This is the transcript of a session recorded at PI Apparel New York. The video from this session can be watched in full here.
My name’s Tim Devine. I’m with Unity Technologies, and today I’m here to talk to you about this really long topic. Unlocking and extending real time to unlock and transform the fashion industry with DC. That’s I always made up a long time ago with Michael who has moved on and this Michael. But yeah, that’s not exactly everything we’re going to talk about, so I’m just going to launch into it and kind of tell you about Unity myself.
So my Nintendo and I’m a senior program manager at Unity Technologies, I work with the Seller Solutions Group, which is actually the group at Unity that does bespoke software development for industrial clients. So we work with a lot of clients like yourself and based in Berlin now out of AMEA. But I would, you know, I start out and really I’m actually from that little small dot somewhere closer to here, a little bit further from there in the world called Irmo, Irmo, South Carolina.
Weird place where people kind of talk like this and we celebrate things like this. We actually have a festival around okra, Believe it or not, that’s really my hometown. I’ve been to that several years more than I wanted it. And we’ve perfected the art of frying anything and donuts, Oreos, all of the above. Some of them are good, but yeah, I moved on from that place about ten years ago and moved to another weird place.
I seemed to like places to celebrate weird things and landed here for fiscal Portland. And people don’t talk so funny, but people do some funny things and we celebrate things like this. Yes, that’s a donut with pickles on it. It’s actually tasty. I don’t know how, but it is. And it’s actually the first town I found in America that we actually have proper, proper football games.
So I kind of stayed there for a while. I spent ten years out there and one of the things that we celebrate there is things like this and the outdoors, nature, beauty and big geometry. And it drew me and drew me there and I stayed. The outdoors is is a passion for me. So I found myself kind of gravitating to it and found myself working in the industry.
And I started work for a company called RCI and then later started working for a company called Columbia Sportswear and really great company, really enjoyed it. And I was like, okay. And following the passions of I Found Nature, I found the combination of that with was an industry that I care about. And while I was working with Columbia Sportswear, I started as a buyer and I wasn’t a really great buyer because I couldn’t stay on my desk very long.
And you need to do that for the job and I was way more curious about how things were made, what is technical development, how does product development work? And I was really blessed when I was there that Columbia sent me out on a trip. They have this shoe school and a pair of school thing that we did. So I got to go to Asia with some teams and I got to see how how the sexual industry works and how our product is made.
What do we actually do on the other side of the earth with all the work that we do here and within our brands and our companies and the companies that we love? And it was different, right? I found out that the work is a little bit difficult. I’m a horrible sewer. I couldn’t sew a straight line to save my life.
And if you’ve ever been in a leather or a dire factory or tannery, it’s it’s it’s it’s poignant. It will stick with you. And I learned there’s a ton of waste in the process and something we knew. It’s something everybody in the room is pretty much aware of. But I hadn’t really changed in a long time and I hadn’t really seen it firsthand.
So having the ability to go on these trips and kind of see that, it really impacted me. And I came back to Columbia and I really kind of got on this mission of like, this needs to be better. And I knew there was this thing, you know, digital and digital technology. And we started on a journey of digital product creation.
You know, it’s like, okay, maybe this is some of the answer, right? Like, that’s really what I thought, you know, let’s put full force into it. So at night I was a gamer. I was always a gamer. I’ve always been into gaming. I knew about unity and I started doing this work with Intel Technologies. I was actually a guinea pig for him.
I was doing a lot of UX testing and they put me in early, early wearables, right? We were doing research in VR some earlier, and in doing that I actually played with this application. You can actually see me on the right there. An application is called Toothbrush. It was built by Google and it’s just a simple immersive space where you could paint a picture in 3D.
You could paint really anything in 3D. But one of the things that I noticed when I was in the experience is that they had the ability to drop in a dress form just in space. And I was like, Whoa, that’s different. And you can actually see on the screen I started to just naturally paint a dress. And I thought to myself, Right, okay, this is different because I just saw this process of how product is made.
And I worked with the people and I’ve seen the tech designers and I see the data flow and I’m in this space and I just if I could just have the people in the factory and the other teams that are across the ocean in the same space and we could build product like this, then the industry is going to change.
And that kind of set me off. I was on a mission. I was like, okay, I really want to get behind this. I want to understand the technology better, sort of connecting with youth to sort of trying to evangelize a bit more about what immersive technology is, what is VR? And I went on a journey with that and I got pretty passionate about it and I started working with Unity myself and I built some applications and this is going to play.
