IBM and Unity are launching the IBM Watson Unity SDK on the Unity Asset Store, enabling developers to easily integrate Watson cloud services into their Unity applications such as visual recognition, speech to text, and language classification. The SDK makes it easy for developers to take advantage of modern AI techniques through a set of cloud-based services.

IBM and Unity are partnering to bring the power of AI to the Unity community

Today we are thrilled to announce a partnership with IBM to launch the IBM Watson Unity SDK on the Unity Asset Store. This SDK is the first asset of its kind to bring scalable AI services to Unity, enabling developers to easily integrate Watson services into their Unity applications. Millions of Unity developers globally will now have access to the powerful cloud-based AI services of Watson directly within the Unity environment.

Building the future of enterprise AR and VR together

Although AR and VR are continuously being applied to the gaming industry to immerse players in virtual environments like galaxies or with geolocation environments where the activity happens on real surroundings, we are now experiencing the advancement of applying these concepts into business use cases. With VR, companies can implement employee training programs that teach workers how to perform a job in a virtual environment without any safety risks, and with AR, field workers can hold up their phone or glasses to a pipe to see if it needs to be fixed, when, and where.

As AR and VR technologies mature, there is increasing interest coming from the enterprise market for innovative applications in marketing, design, engineering, manufacturing and analysis. Unity is the market leader in AR and VR for consumer use cases, as well as rapidly emerging as the market leader for enterprise AR and VR.

Bringing data to life with IBM Immersive Insights.

With its deep AI expertise and industry knowledge, IBM also has been actively exploring the application of AR and VR with clients such as the Immersive Insights demo, which hints at the enormous potential of AR and VR in enterprise applications. Together, Unity and IBM plan to help drive the development of this market by enabling applications that bring contextual expertise and AI capabilities directly into the employee and/or end consumer’s personal and professional sphere of experience.

This partnership exemplifies IBM and Unity’s commitment to accelerating the enterprise developer journey and equipping them with the tools and resources they need to build powerful new AR and VR apps. As an official platinum sponsor for INDEX Conference, the open developer community event, we’re excited to collaborate with IBM to empower the Unity community with powerful AI-driven cloud services to help expand a new frontier of interactivity. The first step of this journey begins with the IBM Watson Unity SDK.

IBM Watson Unity SDK

With the SDK now available on the Asset Store, Unity developers can now configure games and projects to understand speech, talk with users, and understand the intent of a user in natural language.

One of the key features of the SDK is its powerful speech recognition capabilities. With speech services, developers have access to real-time speech recognition providing highly accurate speech recognition directly in your Unity project. Player speech can be recognized and used to trigger in-game events. The IBM Watson Unity SDK also has powerful language translation and language classification capabilities. In conjunction, both language classification and speech recognition can work together seamlessly to provide voice-driven interactivity in your Unity game.

Watch an example of how IBM teamed up with Ubisoft to give players of Star Trek Bridge Crew the ability to issue commands to NPC’s with just their voice using the IBM Watson Unity SDK.

For developers interested in the power of AI-driven visual recognition, Watson’s Vision API provides the ability for developers to integrate real-time visual recognition within their Unity projects.Take a look at how a team of developers took advantage of the IBM Watson Unity SDK during an IBM-sponsored Hackathon to create Watson and Waffles, a VR adventure game which requires the player to sketch game objects using the Vive controller. Using the Vision API, Watson identifies user drawings and generates corresponding 3D objects for the player to use.

For more details about the Watson capabilities available within the IBM Watson Unity SDK you can leverage to get started, please visit: https://www.ibm.com/watson/products-services/

The SDK is simple to set up and can open up your project to new levels of interactivity. Imagine a game with NPC’s powered with visual recognition technology that recognize in-game objects or even a virtual reality experience with interactions driven completely with voice commands.

Receiving access to the IBM Watson Unity SDK is easy – simply head over to the Asset Store and download the SDK here.

You also can familiarize yourself with this short video series from IBM, which provides an overview of all of the core features of the IBM Watson Unity SDK.

Visit the Asset Store and download the IBM Watson Unity SDK today!

Resources

We’ve rounded up some key resources to help you get started with the IBM Watson Unity SDK:

•       Overview video series: IBM Watson Unity SDK Video Guide
•       Set up instructions: Watson SDK GitHub page
•       Set up instructions: IBM VR Speech Sandbox – Creating a virtual reality speech sandbox
•       More info & Community Help: developerWorks Community | Stack Overflow Community
•       Note: Registering for an IBM Cloud account is a necessary step to instantiate Watson services and access your service credentials.