Gaming Giant Unity wants to digitally copy the world

In video games, unplayable characters can be a bit confusing. An NPC can wander through a neighborhood and face a street light, and then can disappear from the next block. NPCs lunge at the player character’s punches or commit to kicking the wall 400 times, never knowing that the wall won’t kick back.

Unity Technologies is in the business of NPC. Founded in 2004, Unity creates a game engine of the same name that provides the architecture for hundreds of video games using real-time 3D computer graphics technology. Unity also provides a wealth of tools that integrate with that game engine, including an AI engine. In the Unity game engine, developers design 3D city blocks and their street lights; modeling their NPCs; animate their punches; and can — through Unity’s AI technology — teach them when to stop throwing stones.

Five years ago, Unity executives realized: In the real world, there are many situations that would greatly benefit from NPCs. Think about designing a roller coaster. Engineers can’t ask humans to get on a roller coaster in front of a hairpin turn to check if they’ll fly away. And they certainly can’t ask them to do it 100 or 1,000 times, just to be sure. But if an NPC had all the right qualities of a human—weight, movement, even a little impulsiveness—the engineer could whip them around that bend 100,000 times, like a child. crazy play. RollerCoaster Tycoon, to distinguish under which circumstances they will be ejected. Of course, the roller coaster will also be digital, with its metal bending over time and the speed at which its cars sink and rise depending on the number of passengers.

Unity turned that idea into a branch of its business and is now leveraging its game engine technology to help customers create “digital twins” of objects, environments, and more recently, children. people in real life. Danny Lange, Unity’s senior vice president of artificial intelligence, said at Unity headquarters in San Francisco last October: “The real world has limits, it’s weird. Speaking to WIRED in 2020, he told me, “In a synthetic world, you can essentially recreate a world that is better than the real world for training systems. And I can create many other scenarios with that data in Unity. ”

Digital twins are virtual copies of real-life things, acting and reacting in cyberspace the same way their physical counterparts do. Or at least, that’s what the term implies. The word “twin” does a lot of the heavy lifting. It will be a long time before simulations boast 1-1 features to their references; and these “twins” need a mountain of human labor to create. Right now, however, dozens of companies are using Unity to model digital twins of robots, production lines, buildings, and even wind turbines to design, operate, monitor, optimize and train them. These twins rust in the rain and are quickly peeled off by lubricants. They learn to avoid a tumor or identify a broken gear. With a sufficiently precise digital twin, Unity’s game engine can even collect “synthetic data” from the simulation to better understand it, and double its IRL, Lange said.

“We really are a big data company,” Lange said. “We realized early on that at the end of the day, real-time 3D is about data and nothing more than data.” Unity’s main digital twin customers are in the world of industrial machines, where they can use digital simulations in place of more expensive physical models. Unity executives believe the company’s real-time 3D technology and AI capabilities make it possible for them to compete with many other companies entering the $3.2 billion sector, including IBM. , Oracle and Microsoft. David Rhodes, Unity’s senior vice president of digital twins, says his goal is to make Unity the venue to one day host “a digital twin of the world.” .