Unity, the San Francisco-based platform for creating and operating games and other 3D content, on November 10 announced the launch of Unity Simulation Pro and Unity SystemGraph to improve modeling, testing, and training complex systems through AI. With robotics usage in supply chains and manufacturing increasing, such software is critical to ensuring efficient and safe operations.
Danny Lange, senior vice president of artificial intelligence for Unity, told VentureBeat via email that the Unity SystemGraph uses a node-based approach to model the complex logic typically found in electrical and mechanical systems.
Unity’s execution engine, Unity Simulation Pro, offers headless rendering – eliminating the need to project each image to a screen and thus increasing simulation efficiency by up to 50% and lowering costs, the company said.
“The Unity Simulation Pro is the only product built from the ground up to deliver distributed rendering, enabling multiple graphics processing units to render the same Unity project or simulation environment simultaneously, either locally or in the private cloud,” the company said.
While there are several companies that have built simulators targeted especially at AI applications like robotics or synthetic data generation, Unity claims that the ease of use of its authoring tools makes it stand out above its rivals, including top competitors like Roblox, Aarki, Chartboost, MathWorks, and Mobvista.
“As these simulations grow in complexity in terms of the size of the environment, the number of sensors used in that environment, or the number of avatars operating in that environment, the need for our product increases. Our distributed rendering feature, which is unique to Unity Simulation Pro, enables you to leverage the increasing amount of GPU compute resources available to customers, in the cloud or on-premise networks, to render this simulation faster than real time. This is not possible with many open source rendering technologies or even the base Unity product – all of which will render at less than 50% real time for these scenarios,” Lange said.
Unity will showcase the Unity Simulation Pro and Unity SystemGraph through in-depth sessions at the forthcoming Unity AI Summit on November 18, 2021.