Augment Your Reality Safely - Reflections on AR and Other Things

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...