Inside NAB 2019
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00:00Hey, welcome back to Checkpoint XP. We are here at the National Association of Broadcasters
00:10Convention in Las Vegas, Nevada in the beautiful Las Vegas Convention Center. Joining me now is
00:17Adam Myhill, the creative director for Made with Unity. Adam, welcome to Checkpoint.
00:21Thank you for having me.
00:22So, first of all, we have a lot of listeners out there who are newer to the video game space.
00:28Unity is, of course, a legacy brand in the world of gaming. Can you tell people a little
00:33bit about Unity and its origins?
00:35Yeah, so Unity is a 3D creation engine, and we work with creators to do everything from
00:42create to operate to monetize. We're the largest game engine by many metrics, and we're working
00:50on everything from the smallest mobile game all the way up to Academy Award-winning films.
00:54So, going a little bit into Unity, a lot of people, when they think about Unity, they
01:01think accessibility. They think it's what a lot of the indie developers choose to develop
01:07on. Why is Unity so easy to get into? Why is it so popular?
01:14Its origins are in gaming, and in gaming of all sizes, and it's easy to use. So, the approach
01:22that I think a lot of people find when they get into it is they can spend their time working
01:26on creative problems, and on the game design, and on executing on their vision. And, hopefully,
01:33our goal is the least amount of time wrestling around with tech and with problems and pipelines.
01:38We support the most different forms of platforms. So, like, if a new VR piece comes out, or there's
01:44a new phone, we've got hundreds of engineers that are working on that very problem. And you
01:49hit a button, and it'll work on that device.
01:51In mentioning that, I mean, Unity has been absolutely instrumental in the rise of mobile
01:57gaming. I'm wondering, what kind of challenges come along with, you know, developing for mobile
02:01gaming, and really for, like you say, for being so ubiquitous, for being able to be used on so
02:06many different platforms? How challenging is it to develop that way?
02:09Well, it is. I mean, there's a great diversity in the capability of these devices, right? And it
02:13depends how far back you want to go. If you want to support, like, an iPhone 4 or something,
02:18versus the latest hardware that's coming out there, it's a really large delta between the
02:23processing power of those, you know, those devices. So, we approach that. We have systems
02:29to handle that. So, you can have quality settings, and you can configure your project to, you know,
02:35use the lower expense items for the cheaper hardware, and then, you know, go full on and turn
02:41all your graphics to 11 on the highest one. So, we're coming up on the era of 5G. I mean,
02:48it may yet be a year or two out, but it's going to get here eventually. How do you foresee 5G
02:54changing the way the mobile world works, or maybe even, you know, moving off of mobile,
03:00maybe talking more about offline tournaments and things like that? How do you foresee 5G changing
03:05things with Unity? It's going to change a lot. It's going to be a really big change. So,
03:09when you don't have to do the processing power on the device, and you can have machines in the cloud
03:16with whatever the craziest video card is running, and the latency between getting that stream to your
03:21phone is near zero. So, now you can play your game on your phone, but it's not actually running on
03:27your phone. It's just streaming video back and forth from a server in the cloud. I mean,
03:31that's the whole Google thing that they just announced, right? I am glad that you mentioned
03:34that because, of course, I'm not going to let you get out of here without talking about that.
03:36Unity was announced as one of the partners for Google Stadia. When you tell people the concept
03:44behind Google Stadia, you get one of two reactions. You get, whoa, or you get, that's impossible,
03:50there's no way. There's one more reaction. We've already tried that. The industry has tried that.
03:55Right. So, I mean, of course, the industry has tried that, not necessarily with, you know,
04:00the overlords of Google behind it. Talk to me about this concept of cloud gaming and why it could
04:08actually work.
04:09Well, I mean, if anyone's going to do this, it's going to be Google because they just have the
04:13infrastructure and the scale and the horsepower and the commitment. So, why I'm excited about this
04:17is because I think that there's a world where all of this really heavy, not that phones aren't powerful,
04:22they are, but like really significantly heavy computational processes are done in the cloud.
