Deciding to participating in ART.HAPPENS is my latest motivation to look at Unity 3D, something I've done several times. My first look was almost five years ago, and my most recent look was about a year and a half ago in the context of machine learning. Unity is a tremendously powerful tool and I've gone through a few beginner tutorials, but I never got as far as building my own Unity project. Will that finally change this time?

My previous look at Unity was motivated by an interest in getting into the exciting world of machine learning, specifically in the field of reinforcement learning. That line of investigation did not get very far, but as most machine learning tools are focused on Linux there was the question of Unity's Linux support. Not just to build a game (which is supported) but also to run the Unity editor itself on Linux. My investigation was right around the time Unity Editor for Linux entered beta with expectation for release in 2020, but that has been pushed to 2021.

For my current motivation, it's not as important to run the editor on Linux. I can just as easily create something fun and interactive by running Unity on Windows. Which led to the next question: could I output something that can work inside an <iframe> hosted within Gather, the virtual space for ART.HAPPENS? On paper the answer is yes. Unity has had the ability to render content using WebGL for a while, and their code has matured alongside browser support for WebGL. But even better is the development (and even more importantly, browser adoption) of WebAssembly for running code in a browser. This results in Unity titles that are faster to download and to execute than the previous approach of compiling Unity projects to JavaScript. These advancements are far more encouraging than what Unity competitor Unreal Engine has done, which was to boot HTML5 support out of core to a community project. Quite a sharp contrast to Unity's continued effort to make web output a first class citizen among all of its platforms, and this gives me the confidence to proceed and dive in to the latest Unity tutorial for beginners: LEGO!