April in Review: HoloLens, Unity Tutorial, WebVR, and More!

April has been a busy and exciting month – there’s been a lot of news in the VR and AR communities, and HoloLens has jumped into the mix with Build this week, finishing off the keynote address yesterday and starting to gain exposure with various demos available to Build attendees. I had a chance to try out the Holographic Academy event they’re doing (expect more on this very soon, in the meantime check out this guy’s experience) and I’m really excited with the direction HoloLens seems to be heading.

This month, I also published a getting started with Unity 5 tutorial that I created as I was teaching myself the basics of 3D development and world creation within the Unity editor. It’s not meant to be a best practices guide, but instead walks through the fundamentals of getting down basic game mechanics for developers (and non-developers) who are interested in picking up some of the basics. VR support will be coming alongside the basic gameplay mechanism soon, as companies begin to release more complete versions of their tools and SDKs. Yes, at some point in the future, HoloLens will be one of them. If you’re interested in picking up some of the basics about Unity, or know someone who might be, check out the tutorial here.

 Alongside Unity, I’ve been teaching myself the basics of WebVR, which I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts on the topic. I’ve recently begun a second WebVR application that allows you to visualize Excel charts in 3D space using Three.JS and a new virtual reality boilerplate template, and am getting excited about that being close to a point where I can share more details about it. I’ve also been a lot more exposed to other projects being worked on with WebVR as part of a talk that I’m doing in two weeks at JSConf Budapest, where I’ll be speaking about JavaScript’s role in virtual reality and how web developers can get started with the technology today! The talk will be live streamed and available on-demand after the conference, so stay tuned for that! I’ll also share my slides – and if you’re interested in hosting the talk in a social VR space, please get in touch because that would be amazing! 

Finally, in unrelated-to-VR-news, I’m in the process of transitioning my blog off of WordPress.com and making some much-needed updates to the overall site. Things may be a little wonky as I figure these out, so if things look out of place or are unavailable, shoot me a note on Twitter and let me know if there are bugs I miss!

Happy Holograming!

Do we live in a hologram? 

Introducing Astro AR

This past weekend, I participated in a Meta AR Augmented Reality hackathon in San Francisco and had a chance to play around with & try building for one of the only consumer-available AR headsets. I’ll be going into more detail in an upcoming post about the technical side of the event, but I’ve gotten some interest about what we built during the project, so I’ve decided to share some of it here!

Astro AR is an augmented reality application build on the Meta SDK to bring the solar system into reality in two different mini-applications geared towards teaching children (cough padawans) about the planets from both our solar system and the various star systems in the Star Wars universe.

The first part of Astro AR, pictured above, utilized the Star Wars API to pull down data from the web about various planetary systems in the Star Wars universe. This was an example that we wanted to showcase with Astro AR to serve as a proof of concept for utilizing existing APIs for use in Unity – in this case, we simply parsed the JSON object that was returned and used it to populate the planets in our Unity scene, but the idea was to show that existing web APIs can be used easily in AR and VR applications. We put in an additional MGUI layer – a wrapper around Unity’s UI elements specifically made for use with the Meta SDK – which was then used to display the data received by the GET request for the SWAPI call. When wearing the AR glasses, a finger press+hold on the virtual planet would trigger the call and display the relevant planetary information.

The second part of Astro AR was a representation of our own solar system to demonstrate a real-world application of the technology for use in educational environments. In this scene, the viewer played the part of the sun, watching planets orbit around them. Although the sample project wasn’t to scale, it was a fun way to see the planets in an interactive way that has the potential to increase hands-on education for students as AR/VR tech becomes more widely available.

Right now, I’m working on an Oculus version of the application, but without the camera input to integrate with gestures, it’s not as fun (LeapMotion, if you wanted to throw one of those my way… you know… ) but that will hopefully improve as we build out some functionality that is conducive for using an Xbox controller as input. Realistically, there’s a lot of opportunity that this sort of tech will open up – so if you’re interested, go grab the source on GitHub and let me know what you think!

SFVR #8 – Recap

Last night, SFVR was featured at the REAL 2015 Conference with some great speakers and awesome exhibitions set up! Here’s my quick recap of what went down.

Photo uploaded by Matt Sonic to SFVR on Meetup

Announcing Windows Holographic and Microsoft HoloLens

Today at the Windows 10 Preview event, Microsoft officially announced their stake in the VR/AR game with Windows Holographic and Microsoft HoloLens – we are officially living in the future.

Source: Microsoft

Today’s Windows 10 event generated a lot of buzz for the HoloLens and Windows Holographic, with a live demo of an app called HoloStudio showing a drone being decorated to showcase how you can use the HoloLens to build things on the PC and see how they look in 3D. While we’re still waiting on most of the details, tech specs, and availability, word on the street is that they’ll likely be opening up a developer program sometime early this year.

What we do know already is that Minecraft is going to be a key app for demonstrating the headset’s capability, and that there will be a lot of potential for Microsoft’s “Universal” apps to run seamlessly with the HoloLens.

Source: Business Insider

Another important demonstration from the Windows 10 event also adds to the hype and excitement about Windows Holographic and HoloLens: Cortana, Microsoft’s personal assistant AI, is coming to Windows 10, which leads me to believe that the voice control on HoloLens will be pretty fantastic. I’ve used all 3 personal assistants and Cortana takes the cake over Siri and Google Now, and the limited nature of current VR/AR input devices means that a solid voice navigation system could very well be in the works.

Wired got a first look and hands-on with the HoloLens, and you can follow the new product’s official Twitter account @hololens. Stay tuned as more information comes in, and I’ll be doing my best to see about getting a demo myself!

SVVR Meetup & A New Unity Project!

There is a way to make dreams come true, and that is virtual reality. This week, I had my first chance to try out the Oculus Rift, where I became a Jedi using the Sixense STEM System, as well as the SeeBright AR headset and the recently funded NimbleVR NimbleSense (spoiler alert: yes, I totally backed them!)

A life long dream of being a jedi brought to life.
Photo: Komei Harada