Unity's 3D engine has it's roots in desktop game development. Recently they've branched out into the in-browser 3D world and brought their high-end graphics with them. Their
Unity Web Player can be downloaded and installed onto both Mac and PC and allows you to view content built on the Unity 3D platform right inside your browser.
Features
Unity 3D's graphics are stunning to say the least, especially when compared to it's competitor in-browser plug-ins (Flash and O3D). When it's given to access your GPU the detail involved in the
3D scenes can appear almost boundless. Particles, shadows, shaders,
physics and all up to standard with today's high end games machines. Not to mention full multiplayer and network game support. On the development side there are established pipelines between applications like Blender, PhotoShop as well as support for a massive range of file format imports. This is something the open-source equivalents struggle to do well in my eyes and can be a somewhat cumbersome process. Then once you've developed and got your 3D scene, model or game ready for deployment, then not only can you push it through onto their web player, but also iPhone, Desktop and even Wii. This really is where all in-browser 3D environments need to be.
The future of Unity 3D
Unity 3D already brings rich, highly detailed, multi-player environments straight into a standard web browser. This means with their web player still in such early days of it's release, what Unity 3D has to offer in the future is an exciting prospect.
Unity 3D is closed source and a license to use it's development tools needs to be paid for. This can be seen as a good thing or a bad depending on your opinions regarding the open-source movement.
The only real drawback we can see is that the Unity Web Player plug-in hasn't yet been nearly as widely adopted by the internet community as Flash's has. This means viewers of your Unity 3D created content will see a blank space asking them to download a new (3 MB) plug-in. In the immediate, now now now culture of the internet it will put a lot of people off. Hopefully though with Unity's second to none GPU supported graphics will win users and compel them to download, install and enjoy.
