Game Development ...more
An accelerometer/gyro goes onto an Arduino board and transmits the angular motion of the skateboard via Bluetooth to a virtual reality game I made for Android phones and Google Cardboard. DIY Virtual Reality Skateboard Video: . This is a really fun and easy project that can b ...more
Learning different coding languages can be difficult. You spend so much time mastering one and getting used to thinking along the channels you need for it that learning something new can sometimes be more difficult than starting from scratch. Starting from scratch, notably, is ...more
Cinema 4D is an amazing program, but not a one-stop source for animation needs, especially if you're planning on making a 3D video game, for which you'll need Unity 3D. This three-part video covers the process of rigging a character in Cinema 4D and transferring to Unity 3D. ...more
This clip offers instruction on how to export a model from Blender to Unity 3D and import it into a game. The tutorial also demonstrates how to bake a normal map and a color map from a highpoly model to the lowpoly counterpart, real-time display of the color/normal maps in the ...more
Big news from the world of game development engines. For several years, Unity3D has been the free 3D game development engine of choice for aspiring and indie game designers around the world. While it isn't as powerful as Unreal Engine 3 or CryEngine, it's free and much easier ...more
Today concludes our Gamer's Guide to Video Game Software (see Part 1 & Part 2). In our final installment, we will shift away from engines toward video games that allow you to make your own games within them. Many games have featured level editors that allow users to create th ...more
Yesterday's installment of a Gamer's Guide to Video Game Software featured Unity 3D; today we'll be covering one of the oldest consumer game making engines, RPG Maker. The series started in 1995 in Japan, and has since gone through many iterations in its home country. There a ...more
You can see the weather in 3D like First person shooter style by using the site called wunderground. So first go to the site and type whatever you want like Boston, Massachusetts to see the weather of there. You will find a radar image in middle of the website, click on that. ...more
“On this day he had lived with that feeling, with death breathing right in his face like the hot wind from a grenade across the street, for moment after moment after moment, for three hours or more. The only thing he could compare it to was the feeling he found sometimes when ...more
If we were to assign a theme for the 2019 edition of the Next Reality 30 (NR30), it might be something along the lines of, "What have you done for me lately?" Many of the top names in the industry from the 2018 edition remain the same, but their positions have shuffled. The p ...more
Visitors to the Unity booth at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco will get a special augmented reality treat courtesy of Magic Leap and Weta Workshop. On Monday, after alluding to the reveal in a blog post last week, Magic Leap revealed Grordbattle, a multiplayer ...more
Epic Games released Unreal Engine 4.21, bringing a number of new features, bug fixes, and improvements for augmented reality development, including deeper support for Magic Leap One and the addition of support for the Windows Mixed Reality platform and headsets. Initially inc ...more
One could argue that, at least for the moment, software development is more important to the augmented reality experience than hardware. Since a viable augmented reality headset has yet to emerge for the broader, mainstream consumer market, currently, the same devices that mak ...more
Continuing to take the steps necessary to reign supreme among the top game engines of the world, with a steady stream of major updates, enhancements, and new features, the team at Unity are keeping the user base in a regular state of surprise. At this rate, it's almost like Ch ...more
After publishing two batches of videos from its L.E.A.P. developer conference, Magic Leap has made the session on Seedling from Insomniac Games available to the public. Featuring Joel Bartley, lead gameplay programmer for Insomniac Games, and Michael Liebenow, lead software e ...more
The year 2020 was a pivotal span of time during which the word "virtual" took on a brand new meaning. Instead of referring to VR or augmented reality, the term was hijacked to describe meeting across long distances through a variety of software tools, most often through video. ...more
With any continuously active software, it can start to become fairly complex after a few years of updates. New features and revisions both get layered into a thick mesh of menu systems and controls that even pro users can get bewildered by. If you are new to a certain applicat ...more
With $100 million in grant funding already available to developers via its MegaGrants program, Epic Games is sweetening the pot with some gear for Magic Leap developers. At last week's Unreal Engine Build: Detroit '19 event, Epic Games announced that it would supply Magic Lea ...more
Once mixed reality technology is more widely available and realistically priced for consumers, using the tech to create the illusion of a larger space, will likely be a favorite use for mixed reality in places where real-estate is expensive, people tend to live in smaller home ...more
The guy who recreated Super Mario Bros. as a first-person obstacle course is back with an augmented reality take on another classic game. While the previous experiment was built for HoloLens, this time the developer, Abhishek Singh, has come up with an AR version of the class ...more
Not all remakes of video game classics turn out well, but a new augmented reality take on Super Mario is likely to draw in fans of the Nintendo hit. Created by Vancouver-based Stuart Langfield, the AR gaming experiment isn't an official release, but after seeing what's possib ...more
Tony Parisi, the global head of VR/AR at Unity Technologies, has been passionately working with virtual and immersive spaces for a long time. And while the internet world we live in now is very different than when Parisi was co-authoring VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language ...more
Don't Miss: The Difference Between Virtual, Augmented, & Mixed Reality Mixed reality blends the digital world with the physical one, whereas virtual reality blocks the physical one out. But as game developers are finding, and Unreal Engine 4's upcoming mixed reality support ...more
Welcome to the first annual Next Reality 30, our list of people who've made the biggest impact on the augmented reality space in the last 12 months — and what a 12-month roller-coaster ride it's been. Apple introduced ARKit-powered apps last fall, Google launched ARCore for An ...more