It’s actually going to play. Okay, cool. I built this application with my buddy Rachelle in the background on there, and I this is an application we built for immersive in-store training. This is my buddy Cliff at Columbia, and we actually took this over the employee one store one day and I put Cliff in VR for the first time, so I freaked out just about being in VR, but we did this training and I said, Cliff, just just check this out.
The idea was we make outdoor product and how do you train the employee inside the store to understand which product fits which environment? So we brought the actual environment in, right? We made it snow, we made it rain and we made the employee match up and figure out, Hey, this technology aligns with this climate. I put Cliff in.
It seems really simple. And I was like, What do you think? And he came out and he was really shocked. He was like, Hey, Tim, this is awesome. This is amazing. I really had no clue. We could do things like this. When my employees on the floor, I come over and ask them, I’m next to them and I’m trying to train them around product knowledge.
They’re so scared to make an error in front of me or in front of a customer reason that they don’t even want to talk. This is the thing that they hate the most. They hate being embarrassed and this is safe. We could train them in the back. We could get them familiar with the product. We can get them familiar with the product marketing and labeling before they ever even have to get on the floor.
This is really powerful. Let’s try some more of this. I was like, okay, that’s cool. It’s not in reaction. I was expecting it at the time. This was kind of needed stuff. Maybe we should push it further. And we did. I found myself actually going out and this was kind of early days, I think maybe six, seven years ago.
I’m not sure. I ended up speaking at a conference in Berlin and we talked about the prototypes were found. I found myself in a new step in the journey, and I actually found myself moving to the third strange, weird city in the world. Then I decided to move to and a place where we celebrate things kind of like this.
At any point in the day, people will queue up for careers. Legit always, and they’re quite tasty. But yeah, again, strange city, strange food. And here I am on a journey with 3D digital product creation. I got there and I was talking to PI and made some connections there and I ended up meeting up with a really innovative kind of forward looking company called Zalando.
And you know, at the time they had a real cool wing in which, you know, Zealand is a e-commerce platform, but from the data they moved across their e-commerce platform, they actually built 14 different brands completely from data sourcing their designs through I from data. And they built a company called Z Labels that grew in ten years to do $1,000,000,000 in revenue, and they wanted to take that company fully digital.
So we came out and we started educating them on browser. And how do you, how do you leverage 3D, how they start working with 3D assets? And it was cool. I figured this is what I want to do, right? This is this is how 3D you can start to change the industry. Companies that are digital natives, companies that aren’t.
If they adopt this technology, we can start removing some of that waste in the system. So the journey was kind of taking me where I wanted to go. I was happy about that, and along the way I was realizing I was making some friends, you know, is meeting cool people, like minded people. I was getting to see the world a bit and they were on the same journey.
And I hope you guys were doing the same because, you know, it’s been a journey. We’ve all been on it together. It’s been about, I think, ten years since Pi has been going and I think it kind of actually started in New York in this building. We also went to the club somewhere. That was kind of weird, but I’m glad we’re back here.
And yeah, that journey kept going. And then then it got a strange, you know, I met a new friend, not so new friend to change things up. And we all experienced the world going in a different direction. It slowed down, it got quiet, and our companies, probably for the first time shut doors for reasons unexplained, customers couldn’t visit us goods couldn’t move, and it was question marks and what was going to happen when that would change?
What would that change look like when it came back and so I figured this right. For me, that journey slowed down pretty quickly. I was consulting. There was no way to consult. People do not need your services when their businesses aren’t open. So what was next for me? What was next was no matter what, seeing them things getting weird in the world, driven by values.
So I came back to unity and this is these are these are unity values users. First best ideas win and it together and go bold. Kind of like to go bold sometimes and I definitely like working with people find people. So I thought I could get behind this and thought it could get behind the company. I always believed in the tech, so I started talking to Unity, started working with Unity and found myself here.
So it’s not about me. It’s this unity. It’s talking about this and who first shared their stories and us connected our nature and science led us to our new horizons. We thought to capture emotion, spark an engine to life, turn television into a playground. Every day you create the playful, the functional and the unexpected. You break down walls and take us to astonishing places and tell stories, sleep, borders and create beauty for tomorrow.
Because at unity, we believe the world is a better place with more creators in it where everyone has a chance to shape the world. So yeah, and that’s good about unity. And most of you probably think we’re just a gaming engine, but a bit more than that, you know, he’s actually the world’s leading platform for creating and operating real time 3D content.
