Our first Unite was, in short, amazing.
We were happily grinning most of the time and said to each other, “I never want to miss another one”.
Our buddy, Josh Montute over at ThinkSquirrel, reached out to us and asked if we wouldn’t mind helping volunteer at his booth for the week – answering people’s questions and trying to upsell his awesome plug-ins for Unity.
We at Streamfall actually have used his products – Fluvio and Camera Shake – in the past, so of course to talk these products up was no sweat as we were genuine in our enthusiasm. (You may have seen us – ThinkSquirrel was the only all purple booth at all of Unite!)
Michelle (art lead on the team) was able to experience Unity’s official training day on Sunday before the event. This covered building an entire game from scratch (aside from premade 3d assets). The whole process was rewarding to her as an artist, as she is gaining more skills in the programming side of her skillset. It was a bit of a last minute placement, but we are grateful to the Unity staff for accommodating us so quickly.
The event started with the keynote. In which, the Hololens was debuted for the first time live in public. Up until now, we were skeptical of the capabilities as marketing had corrupted our trust in the past. It works! We can’t stress how excited we are for that future. It was also great to meet one of the senior engineers on the project, Patrick, whom urged us to attend one of Microsoft’s Hololens academies sometime in the future. Depending on where we are with work, we’ll see if we can follow up with it!
AR / VR was definitely a hot topic the entire week. We are glad to be a part of the wave, building incredible apps for the next set of future technologies.
Networking was phenomenal as well. We returned with a bag full of business cards, and are in the process of following up with these people.
A highlight of course was Google, who were handing out free Tango dev kits the entire week. Luckily we grabbed two, after waiting a couple hours in line. Our wireframes and UI mockups for upcoming Tango projects are complete, so this will greatly help our ambitious aspirations.
Special thanks to that Google Tango team. The staff was kind, helpful, and always full of energy. They were great support in answering our technical questions concerning our previous work experience with the Tango. Oh, and did we mention that we got to meet Johnny Lee? Bryan was a little star struck, but we are happy to have seen him!
As we happily said to each other, we will definitely try to make the effort to get out to future Unites. The experience was incredible, gaining lots of new knowledge, contacts, and excitement for future projects. (Of course, it was also way fun to geek out with fellow Unity developers and to talk shop with people from all different parts of the world).
Comments are closed.