04:26Right.
04:26And each phone is a portal to this, but because of 5G, this is a two-way connection, right? And what
04:31we're seeing with media is broadcast is not a one-directional thing anymore. I mean, it still is.
04:38We're at the NAB show.
04:39Right.
04:39But when you look at things like Bandersnatch, you look at things like eSports, $120 million were spent
04:44last year on people on Twitch gifting their favorite players.
04:48Don't I know it. Don't you worry.
04:50Right. So, we're going to see a game designer designing games where the spectators and the
04:55viewers and the casters have a play, and this is a bi-directional stream. So, when we have,
05:00I'm kind of moving back to your 5G question, but I mean, it's the takeoff point for so many
05:04other questions. When we have 5G going and information can come from the viewer, the spectator,
05:10and go back, and we have this two-way communication, think of what game designers are going to be able
05:14to do, like, stuff we can't even imagine. Like, we're going to see stuff like, you know,
05:17if a hundred people vote this way on something, and it's going to, a health back will drop.
05:20It's going to change the outcome of this. We're going to have, like, branching narratives,
05:23and we're going to have a place where spectators and viewers can really have agency over what
05:26they're watching.
05:27So, and one of the big questions that people in the games industry have been struggling
05:31with is this idea that, you know what, graphics can only improve for so long. We can only move so
05:37many generations of consoles on the concept of, like, wow, look how realistic this looks.
05:41The point is, we're getting to photorealism. We're very close to it now.
05:45Yeah.
05:45So the idea is, like, okay, so what's the next major innovation that's going to sell the
05:50next generation of consoles? And I think you're right. Are we looking at maybe interaction
05:54being the new dimension?
05:56Yeah. And, I mean, it's not really new. I think we're just figuring it out. RTX,
06:00real-time ray tracing, we support it. Other game engines support it. In two years,
06:07hard surfaces, things other than humans, humans are going to look amazing. Things other than humans,
06:11I don't think you're going to be able to distinguish them from live action footage.
06:15Right.
06:15It's going to be that good. So that problem's gone. So making it look amazing is, we're past
06:20that now.
06:20Right, yeah.
06:20Or we will be. We're very close now. What's going to happen is people want to watch experiences
06:25where nobody knows what happens next. Look at the psychology of children, right? Like,
06:29kids aren't watching TV shows because they feel that there's no variability. Like,
06:34they're not actually with the people that are playing and nobody knows what's going to happen next.
06:38So the next generation, the current generation, like, the younger people want to watch experiences
06:46that have variability. And you look at the baby boomers, and they're going to, you know,
06:49they don't have too long left.
06:51No.
06:51And they're the ones that have cable and are watching this passive media. And it's going
06:55to change fast.
06:56Yes.
06:56And we're going to watch things where you as a caster, me as a spectator, are going to
07:01have some control over what we're watching. And we're all watching this thing live, just
07:05like sports.
07:06But yeah, exactly.
07:08Exactly. And we need to get into this and talk about some of the ramifications for e-sports.
07:13I mean, at this point, it's not worth calling it an emerging medium anymore. It's here.
07:18Totally.
07:19So talking about e-sports, tell me about Unity's commitment to e-sports and the growth in that
07:24field.
07:25That's something I'm really passionate about. So I've been at Unity for almost three years
07:30now. Before that, I had a company called Cinemachine Imagery. And what we were doing
07:33is we were figuring out how to film variable scenarios and make it look like a movie.
07:38Right.
07:39So virtual camera systems. And my long vision, even back then, was, is I want to make e-sports
07:44look good. I'd like to increase the watchability of e-sports. So everybody likes to see it from
07:50the player's view. But watching an entire Overwatch tournament from just the different
07:55player views is kind of fatiguing. And if you notice, they have like, you know, a high
07:58third-person camera that's in overhead. And that's amazing.
08:01Right.
