Augment Your Reality Safely - Reflections on AR and Other Things

Introduction (to the Tutorial Series): I will be writing about my own experiences using Unity's new beta Shader Graph, part of its upcoming 2018 release (also in beta).  The Shader Graph lets you create a variety of Unity shaders using nodes - not requiring you to write code. I will be writing about this journey over multiple posts, usually spaced about a week apart. Each post will be a short tutorial on how to use various node types to create different shader effects. And will include brief discussions on types of shaders and their uses, and later, how the Shader Graph compares with code-based shaders. I will try not to get overly technical, but will try to give you an idea of the complexity involved in shaders, from lighting to vertex and fragment manipulation. Given the nature of beta software, expect the Shader Graph (and later tutorials) to vary from earlier ones that you can now find online. Even within my tutorials there will be changes if/when the beta evolves - incl...

Introduction (to the Tutorial Series): I will be writing about my own experiences using Unity's new beta Shader Graph, part of its upcoming 2018 release (also in beta).  The Shader Graph lets you create a variety of Unity shaders using nodes - not requiring you to write code. I will be writing about this journey over multiple posts, usually spaced about a week apart. Each post will be a short tutorial on how to use various node types to create different shader effects. And will include brief discussions on types of shaders and their uses, and later, how the Shader Graph compares with code-based shaders. I will try not to get overly technical, but will try to give you an idea of the complexity involved in shaders, from lighting to vertex and fragment manipulation. Given the nature of beta software, expect the Shader Graph (and later tutorials) to vary from earlier ones that you can now find online. Even within my tutorials there will be changes if/when the beta evolves - incl...

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...