We will be continuing the Virtual Field School Project work in our research of the Unity3d platform in tandem with maturing the Second Life (SL) version.
At this point in the process it's apparent that we'll be able to leverage a few Unity3d strengths. Second Life may offer some of these but they were either not reliable or are very difficult to implement:
- Near limitless size possibilities
- Can implement complex 3d meshes (such as from Maya)
- Supports multiple camera and finite camera controls
- Customizable terrain vegetation
- Can import Maya animations and control them on a frame by frame level
- Tree editor
- To scale importing of USGS data
- real time physics engine
Unity3d opens up a variety of options that will enable us to entertain the idea of doing a few Unity3d unique things such as:
- simulating flooding
- destroying structures
- simulating the physics of a flood
While Unity3d has its finer points we're working on a few deficiencies that the platform doesn't have in comparison to Second Life:
1) out of the box multiplayer framework -- We're currently investigating something called Badumna that might allow us to not only mimic some of the SL interconnectivity but maybe even improve on it. Badumna is a pier to pier networking technology that (in theory) should allow for much less lag in multi-user environments.
2) Media on a Prim (in world browsers) -- There is no Unity3d equivalent to this. I'm not sure that the Unity3d people are even aware of this need for a feature. However, Unity3d does support the possibility of communicating with the browser window it is embedded in.
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