The latest iteration of Unity 5 offers native support for Google’s virtual reality platform and the new graphical API from Khronos Group.
Unity has announced the launch of the version 5.6 of its engine, the latest iteration of Unity 5, which adds native support for Vulkan and Daydream. The Khronos Group Graphics API offers a high-performance solution for multiple desktop and mobile platforms, and has been designed to take advantage of processors with multiple cores and allow multiple threads to run in parallel. Therefore, the speed is improved and the CPU load is reduced so that it can carry out other tasks. This allows performance improvements of 30 to 60%, abstracting the programmer from the specific part of the Vulkan API. Another of the improvements that are achieved is a lower consumption, so that a longer playing time is achieved on mobile devices. Unity version 5.6 also adds initial OpenVR support.
This latest iteration of Unity 5 also adds native support for Google VR with Cardoard on iOS and Android, and Daydream on Android. This means being able to natively take advantage of virtual reality performance improvements such as asynchronous reprojection. Compared to the previous Google VR SDK for Unity, a more streamlined workflow is now offered with significant improvements and lower latency. To use it, we will only have to enable virtual reality and select Daydream as the platform in our project.
