Game Development with Unity

Abstract

The original use case for the Kinect, and perhaps still the most popular, is game development. It is difficult to have a discussion on game development these days without bringing up Unity. Most readers will already be familiar with Unity. For those who are not acquainted, know that Unity is a cross-platform game engine that targets various APIs. These include the ever-fashionable Direct3D as well as the pretender to the throne, OpenGL. It is not limited to PCs, however. It also supports mobile, Windows Store, VR/AR, websites, and consoles. Unity apps are primarily developed in C# (though there is also JavaScript support), thus Unity does not require too much of a context switch from typical Kinect programming. It is free, is easy to get started with, and, importantly, has third-party support for the Kinect. In this chapter, we will cover the basics of integrating the Kinect with Unity.