And so it’s not just games, it’s real time data moving in space versus space. So pretty big. We’ve grown, we’ve grown pretty large. Now we’re in 49 offices in 21 countries and again born from gaming. So through through that engine, through real time 3D, we kind of stretched out from gaming and we know you can find us in quite a few spaces.
We work with music, social media, our VR content architecture and film and TV, retail, manufacturing. So we’ve grown quite a bit. And to put that scale in context, our platform supports 25 different other platforms and technologies so you can build once and unity and deploy in 25 places at least and growing. That’s pretty big when you think about scale and reach.
If you’re on a digital journey, you’re working with 3D assets and you want to get them to the world, especially as it becomes more immersive in terms of reach, we’ve got a million monthly active developers on our platform working at any time, and we’re reaching 3 billion devices each month. In terms of ad reach, we reach second in the world behind Google too.
So it’s it’s quite a bit of reach behind who you can talk to and who we’re talking to through games. And in terms of that gaming space, I’ll tell you some more data on that. But these are the three guys who started out. It didn’t didn’t just start always so big. It started with three guys that had a dream to make a game in Denmark.
These are our founders, David, Kim and Nicholas, and they were trying to make a game back in the day called Google. Anybody ever heard the game and all point? It’s because it didn’t work too well. It was cool right there. They were thinking of themselves like Yahoo! Yahoo! Stands for yet another hire for office. But and also the guys didn’t think it would work, so they kind of made it play on it.
You always have other options. They had other options with unity. They started opening up the platform. The thing that they made the game on, they put out there to other creators. And today that same broken game is now behind 71% of all the mobile games out in the market. So it’s it’s quite a jump things like among us Kings Cube surfer and if you’re a switch player I travel a decent bit I like my switch it moves with me games like Kingdom Hearts Ori Genshin I’m over half of all the switch titles that are out there actually made on Unity.
And for those of you that saw the people in the world goggles in the video on Air VR content, we’re leading about 60% of all developed air VR content in market in industry now. So that’s that’s a bit about our reach and a bit about unity. And again, it started from games, but back in the day there were a lot of people with games and back at the Home Office and we were kind of looking around and realizing that people were buying our licenses, but they weren’t just buying licenses to make games and we didn’t exactly know what was going on.
And so we saw companies and brands like yourself were engaging and working with Unity, and they became an industrial play. So we actually built a wing within the business to start figuring out and investigating how to connect better with industry. And that’s where solutions spawned. That’s where my team came from. And we’re still figuring that journey out. So over here we want to talk to you because we believe that real time 3D is kind of transforming everything around us.
We really believe that one day there’s going to be actual digital twin of pretty much everything in the world, including yourself. Some of you may right now it’s very room have avatars of yourself. A lot of you probably do in one form or another. Maybe it’s your bitmoji. Maybe you’re playing Roblox, but it’s happening and it’s happening slowly.
But it could increase. So what is real time 3D? Real time 3D is kind of this journey from 2D and okay, this thing’s broken. It’s not showing you what it is, but it’s these 2D static images moving to an interactive space where you can interact with that set of conditions and moving from pre-rendered to real time render. And that’s a conversation I think everybody in this room understands, right?
Taking the light process in real time as something moves, you can see it change and taking 2D objects and moving them to a physical space and dimension into 3D. So that’s what you need. Okay, Now you want to play fine. I get it. And so it’s kind of noticing on the journey that there’s a lot of changed. That was ten years kind of the story that I was telling there.
And over the ten years, these are my three favorite humans. These are my nieces. They changed to. One of the good things that came from the pandemic was I get to go home. I got to spend some time in Atlanta with my family and I got to connect. When I got there, something was different with my nieces that wasn’t there before.
They were glued to iPads, which I was pretty freaked out about, and that you’ve got kids. You might also be a little bit concerned about this too, and I’m not from that day, right? So I take them out and I’m like, We’re going in the park every day. Uncle Tim doesn’t play that. Let’s go. So we go outside, teach them how to make the tree bark boots.
We’re having a good time. We’re on the playground and they bump into their friend. I’m not a parent. They’re my nieces. They run, they see each other. It’s covered, they hug, they tackle each other. I freak out, Hey, I’m not a parent. I don’t know if this is cool. Are you cool? Are they cool? yeah. No, they’re fine.
They’re classmates. Okay, cool. I’m glad you’re cool with it. They’ve never met each other. What? yeah, that’s right. They’re six. They started school. Their whole education journey is now born from a digital place. Wasn’t their choice. It’s just the way the world changed. But it’s now the standard. They’ve adopted it. This is how they communicate with the spirit.
