Cole’s 1st Blog Post

Amidst a period of innovation for XR, we want to ensure Unity remains the best development platform for creators and our ecosystem partners. We’re excited to announce our new XR plugin framework designed to empower the ecosystem and provide guidance on how this impacts development in 2019.3 and beyond.

We have been working to improve our multi-platform offering, enabling direct integrations through a unified plugin framework. The resulting tech stack consists of an API that exposes common functionalities across our supported platforms in a frictionless way for creators while enabling XR hardware and software providers to develop their own Unity plugins. This architecture offers the following benefits:

• Multi-platform developer tools such as AR Foundation and the XR Interaction Toolkit
• Faster partner updates from supported plugins via the Unity Package Manager
• More platforms have access to an interface to leverage Unity’s XR rendering optimizations and developer tools

Unity has developed new XR plugins for our supported platforms as part of this shift. Additionally, we have deprecated our built-in platform implementations in 2019.3.

This framework will influence how we support various types of platforms:

• Officially supported platforms
• Verified Solutions Partners
• Innovators

“Build once, deploy anywhere” continues to be our core principle, and we work directly with our strategic partners to ensure that all creators are fully supported when developing for these platforms. This involves deep platform integration, improvements to our engine, and optimizations to our XR tech stack for the platform. As of 2019.3, Unity officially works with and supports:

• ARKit
• ARCore
• Microsoft HoloLens
• Magic Leap
• Oculus
• Windows Mixed Reality
• PlayStation VR