Unity Will Be Able To Build Games For Microsoft’s HoloLens

The Unity game engine is arguably the de facto standard for those dabbling with Oculus Rift development.

But that doesn’t mean the Unity/Rift relationship is particularly exclusive — that’s hardly Unity’s style.

Thus, Unity today announced incoming support for an entirely different headset platform: Microsoft’s crazy hologram-style Augmented Reality headset, HoloLens.

We’ve written about Unity a number of times, but in case you’re unaware: Unity is a game engine designed to kill off some of the pain points in game development. You design your game once in Unity, and then it ports to pretty much any popular platform (iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and all of the next-gen consoles) with minimal code changes.

HoloLens, meanwhile, is Microsoft’s insane-looking augmented reality headset that renders high-definition hologram-style images into your environment. It was first announced back in January, with an availability window that basically works out to “eventually”.

Unity says it’ll support all of HoloLen’s flagship features, including spatial mapping (allowing you to detect real world objects around you and render things accordingly), gaze (detecting where you’re looking/focusing), and gesture/voice recognition.

Before you rush off and update Unity: HoloLens support isn’t publically available yet. It’s still in private alpha, and there’s no timeframe mentioned for when it might be. Given that HoloLen’s own release date is still up in the air, that’s pretty reasonable — without a HoloLens to test on, Unity support isn’t all that useful.

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