The Chromecast has become something of a success for Google, despite it launching with views that it was something of a niche product and something that people would find confusing. Since its launch some time ago, it’s grown in popularity and there are now more apps and services that use Chromecast to get content on your best display in the home. This year however, Google introduced a pair of new Chromecasts and games became a big deal as well. Along with Android TV, Google is looking to push gaming as well as media consumption using the Chromecast, and there have been some interesting ways to do this.
For the most part, games that use Chromecast are a sort of multi-screen experience, with your phone being used as either a controller or information only relevant to you, such as board games and so on. What’s nice about this is that rather than create a quasi-traditional gaming platform, Google has offered up tools to bring board games and other more casual, family-oriented content into the 21st Century. Now, Google is making things a little easier for developers that use Unity to build their 3D games. As they detail over on the Developers Blog, Google has introduced the “Google Cast Remote Display” plugin, which is available via both GitHub as well as the Unity Assets Store. This plugin allows Unity games to communicate with the Cast APIs to leverage the GPUs and processing power in smartphones of today to render external content. For those that wanted to jump onboard with Google Cast but couldn’t previously, this now allows them to do just that if their app or game is built using Unity.
This sort of thing is always nice to see, and we’re sure that developers will continue to come up with interesting and fun new ways to bring Chromecast into the living room for gaming. Unity has helped create some of the best games on Android, so it’s nice to finally see it head to the big screen in more than just an output sense. As we said, interested developers can take a look at the source link to find out more.