The latest version of the Unity game engine, which is the foundation of the vast majority of XR games today, is now available to developers in preview. Unity 6 Preview includes several new features that make XR development easier, including Composite Layers, which dramatically improve the quality of XR Chinese books, UI, photos, and videos.
The Unity 6 preview (formerly known as the 2023.3 Tech Stream) is now available for developers to try, and the upgraded engine includes a range of improvements to XR development.
Foveated Rendering
The first is the built-in Foveated Rendering API, which allows developers to reduce the view resolution only in the user's peripheral vision, improving rendering performance without compromising the quality of the image at the center of the user's view. Unity's Foveated Rendering API also supports eye-tracking foveated rendering for headsets like Quest Pro and PSVR2, which allows the system to maintain high-resolution rendering no matter where the user's gaze is turned, while reducing the resolution of their peripherals to improve performance.
Unity 表示，Foveated Rendering API 与必要的 PSVR2 和 Oculus XR 插件兼容，也将“很快”支持 OpenXR。
Composition Layers
The Unity 6 preview also adds a new feature called Composite Layers (also known as compositor layers or timewarp layers), a technique for rendering textures into XR applications at the highest possible quality.
XR applications typically render by drawing a full frame, and then distort that frame according to how the headset distorts the image. The two-step process means that anything in the scene is sampled twice (a bit like taking a photo), which inevitably reduces the quality of the final output.
Unity 6 Preview Compositing Layers allow developers to render textures in a special way that is painted and distorted at the same time, avoiding the issue of double sampling, which would otherwise degrade the final quality of the texture.
This is especially useful for flat textures such as UI, text, crosshairs, and maps, where double-sampled blur tends to be particularly noticeable. It also helps to render photos and videos in the highest possible quality in XR.
This feature has been around for years, but has remained stuck in a platform-specific implementation, which makes it difficult for developers to deal with, especially for cross-platform development. Composite layers are now built directly into the Unity 6 Preview, making it easier for developers to use the feature to sharpen key textures in the game, making it suitable for all supported headsets.