The Ultimate Guide to Real World Applications with Unity

This course is authorized by and made in partnership with Unity Technologies. 

Have you ever wanted to create applications beyond video games but thought that’s all Unity could do? I’m here to tell you, that today Unity is no longer just an incredible game engine, but a real-time rendering platform that is capable of delivering and powering enterprise-level applications. Companies large and small use Unity to power their applications, no matter what industry: film, automotive, machine learning, construction, and so many more. Notable companies like Uber, Disney, Coca-Cola, and AT&T are developing new innovative technologies and applications working with Unity!

In this course you will:

• Create an augmented reality experience

• Explore APIs like AWS and Google Maps

• Save & load data to cloud storage

• Implement asset bundles & Scriptable Objects

• Discover advanced programming concepts

This course will take you through developing three applications. The first application is a service adjustment app that will show you the ease and flexibility of building your UI with the Unity engine. We take this a step further by getting into different APIs and how to connect to them using Unity. You’ll learn how to work with Google Maps API and obtain your GEO location. You’ll discover how to enable the camera on your iOS or Android device and save the image to a texture! You’ll wrap up the application by saving and loading a file to and from Amazon S3, one of the most popular storage file systems on the web!  

Our second application is an interactive map experience for your local zoo. This application will reinforce the ease of use working with the Unity’s UI System and then get into triggering engagement points to display infographics. A big takeaway from this project is the introduction of Scriptable Objects. Our application has several engagement cards we want to display to our users, so instead of creating 50 or more engagement cards, we create a template for a card using a scriptable object and then dynamically populate those cards at run-time. Truly an incredible feature of Unity!

Our final application is an augmented reality (AR) experience where we demonstrate the power of working with AR to induce learning. Our application takes you through the anatomical structure of a horse and allows you to control the transitions through the animation system. A big takeaway from this project is the use of asset bundles. Asset bundles allow you to store models, data, and even entire scenes into a cloud-hosted solution like AWS S3 and then retrieve that object at run-time incorporating it into your scene.

Why Use Unity to Build Real-World Applications?

Unity is so much more than just a game engine. From the user-friendly editor, to the flexibility of C# scripting, you can create incredibly powerful and useful applications within a fraction of the time. One of the biggest struggles new developers have when learning app development is to choose a platform to develop for. With Unity, you’re designing and developing your application once and then with a push of a button, you’re able to port that app to over 22 different platforms including iOS, Android, Windows and wearables. You should be interested in learning to develop real world applications if you’re serious about a career with Unity because it opens the door of opportunity. Focusing purely on games narrows you down to a $120 billion industry. While that’s quite large, the games industry is very niche and tightly pieced together, accepting new members very rarely. On the other hand, using Unity to build real world applications creates opportunities in several other multi-billion dollar industries, as mentioned above. This allows you to use your skills and knowledge of the real-time rendering engine and apply it to help these other industries thrive and innovate. With this course, I’m going to show you how I became a self-taught software engineer. Through the simple process of researching solutions and understanding the logic of what you’re writing, you’ll discover how easy and powerful Unity can be when developing applications beyond games.

Why Learn From Me?

This is the fourth course that has been co-created with Unity Technologies on Udemy. We want to demonstrate the power and flexibility of moving beyond games and developing enterprise level applications with Unity. I’ve been developing in Unity since the initial public release of version 2.6. I’m also a completely self-taught software engineer. I’ve developed enterprise augmented reality applications for companies like Coca-Cola, AT&T, GE, and Thyssenkrupp. These were powerful real world applications that were powered using Unity! I fell in love with the opportunity to work for these big clients and loved how the logic and problem solving I applied to video games was seamless in the transition to developing enterprise level applications.   

Upon completion of this Unity course, students will understand Unity from a software engineering standpoint. The ability to research and understand the logic being applied to these applications will help you grow as a developer and widen the opportunity for you to get a career working with Unity.

Join me on this adventure today! I'll see you in the course.