Gaming Giant Unity Wants to Digitally Clone the World

In video games, non-playable characters can be somewhat clueless. An NPC might wander across a city block and face-plant into a streetlamp, and then maybe vanish the next block over. NPCs leap into player-characters' punches or commit to kicking a wall 400 times, never learning that the wall won't kick back. Unity Technologies is in the business of NPCs. Founded in 2004, Unity makes an eponymous game engine that provides the architecture for hundreds of video games using its real-time 3D computer graphics technology.