This is how they embrace education. Now, that was a change for me. Kind of opened up my mind. Things were changing fast, really fast. And go back to Berlin. I’m talking to my friends and I’m telling them about this story. I talked to my friend Cucina Cosenza graphic designer, and she was looking for a job at the time.
I said, Hey, I know this company. I think we need graphic designers. And that’s pretty cool. They’re fun and get good values. Are you interested? She said, Yeah, Tim, I’m scared. Ten years ago, when I studied graphic design, I worried about things like typography, print, layout. I worked with tools like Photoshop. That’s all I needed. I had a portfolio today.
I changed. I needed to know how to develop 3D characters. I needed to build a 3D character continuity portfolio that went beyond just 2D. I had to understand 3D. Not only did I have to understand 3D, I needed to understand how to take my 2D and my 3D content and leverage technology like NFT to put it in 3D space.
That was the expectation. Do the job that you wanted to do ten years ago today. Scary things moving fast. So I go back on Tuesdays and meet up with my buddy Joe. I’m telling Joe the same story. Joe true story, just like Tim. What the heck do you do anyway? I’ve never understood anything you do. What is digital product creation?
What? What is it? I don’t get it. I’m like, okay, I get it. People ask this all the time. Digital product creations like Tim, Can I just take a guess? Is it is it digital product creation? And it’s using digital tools to make physical products? And I was like, okay, cool. You get it. Like, this is this is where it started.
This is what we’ve been talking about for a long time. This is what we came here a long time ago that we all do that better together. He said, Wait, what is it like using digital products to make physical products, or is it is it even like digital tools to make digital products? And it’s the first time anybody kind of challenged and like thought about that whole ecosystem in which which way the whole process was moving.
But the truth is, is like it was all three. It is all three in ten years it evolved. We’re actually doing and making digital products, digital physical products from digital products. And if you don’t think that’s happening, is a company like Nike buying up a full on digital studio to make nothing but digital shoes, they’re going to test and put into games to inform what they’re making in the physical world.
That’s a real thing that’s happening now, and that’s the paradigm of change that we’re looking at in just two years in this industry because of things like digital product creation and the journey that we’ve all been on in this room. So I’m like, okay, this is this is this is really real. This stuff is happening now. We’ve got to go further.
You know, we’ve got to continue to push this, but all the while, the creators, they’re still out there creating currencies out the. Cronin The people didn’t stop people. We’re making good stuff, doing digital work, trying to change the world. So what did that change look like? An industry? What what did it look like for us? Right. So during this ten years, some of us tried some things.
We talked on stage about standardization and interoperability and when are all these things just going to work together? We can just push the button, plug it in. My clue file news to here, consider when it’s actually going to come. So we tried some things. Some of them lasted, some of them didn’t. We saw the the birth of some new new opportunities, new new ways of moving data transmission metadata, trying to figure it out.
We all sat there, we all worked together, and we’re still doing it. We’re trying to just figure it out. But the day is not there. It doesn’t just work. The change has been coming, but we still need to go further. And all the while creators kept creating. It just kept happening. Creators don’t stop. We saw our friends, people that we know, people who’ve been innovators and pioneers in this space reached success they didn’t dream about.
They didn’t know we can and break down walls. They didn’t think that they would have a chance to all through digital, all through digital people that have been on this stage right here, we started figuring it out. We started figuring out together, and all the while, creators kept creating. This is one of my favorite creators around here I can’t pronounce.
Bring him to us. I’m not going to put you Scott. Under the sheets is actually all digital fabric overlaid on natural landscapes. It’s pretty beautiful stuff. Okay, so with the change look like in our lives, right? The change look a little bit different to change the way we work. Our pets, children, they became our coworkers. And I like seeing your kids and your pets on the screen.
It makes the day call a bit more levity. That was fun. Some things weren’t so fun we thought about. We changed the way we consume, right? So things being closed, consumption journey changed. We probably order a lot more online now. They had to queue. How many people remember toilet paper reading? This wasn’t fun. None of these people were cool.
This was not nice. But that happened. We lived through it. The creators kept creating. This is somebody saying Good year and Fallen Angel Sam, It’s pretty amazing you did this. The company called them out on their SO say this to say. If you think about it over time, this is a true fact. When you think about technology and technology adoption, people don’t have a recorded instance of moving away from technology when we figure out how to make a workforce.
