SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Unity Technologies (https://unity3d.com/), creator of the world’s leading real-time 3D development platform, announced today its collaboration with DeepMind, the world leader in artificial intelligence (AI) research, that will enable the development of virtual environments and tasks in support of the company’s fundamental AI research program.
Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, said: “Games and simulations have been a core part of DeepMind’s research programme from the very beginning and this approach has already led to significant breakthroughs in AI research. As a former video game designer myself, I couldn’t be more excited to be collaborating with Unity, creating virtual environments for developing and testing the kind of smart, flexible algorithms we need to tackle real-world problems.”
Unity is no stranger to forging thought-leadership in the AI field. In combination with the ML-Agents toolkit, Unity is quickly becoming the platform of choice for the development of intelligent agents. The Unity engine can create the massive simulations needed by researchers to study autonomous artificial agents and develop new kinds of algorithms, which will influence fundamental AI research in areas including robotics, autonomous vehicle development, and many other areas of science and technology.
“DeepMind researchers are trying to crack huge AI problems and Unity provides them with a solution of creating complex virtual environments that will enable the development of algorithms capable of learning to solve complex tasks across diverse environments,” said Danny Lange, Vice President of AI and Machine Learning, Unity Technologies. “We believe the future of AI is being forged by increasingly sophisticated human-machine interactions, and Unity is proud to be the engine that is enabling these interactions.”
Unity is the most widely-used real-time development platform, powering 60% of all AR/VR content and 50% of all mobile games worldwide. Unity is now taking initial steps toward becoming the general platform for the development of intelligent agents and creating simulation environments to generate and capture synthetic data for different verticals such as automotive and industrial.
About DeepMind
DeepMind is a neuroscience-inspired AI company which develops general-purpose learning algorithms and uses them to help tackle some of the world’s most pressing challenges. Since its founding in London in 2010, DeepMind has published over 200 peer-reviewed papers, six of them in the top scientific journals Nature and Science, which is an unprecedented track record for a computer science lab. It was acquired by Google in their largest ever European acquisition in 2014. DeepMind’s groundbreaking work includes the development of deep reinforcement learning, combining the domains of deep learning and reinforcement learning. This technique underpinned AlphaGo, a computer program that defeated Go world champion Lee Sedol in 2016—a breakthrough experts proclaimed to have arrived a decade ahead of its time. DeepMind is now applying its technical expertise to complex real-world areas like health, including several partnerships with hospitals to make advanced technology work for patients and physicians.
About Unity Technologies
Unity is the creator of the world’s most widely used real-time 3D development platform, giving developers around the world the tools to create rich, interactive 2D, 3D, VR and AR experiences. The company’s 800 person engineering team keeps Unity at the bleeding-edge of technology by working alongside partners such as Google, Facebook, Oculus and Microsoft to ensure optimized support for the latest releases and platforms. Games and experiences made with Unity have reached ~3 billion devices worldwide and were installed more than 24 billion times in the last 12 months. Unity’s renowned flexibility gives developers the power to target and optimize their creations for 25+ platforms including Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Gameroom (Facebook), SteamVR (PC & Mac), Oculus, PSVR, Gear VR, HoloLens, ARKit (Apple), ARCore (Google) and more. Unity also offers solutions and services for connecting with audiences including Unity Ads, Unity Analytics, Unity Asset Store, Unity Cloud Build, Unity Collaborate, Unity Connect, and Unity Certification.