With clients across Europe, i2CAT Foundation is a public research center investigating how various technologies can be applied, including extended reality (XR), artificial intelligence, blockchain, and more. The majority of their projects are funded by the European Commission.

Gianluca Cernigliaro focusses on XR technology, and for most of their XR-based projects, i2CAT Foundation uses Unity.

Check out the video above, and the highlights below, to find out why that is.

Top reasons why i2CAT Foundation chose Unity

Explore a few of the key reasons why i2CAT Foundation use Unity as the tool to build their immersive training applications:

#1 Flexible workflows and easy data ingest

Working with many different stakeholders and across multiple projects, i2CAT Foundation needs a technology that provides a smooth data ingestion process and works seamlessly with other applications.

“Flexibility is the main benefit [of using Unity]. We can integrate our technologies and we can also create virtual scenarios. Then we can integrate 3D assets that are created through our technologies and also from other partners. We can put everything together. It's easy to use.”

#2 Multiple platform options

To meet the delivery requirements for a variety of clients and projects, being able to build in one place and deploy to multiple different platforms is essential.

“It is important to have an integration environment that supports many different devices. Unity gives us these possibilities. We have templates to work in VR, to work in AR, and in different operating systems. We can move from one to another.”

#3 Believable environments

Ensuring that participants feel truly immersed in the virtual environment is key to a project’s success. Even more so if the purpose is training, where knowledge retention is key and distractions can have a negative impact on the effectiveness of the training.

“When we were bringing non-technical people in to try the applications, they were amazed. At some point they were forgetting that they were in VR and they were acting as if they were all in the same environment. Sometimes I've seen things like people placing a piece of paper on a virtual table that wasn't actually there because they forgot that they were in there.”

Benefits of Unity for immersive training

Drive skills retention with immersive 3D training that builds deeper connection to the products, processes, and jobs-to-be-done.

* (PwC study)