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? 

Moving in a WebVR Three.JS Scene – Quick Fix

I’m in the process of writing an ASP.NET web application using Three.JS and WebVR, specifically with the webvr-boilerplate library from Borismus on GitHub, and wanted to share the small change I’ve used to quickly set up a basic movement mechanism for the camera. This isn’t an intensive tutorial on getting set up with WebVR or Three.JS, though those will come later – but if you’re working on a WebVR boilerplate project and want a quick way to get the camera moving around for debugging, this might help you out.

An [International] Update!

March has been filled with all sorts of madness for me – after a crazy fun week at GDC, I’ve been spending a lot of time working on a few of my side projects (some are starting to share up into actual experiences, I’m happy to say!) and writing conference proposals. But the most exciting news of the month: I have officially been accepted as a speaker at JSConf Budapest this May, where I’ll be talking about WebVR and JavaScript’s role in virtual & augmented reality!

My excitement level:

Is 2015 the year of Virtual Reality? Experts suggest that VR will be a 5.2B industry within the next 2 years – but right now, the majority of VR development tools require heavy game engines and specialized desktops.

In this talk, we’ll discuss the emerging support from the VR and web communities for WebVR, a new API emerging to support writing VR-enabled websites using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We’ll be taking a look at existing applications for virtual reality on the web, the benefits of WebVR, and how to get started with the available tools and libraries for browser-based virtual reality written in JavaScript.

If you are interested in attending JSConf Budapest, you can buy tickets here! When work has you traveling to amazing new places, talking about the things that you love – that’s the best place to be.