And that’s the journey we’ve been on, trying to figure out how to make this technology work for us. So if you think about that, that ten year journey, standing on the stage today, and I look ten years back when I first found into the pie conversation and digital product creation and ten years forward, and I think about that conversation like the day when is it just going to work?
The only thing I can really tell you is that that day is a lot closer to now than it was then. Very complex craft for truth. So with that, the time for change is now. Time for us to figure out how to change. It is now. It’s changing faster than ever and it’s going to continue. But then it got even weirder.
This thing came along. Metaverse We’re all talking about it. What is it? When did it do? What exactly? So, okay, what is it? Why does it matter? Quick definitions. The metaverse is kind of the next evolution of Internet. It’s this omnipresent, ubiquitous universal space in which the digital and physical world collide. It’s persistent, it’s shared, and it runs in real time.
It’s a simulation of parts of the world or the world in an immersive space, and it’s actually becoming reality. A lot of people say Internet 3.0, who knows? But it’s coming out as fast. So what do we do about it? Well, a unity is a new conversation to us too, but our technology supports it. And we recognize, say, like, you know, there’s a lot we should start getting behind.
So we kind of teamed up with Live Nation and we built this thing called Insomniac, a project called Wide Awake. We noticed that people couldn’t dance during the pandemic, and it’s something that people like to do a Hopi dance. Last night I did, but we built this, and this is an immersive program called Insomniac. We wanted to give the opportunity for people to dance during a time when they couldn’t back to people.
So it took us three months of work. We plugged it together and with the help of these teams, in three months we’re able to put together an immersive space in which we could come together for full on concert, audiovisual experience and live stream 12 million people virtually into the same space in three months. Next next version of this is going to put 20 million in there with the goal to get to 100.
It’s a third of the third of the country in the same space visually, at the same time. That’s what’s coming at us. That’s what Metaverse could do. We did things like this. Things were shut down. We all work really hard. We don’t all get a chance to ring the bell on Wall Street, but we should. So we took that same technology and we went to Wall Street and we put it in place so the people could sell it, celebrate their hard work, their joys and their successes with their companies when they go public.
And this is kind of now a standard operating procedure if you want to be part of the journey when your company decides to take a step forward into the marketplace, we can live stream this and and yeah, that’s a I think also just a few months to do, but it’s a continuing thing. We’re trying to figure out how to bring people together, how to make the technology work for good and what was going to come in front of it, how can we use it?
And that’s what we want to do with you guys as well. And then we made some acquisitions, we bought some tools, so we acquired rid of digital. For those who don’t know, this is Peter Jackson’s studio, great guy behind Lord of the Rings and Avatar. Pretty amazing, the movies. And we’re quite even is even an exclusive, amazing company.
That’s not a real person. That’s and that’s essentially what they do is use A.I. to figure out how to mimic human movements and behaviors spatially so that we can synthetically represent ourselves in this space. And we’re continuing to push into that. We’re continuing to think about what that means on the journey for you guys in the room as you connect with consumers.
And we’re doing this because coming back to the values we we believe the world is better with more creators in it. So we’re going to keep making those moves, acquiring technologies, connecting with industry, and understanding how we can empower more creators to get behind our technology, to help move things forward. Because going back to that core value, we’re in it together.
And if you’re in this room, you all part of that conversation and things need to change a bit. So with that, I kind of summed up my whole thought of that ten year journey to now with this. This is an all product from the Queen of Faso, and it says Alone youth runs fast with an elder slow, but together they give far.
If I think about the ten years some of us have gone pretty far in this space pretty quickly and that’s awesome. Some of us held on to some older technology and maybe we haven’t gone too far, but together as an industry, this digital transformation, this digital journey, we still have a long way to go. We’re actually still poor metrics creating more waste each year, leveraging digital than we have been the year before.
And if we’re trying to look at that towards our goals for the 2030 climate accord, we have a long way to go in terms of adoption, leveraging real time 3D digital power to make this process less wasteful and more sustainable for everyone. And it may not be a journey for everyone in the goal, but there are some benefits that are going to come throughout that as we work together to do it.
So with that, we want to inspire you to dream. We want to dream with you because we believe in a time where if we work together and leverage simple technology like this to solve problems like this, which are things that we’re doing, then maybe together we can make this industry better and we want to work with you to do it because we believe in a world where when people come together, it brings change for good.
And right now the world could use a little bit of that. So we’re unity for the last time we’re in it together, help us change the game. And that’s that’s, that’s my spiel. I’m sticking to it. You got any questions? Let me know.
