With Unity, you will have an opportunity to learn how to create AR/VR games like a pro.

Unity has announced its Student Plan. The plan will give students free access to all the tools for professional AR/VR game production. On this occasion, we talked to Jessica Lindl, Vice President and Global Head of Education at Unity Technologies. In small talk, she shared some insights into the educational process and talked about the industry tendencies.

Teaching People How To Work in Unity

We are dedicated to supporting students everywhere in developing their future career opportunities with a variety of free learning resources, which now includes the new Unity Student plan. We realize that career opportunities leverage Unity to not only build games but to also create amazing 3D experiences across various industries such as automotive, architecture, engineering, and construction. We want to empower students regardless of what industry they are applying their 3D skills to.

Our student users told us in a recent survey that most of them learn Unity not just as a hobby, but for their career pursuits. Students also shared that if they learn Unity at school, they primarily learn by working on group projects, where collaboration is critical but can be time-consuming. Therefore, adding free student collaboration tools is a key feature of the Unity Student plan.

About Unity Student Plan

The Unity Student plan provides access to the professional resources students will use throughout their careers. With this plan, students can:

• Work on group projects with up to five teammates, manage versions, share work with teachers, and easily move between home and school computers. 
• Speed up build and iteration cycles on complex projects using minimal hardware. Students will be able to see the impact of their changes quickly and learn more effectively.
• Gain access to Unity Learn Premium. With this program, they can supplement in-class learning and dive into topics they care about most with unlimited access to on-demand, industry-specific resources to solve problems on their own, such as this popular Introduction to XR: VR, AR, and MR Foundations course. 

As part of this news, we’ve also partnered with GitHub, who is similarly committed to providing the best developer tools to students. When students sign up for the Unity Student plan, their student status will be verified by GitHub, at which point, they will get automatic access to the GitHub Student Developer Pack, which provides free access to the best developer tools from more than 100 partners. 

Increasing Interest in 3D Art and Visualization 

We’re witnessing a rapidly growing demand for real-time 3D development skills across the globe. In fact, the top two fastest-growing engineering roles are in gaming and augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR). If you’re a student, you have good reason to be interested in learning AR/VR and game development.

According to a recent Hired report, the tech job platform saw a 146% increase in demand for game development roles and a 1400% growth in demand in AR/VR roles in 2019. This is a reflection of the broadening applications of AR/VR across multiple industries where world-building, 3D modeling, and visualization are becoming more relevant. 

Real-time 3D skills are absolutely imperative for those entering into the job market, which makes it critical that we empower students today with the technical skills that will be demanded of them. We believe the Unity Student plan is the ideal resource for students to hone their craft and gain a competitive advantage in the workforce.

Read the full announcement regarding the student plan on the Unity website. 

Jessica Lindl, Vice President and Global Head of Education at Unity Technologies

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev