Tony is a Geek

Okay, so, if like me, you've had your interest piqued by the prospect of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) over the past year and a half and have even invested in Oculus Rift and/or a Samsung Gear headset (* other VR units are available ) and you've got yourself a copy of Unity or Unreal Engine and had great expectations about making this wonderfully great new VR world with magical spinning things and whooshy ( yes, that's a word I just made up ) swirls of rainbow goodness, only to the have to fire up Udemy or Coursera to find a course that teaches you how to make 3D models. Several weeks later, you've made a potato.  A bad looking potato.  It is kind of 3D, but has lumps in the wrong places.  It does NOT look like the prancing unicorn that you envisaged for your main character representation in your snazzy new VR world.  Come to think of it, the rocks, buildings, cars, <insert any other shape or object that you wanted to have in your landscape...

My Oculus Rift arrived today: Pretty awesome, but I don't have a Windows PC powerful enough (or with a good enough graphics card) to use it.  shame.  Guess I'll stick to the Samsung GearVR for a while longer :-D

So, this happened today: Bristol Virtual Reality World Conference (VRWC) Expo. I attended (it would have been rude not to....) and took some photo's and had a wander around / chat. >CLICK HERE FOR MORE<

The Oculus Sample Framework for Unity 5 is an experimental sandbox for VR developers and designers. It consists of a set of simple scenes that illustrate solutions to typical problems in VR, including the mechanics of first-person movement or gaze-based UI. Each sample provides an in-app control panel allowing users to change parameters such as the length of the fade to black in a teleport, the delay on a UI element, or the z-depth of a crosshair reticle. This control panel is itself an illustration of in-VR controls that can be used to help build similar controls in your own applications. Each scene in the project explores a concept relevant to VR. We have provided a Unity 5 project for the whole framework. an executable for Windows, and a free download in the Gear VR Concepts store. The binaries allow you to dive in and explore a range of ideas without opening the project in the Unity Editor. Each scene provides in-VR documentation, so you can jump straight in. The samples can...

Apparently, I'm getting an Oculus Rift (again! ....long story...) Although the docs state that you need a PC to do the development work, I've just found that the Mac OSX SDK and Runtime are still available.. (huh!hum!....download whilst you can) I'm sure the official SDK will come back in a short while. After checking out the Mobile SDK , I noticed that there is a Samsung GearVR headset that runs from your Samsung S6 phone, now that's more like it: Android coding! and here are the instructions to setup your Mac for the Mobile SDK . It might be time to purchase a Gear VR from Amazon , get my hands on an S6 (I thought I had an S5, turns out it's an S6!!! Woo!hoo!), okay, I have the right equipment.  Time to setup the Mac and see how far I can go with development before having to purchase the actual Gear VR... I'll naturally do a write-up article when I do start developing....watch this space. Then it'll be time to test out some apps from ...