Augment Your Reality Safely - Reflections on AR and Other Things

What exactly is an enhanced eBook? Or even an enhanced (non-electronic) book? Those were the questions I had when I was initially trying to understand how to improve the book experience. My thought process started back when I was interning with a Marketing professor - I'd gone back to school, you see, to get a Communications degree, after years in science. The professor was working on media engagement mechanisms. Long story short, she was finding that the more the reader had to interact with the media, the more they remembered it.  I'd seen other research like this, with interactive games as the subject, years earlier - with experimental evidence. Experimental evidence is the pinnacle of proof in science. It's not hypothesis, not simply correlation, it's a causal connection. In other words, it's not just a hunch that A is related somehow to B, it shows that A causes B.  So I wasn't surprised that she was finding similar results with correlation studies.

Still sick with the flu, so not ready to write more about AR locomotion issues. But here is a good starter set for anyone interested in the subject. Oculus Research Into Comfortable Locomotion and also this video Solving for Locomotion in VR I'm going to try some of these with low end device Camera-based AR, as a demo, to see if they make any difference. And I think I'll also try them with Cardboard with or without an AR backboard. I think it's easy to say that inside-out tracking and especially hand tracking are also high on the list for dealing with locomotion, but the above might help immensely with the nausea issues that both VR and AR (with camera lag) have.

Well, I'm not quite working on my AR engine yet. I got sick over the weekend and I'm still feeling it - especially in my throat. But I'm about at my limit of sitting in bed watching anime and eating buckets of chicken soup. So I thought I'd take a sanity break and write about something I love - shaders.  It's going to be a long post, but even so, it doesn't even begin to cover shaders as they deserve to be covered, nor about shaders in AR. But it's a start. So let's see if folks have any interest. I've had a fascination with them even before they existed. What? Yes, it is possible. You see before shaders were shaders, they were simply part of the graphics engine - and I've been fascinated with graphics rendering for a very long time. I think anyone who cares about visuals, where it be Art or UI or a Formula 1 car, is fascinated with the mechanisms involved in creating that visual. In fact, I suspect there may be "gearheads" hidde

I'm sitting here eating microwave popcorn and basically, trying to find a reason *not* to work on my AR engine/framework. I'm sure those reading know the feeling. You spend weeks or often months working on something, whether it's a piece of software or art or a book or a back deck - then suddenly, you've sort of hit a wall. The work is coming along fine but there are all these little things that still need to be done. Some people go fishing. Some binge watch TV. Some play video games. It's an outlet - a way to recharge and get one's motivation back. I write and I cartoon. (Is cartoon a verb? Well, it is now!) I don't just blog (in fact, I was very surprised at the response to my last post...positive, I mean. A lot of people must be interested in AR issues). I also write novels (in fact, I just finished my second romance...neither published yet because I don't think I've perfected the first in the series, so that the second, third and fo

Quick brain dump (so please forgive me if it doesn't seem structured enough...this is 'off the cuff') I've had my AR plugin running in Unity on Windows for quite some time. It's not that difficult, when your background is as a Windows SDE to write a DLL that links to OpenCV's DLLs. It's still a bit of trouble, as dynamic linking of DLLs to other DLLs can lead to some memory (heap) violation crashes, but debugging is relatively easy. Android is another story. I only accomplished that about a month ago. I've been gradually making myself more comfortable writing for Android. It's easy to forget that when letting Unity do the hard work, writing for Android is a lot more complicated when you need to directly interact with the Android system. It's not that hard for Android devs, of course, but for those of us coming from a different background...well, it's a learning curve. So naturally, I want to write a shared library (DLL in Windows spe