Companies have begun seriously experimenting with how virtual reality can be applied in work environments to streamline tasks such as product design. Now, IBM Corp. is looking to capitalize on the trend.

As part of the effort, the technology giant today announced a partnership with Unity Technologies Inc., the maker of a popular game engine touted as the industry’s most widely used platform for building VR applications. The software also lends itself to creating augmented reality services. IBM has collaborated with Unity to build a development kit for the platform that will let companies draw on its cloud-based Watson artificial intelligence suite in their projects.

The offering brings several major capabilities to the table. The first and arguably most versatile of the bunch is the ability to analyze the objects in a virtual environment using Watson Visual Recognition.

A project created during an IBM-sponsored hackathon harnessed the service to let users draw objects with a controller and then have their sketches automatically turned into a 3-D model. A team of architects collaborating on a building project, for instance, could employ such a feature to streamline brainstorming sessions. Watson Visual Recognition can also flag important details about an object, perform facial recognition and carry out other similar tasks.

The image analysis features are joined by capabilities for processing speech. According to IBM, companies can harness the Watson suite’s speech recognition and classification services to let users interact with a VR environment via voice commands. It’s even possible to perform automated translation when necessary.

IBM’s entry into the fray could help boost the emerging enterprise interest in potential business applications of VR and AR, particularly on Unity’s platform. But in the near term, the biggest revenue opportunity for the technology giant most likely lies with video game developers, who make up the majority of the Unity user base.

The video game industry is a large market that generated an estimated $36 billion in the U.S. alone last year. It has also caught the attention of IBM’s rivals. Amazon Web Services Inc., for instance, offers multiple cloud tools specifically geared toward game developers. It most recently bolstered the lineup late last year by releasing a service called Sumerian for designing VR environments.

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