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? 

My VR Development Software – What are you using?

I’ve been experimenting with virtual reality development for a while now, and I decided that I’d share some insight into what I use for coding on various projects as a baseline and to see where I can improve workflow. Right now, I’m particularly fascinated with WebVR and have been working on a project with JavaScript and ASP.NET, but I’ve been doing some mental recapping of some of my past test projects and thought it might be fun to share!

I’m always open to learning more about processes and tools that people are using, so feel free to drop me a line with what you’re using in your own projects.

WebVR: Experiences that run in the browser

The first site that I built for WebVR was done to get a feel for Three.JS and WWWTyro’s WebVR renderer for Three.JS. This was a really simple, entirely front-end visualization that I wrote over two days for a work “hackathon” using Atom. Realistically, this didn’t need a full two days, but it was clean and easy to stick with a simple text editor for writing out the JavaScript.

My current project is another WebVR application, but there’s a lot going on in the backend this time around and I decided to give ASP.NET a try since I’ve been working in C# on and off over the past 5 years. I’m loving being able to write in Visual Studio (I know I may be a little biased, but it’s probably my favorite IDE) and since it’s now free with Community version, I’ve been loving the full environment for learning a lot of details as I work on the new app. The NuGet package manager makes managing libraries really simple, and being relatively new to web development, that’s taken off a lot of stress off dependencies.

Detailed Environment Projects & Game Play

One of my favorite things about virtual reality is how I can build out environments that I imagine or dream about – but for this, building everything out in Three.js is complicated, so I turn to Unity, where there is an entire asset store of textures and models to make really cool environments. The prefabs make it really easy to get up and running with the basics and I get to use Visual Studio when I’m playing around on my Windows computer (though Mono Develop on Mac is pretty solid for a free IDE as well… I ❤ C#)! Unity is a great option for building out a lot of end-to-end experiences, but it isn’t the easiest for integrating in a lot of non-gaming frameworks and it’s got a bit of a learning curve behind it.

Meta AR: Augmented Reality

This was another Unity development project. The Meta SDK used a Unity plugin to render a special Meta Game Object within a scene and any objects in the scene that weren’t in color would be rendered with transparency in the goggles. Like Oculus SDK, the Meta SDK has prefab drop ins for camera components that handle the majority of the AR imaging.

As more projects materialize, I’ll be updating with more tools and software. Feel free to share your tools and anything you’ve found to help with your own AR/VR development projects! I’m looking to take a stab at SceneVR next, so if you’ve played around with that I’d love to hear about your experience!

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!

Fove Eye Tracking VR Headset – Hands On!

This week at GDC, virtual reality was on the forefront of everyone’s minds as SVVR and SFVR veterans took to the Expo floor and companies large and small began showcasing their forays into the VR and AR space. The promising demos of the week, though, weren’t limited to HTC and Valve with their Vive headset, despite many claims that it’s the ‘Oculus Killer’ we’ve all been waiting for – for me, the most impressive demo was Fove, a hardware headset that has managed to capture everything that we know about gaze-tracking input for virtual worlds in a sleek, Oculus-styled headset.

Fove Headset, fove-inc.com

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

February News

Hi all!

It’s been a crazy busy month but I wanted to update on a few new things that I’m working on and get a status update out, partially for my own benefit so I can keep track of what’s going on myself.

First, and what was basically the catalyst of this post: I have a new role at Microsoft! Starting next week, I will be working as a Technical Evangelist – so if you’re in the Bay Area, you may be seeing a lot more of me at meetups and hackathons! I’m really excited to be beginning this role, because it will give me more time to work with the VR and the people who are building things with it – and to be working on a few secret things, too. 😉 I’ll be at the GDC expo next week, and am competing in the Meta AR hackathon on the 6th & 7th, so if you’re there, let’s meet up!

In preparation for the new job, I’ve been working on a shiny new landing page in celebration. If you’re feeling like giving my SEO a boost, take a peek yourself. I actually rewrote the site from scratch and moved a few things around to make use of Microsoft Azure for hosting.

A lot of my time recently has been spent on a couple of side projects – I’m working on a miniature virtual reality space world in Unity, based on a dream that I had. If you’ve seen me tweeting pictures of giant purple mountains and lava, this is what that’s all about. At the root of it, it’s a simple bubble collecting game inspired by my friend Katherine over at http://kaharri.com designed to be a short, interactive experience for introducing people to the Rift. I’ve been teaching myself more about building scenes in Unity, writing scripts, and designing worlds, and I’m hoping at some point, this will be ‘done’ enough to share publicly. There’s also a tiny little project that was born a couple of days ago that has been splitting my time – a million ideas and not enough time for them all!

My other project, as I’ve mentioned a few times, is the Unity tutorial that I’m working on. I’m excited on how much progress I’ve been able to make with it, but at the same time, there’s still a little more to go to finish up the whole thing. If you’re interested in the raw markdown files, the GitHub repo is up here. Right now, the tutorial will get you through most of building a VR-enabled maze, but the finishing touches and testing are still in the pipeline – you’ve been warned!

I am really excited for this new adventure and I can’t wait to soak up all of the VR and AR love that is sure to be coming up with GDC this year! I’m hoping to have a lot more to share in the coming weeks!

Proof of Concept: TedVR

As part of my explorations on VR trends, I put together a proof of concept for viewing Ted Talks in VR and how current web experiences will transfer into the new medium that virtual reality brings. I’ve affectionately been referring to the project as Ted Extended, but as a full disclaimer, this is a project I’ve done unaffiliated from Ted.

Experiments in WebVR – Part 2

Back in January, I wrote about my first attempt at using the new WebVR “standards” (I’ll get more into this later) to make a mini JavaScript application that uses Three.js and a Three VR Renderer from wwwtyro. In this post, I’ll walk through the steps that I followed to get a demo up and running using Tyro’s instructions – if you’ve got Firefox Nightly or a vr-enabled build of Chromium installed on your desktop, you can check out the demo at http://webvrdemo.azurewebsites.net, but most browsers will render a blank page until I get some better browser detection going.

Poor quality is from gif conversion, not the actual rendering

Explorations in Potential Virtual Reality Trends

We are finally ready for virtual reality. The smartphone industry and availability of the internet has provided the world with pocket computers and has created an “always on, always connected” mentality that will bridge the gap between physical and virtual environments. Virtual reality is coming (arguably, to some circles, is already here) – but it’s the kind of technology that many people haven’t been able to try using, and as such, there’s a clean slate when it comes to creating new experiences for people to share socially in virtual spaces. People have different ideas about how they’d like to use virtual reality and how it could improve their current experiences. If we look at 2014 mobile application usage trends, social sharing is king: users like applications that enable them to connect with other people.

Experiments in WebVR – Part 1

Last week on Twitter, I mentioned that I would be working on a virtual reality project for a team hackathon at work – the goal of the two day event was to just have fun, learn some new things, and take time to work on projects outside of our day-to-day jobs. Although the hackathon itself turned out to be small and few people actually participated, I got down and dirty with WebVR and got to try out some really interesting things that I had wanted to get proof-of-concepts for.

Hackathon desk – a bit messier than normal, but worth it!