Unity Korea aims to make real-life profits through metaverse

The metaverse isn't just fun and games in the virtual world: It can also help companies generate profit in the real world at factories and shipyards, according to Kim Beom-joo, chief evangelist at Unity Korea.

Kim Beom-joo, chief evangelist at Unity Korea, speaks during a presentation showing Unity's new technology at Unity Korea's headquarters in Gangnam District, southern Seoul, on Monday. [UNITY KOREA]

The metaverse isn't just fun and games in the virtual world: It can also help companies generate profit in the real world at factories and shipyards, according to Kim Beom-joo, chief evangelist at Unity Korea.

"We have cooperated with companies such as Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering [DSME] to generate real-life profit through the application of our virtual technologies," said Kim, at Unity Korea's headquarters in Gangnam District, southern Seoul, on Monday. "In developing DSME's 'smart shipyard,' the location of containers and various equipment were tracked real-time using a virtual rendition of the shipyard, increasing productivity hundredfold."

Unity Korea is the country's branch of Unity Technologies, the developer of game engine Unity. Game engines are graphic software tools used to make games and other 3-dimensional content such as films and animations. Unity is one of the largest services in the world, along with Epic Games' Unreal Engine.

While the idea of a game engine may seem restricted to the digital screen, Kim argued that its real-time 3-D toolkit has the potential to add new values to unexpected industries.

“We want to offer fundamental technologies not only for games and the metaverse but also various other industries,” said Kim. "We will of course focus on our main interest, games, but games nowadays are starting to affect other areas of society through new ideas and technologies."

Metaverse projects have been sluggish in performance in the third quarter for many, even for the most prominent company pushing the concept, Meta. Meta’s third-quarter revenue fell 4 percent while costs and expenses rose 19 percent on year to $22.1 billion. Amid cloudy forecasts for the metaverse industry, Unity Korea still stood by metaverse hopefuls.

“Some sacrifices in revenue have to be made during the research and development phase such as now,” said Kim. “The metaverse industry is going through the same phase as what the smartphone industry went through with the development of its personal digital assistants [PDAs]. The technology and concepts are still new and awkward to many.”

Kim said that the key for small developers to succeed in the metaverse industry is to seek a value or shared sense of community, instead of simply developing avatars and spaces in the metaverse.

“You need to be able to deliver an essential service to users,” said Kim. “That could be sculpting, composing or creating something else — whatever that may be, metaverse companies that focus on even a small real experience can succeed by scaling up from that value and sense of community.”

Unity Korea introduced four new developments in their technology Monday: updates in graphics, UI and UX, performance and gaming services. More fluid graphics for developing clearer animation and rendering were introduced, while an expanded editor version of Unity's UI and UX toolkits were shown. Data-oriented technology stacks — "dots" — that enhance gaming performance and a comprehensive toolkit for game developers to oversee the entire process of developing, updating and distributing games were presented.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [lim.jeongwon@joongang.co.kr]