"I want to make video games" — Is there anyone who hasn't ever thought that? It's almost universal among gamers to want to get on the other side of the screen and design the games themselves, especially those of us who have played less than impressive games and thought that we ...more
Despite the launch of ARKit a year ago, and ARCore this year, a true killer app has not arrived for either platform, that's according to the head honcho for one of the leading development environments for 3D applications. In an interview at TechCrunch Disrupt on Wednesday, Un ...more
In this series, we are going to get you to the edge of building your own cloud-based, cross-platform augmented reality app for iPhone, Android, HoloLens, and Meta 2, among other devices. Once we get the necessary software installed, we will walk through the process of setting ...more
The leading platforms enabling augmented reality technology lead our headlines in Market Reality this week. Unity Technologies received a sizable investment and PTC striking another development partnership as its annual LiveWorx conference wraps up. Fittingly, both companies ...more
At the Microsoft Build 2017 conference in Seattle this past week, 3D application and game platform Unity, partnering with Microsoft, launched a contest that drives HoloLens developers to realize their ideas into a full-fledged application and possibly win money for it. Submis ...more
We've shared a capture-the-flag game for grabbing handshakes and cracking passwords for Wi-Fi, and there are some upcoming CTF games we plan on sharing for other Wi-Fi hacks and even a dead-drop game. While security-minded activities and war games are excellent ways to improve ...more
While these days it is better known for the cross-platform gaming sensation Fortnite, Epic Games also makes Unreal Engine, one of the top development environments for 3D content and, in turn, augmented reality and virtual reality experiences. As a result, the company has mana ...more
Continuing our NR30 series this week, we focused on the leaders of the software development industry that make augmented reality experiences possible. In other news, two of the current leaders in making AR headsets, Microsoft and Magic Leap, are pursuing multiple verticals wit ...more
Franchises left and right are releasing Pokémon Go-style augmented reality games, and Google is making it even easier to churn out the apps. Announced today via a company blog post, the Google Maps API now enables developers to build their own location-based games using Maps ...more
About a year ago, a certain watershed mobile augmented reality game based on a familiar video game franchise was released into the wild. Today, a number of imitators and emulators have introduced their own location-based games with hopes of similar success. The process of rep ...more
Developers looking to create shared experiences that support both HoloLens as well as ARKit may be able to get it working in Unity since that the engine supports both platforms — though, the amount of effort it might take to get that working could be a bit much. Up to this poi ...more
Today in Los Angeles, Unity will be at the Loews Hollywood Hotel to host Unite '16, its annual developer conference. Unite is Unity's platform for showing the development community its upcoming direction and roadmap for augmented and virtual reality, game development, 3D techn ...more
Facebook has announced the cancelation of its annual F8 developer conference, citing concerns around the developing coronavirus health crisis. Next to Facebook's annual Oculus Connect event, the F8 developer conference is the biggest and best event to find out about augmented ...more
Following the surprise release of Magic Leap's SDK on Monday, March 19, Unity, Unreal Engine, and Mozilla followed up by announcing official partnerships with the company. "We are proud to partner with Magic Leap to integrate the Magic Leap platform with Unity," Unity announc ...more
If you're following the classic Halloween playbook closely, you've already got a costume or three picked out, you've binged-watched your favorite horror movies, and you've likely visited a haunted house. But it's 2017, so how about trying something new, like a haunted house th ...more
It has been an interesting few days in developer news. The Microsoft blog has been busy with information relative to the augmented reality space. Meta 2 has also announced an interesting development this week. Here is a collection of various tidbits that have been collecting u ...more
The keynote at this week's Vision Summit 2017, a two-day event put together by the Unity team in beautiful Hollywood, California, revealed a few new features coming to the Unity platform. They also previewed some of the beta features that are currently available for those less ...more
For those familiar with my old YouTube series, New in the Store, you will be excited to know that I am starting something very similar here on NextReality that's a bit more broad in scope. Have You Seen This? will take a look at HoloLens applications that are new in the Window ...more
With its 3D engine being responsible for approximately 60% of augmented and virtual reality experiences, Unity is continuing to place a premium on tools that not only keep developers working in its development environment but also make their workflows easier. During the keyno ...more
The enterprise sector is where the money is for augmented reality at the moment, and remote assistance apps are the go-to app for many enterprise customers. We took a look at the leading apps and platforms from this category, from the top contenders to the underdogs with uniqu ...more
Developers in the augmented reality industry got a lot of love this week. While Microsoft is marketing the HoloLens 2 toward the enterprise segment, the company is still working hard to give the indie developer community a chance to purchase the next-generation AR headset. Me ...more
While Magic Leap turned heads at the Game Developers Conference with AR experiences at the Unity and Unreal Engine booths, news broke that the company was the winning bidder for ODG's patents. Speaking of GDC, Epic Games used its pulpit at the conference to announce a new fun ...more
Whether you're a veteran augmented reality developer looking for a quick access point to add a new platform to your arsenal or just getting started with your first AR head-mounted display, get ready to start developing for the Meta 2. In this short breakdown, we'll use the Un ...more
Mobile game companies Hit Point Studios and Legacy Games have adapted their Color BlastAR augmented reality game for iOS with the ARKit platform. The free game, aimed at children 6-12 years old, places colorless cartoon characters throughout the physical play space. Players, ...more