08:01But imagine if you had an embedded film crew and they were down there and they were filming
08:06this like a war documentary on the ground, making intelligent choices about camera, framing,
08:12following, edit, that would be a revolution in e-sports. And that's what I'm working on.
08:18And that's what I want to show you.
08:19But absolutely. I can't wait to see that. But it's very much like innovations that we've
08:24seen happen in traditional sports where when NFL introduced just the camera on the zip
08:30line effectively that could take you over the action. But e-sports presents a much wider
08:36array of possibilities because it exists in a virtual space.
08:39Totally.
08:39So I'm wondering, like, I had a conversation not long ago where we got to talk a little
08:44bit about virtual reality and this idea that one day, what if you could be in Summoner's
08:48Rift? What if you could put on a helmet and be there?
08:50Right.
08:51So I'm wondering, like, I guess, what's the ceiling at this point for like, where are we
08:57trying to get to?
08:58So I work in this every day, and I don't know.
09:03It's reasonable.
09:04So that's an honest answer. But what I do know is that if I can give game designers an
09:11environment where they can spool up 50,000 intelligent cameras, and I can give casters
09:17like you the ability to have an AI system, boil that down to the 20 best shots and different
09:25cameras of different styles, and this one's always following battles, and that one's
09:28always following player one or whatever the game is, and you as a caster can switch between
09:33these very high-level camera notions, and automatically we can make a movie out of a game in real time,
09:39then I think people are going to do amazing things with it.
09:42Yeah, because as long as e-sports have existed, one of the fundamental problems has been a
09:46lack of communication between the camera person and the caster. I mean, I think when we watch
09:52competitive PUBG or any Battle Royale game, there's so much going on at any one time, it's impossible
09:58for any human to just be everywhere they need to be covering every storyline.
10:04Totally.
10:04It sounds like there might be a solution here.
10:06Well, yeah, and we have this. I mean, I'm giving a talk at four. I'd like to show you in person.
10:11Sure.
10:11We have this technology called Cinecast, and if you, for any of the viewers who want to check it out,
10:16just Google Unity Cinecast. I don't know where the games are going, but I know that if we could
10:23give people really powerful tools to present these experiences, then we're all better for it.
10:30So, obviously Cinecast is one of them. Is there anything else coming up in Unity in the next year
10:36or so that maybe you can tease for us?
10:38Well, we've announced this thing called DOTS, and that stands for Data-Oriented Tech Stack,
10:44and it's a new way of programming. It's like a modification of the C Sharp programming language,
10:51and it makes things run ridiculously quickly. We have a demo on the iPhone where it's running
10:59half a million objects at 60 frames a second.
11:02Wow.
11:03It's really, really quite crazy. The performance gains are out of control. We put it into the camera
11:10system, and I spooled up half a million active cameras doing raycast evaluation and a damped following.
11:19Yeah.
11:20Before this, I could run like 50, and then you'd see the performance things.
11:24And you'd see the line, yeah.
11:25We're running 50,000 at 250 frames a second. And for giggles, I just sent it to half a million,
11:30like half a million. And the laptop did kind of like groan.
11:34It's like, oh, what are you doing to me, man? But okay.
11:36Yeah, and it was four frames a second, which I mean, you'd never use half a million.
11:40Right.
11:40But if you think in a game like PUBG, you got, you know, 50 players. Each player might
11:44have four handheld cameramen following them. The reason why you do four is so you always,
11:49when you're in your narrative, you always have a camera to cut to that's not across the
11:52director line.
11:53Right.
11:54So then you've got, say, a few thousand in the world, maybe a few hundred virtual drone
11:58cameras. You get into the thousands of cameras really quickly.
12:00Right.
12:00So we want to make this so you can put it into any Unity game, and there's no overhead for
12:03it.
12:04That's amazing. Adam Myhill, Creative Director for Unity, has been our guest today. Adam,
12:09thank you so much for your time.
12:10Thanks for having me.