The Oculus Rift vs The HTC Vive

Last week, I got the chance to go to Oculus Connect and try out all of the latest demos.  It was a blast, and I met a ton of incredible people.  Shortly after arriving back in Virginia however,I found out that HTC and Valve's Vive Truck Tour was in Washington D.C. for their final day, and proceeded to head up to D.C. to try out their demos as well.  It was great timing, as I had already had time to think about the Oculus Rift demos I tried, and got to make some fantastic comparisons between the two.  The following is a quick write-up of my thoughts on both of them.

HoloLens is Just the Start

If you've looked at any tech website in the past week, you've probably seen something about HoloLens, Microsoft's fantastic attempt to finally bring augmented reality to the world.  I have to hand it to you Microsoft, they did this very well, and what they have looks fantastic.  While I've been impressed by Google Glass, I've talked about the one thing its been missing to make it perfect: A depth sensor.  Based on what I've seen, it looks like HoloLens is finally adding that, and boy does it look nice.  The best part is, this is only the beginning of augmented reality for consumers!

Standing out in a World of Code

This is an interesting question that I've been asked a whole lot recently.  A lot of people want to know how they can make their code stand out for jobs, and what it takes to do so.  The interesting thing is, you don't have to be a fantastic coder to do so.  In fact, standing out is pretty simple in the world of software development, you just have to know yourself fairly well.  So for today's post, I want to go over a few ways that can help you stand out, whether it's at your school, a job interview, or just online in general, here are my top three tips for standing out in today's world of code!

Is C++ a Relevant Language?

This has been a nagging question to me for a few years now, and is part of the reason I stopped coding as much a few years ago, only to pick it back up again over the past two years: Just how useful is it to learn a programming language like C++?  No, I'm not talking about python wrappers for it, or C#, or something "similar" like Java (and no, they are not similar like you may think).  I'm talking about low level C++, down to the metal, with just you and your compiler (IDE optionally too).  Had you asked me 2 years ago, I probably would have said C++ is just for gaming.  Ask me now, and I'll tell you it is still one of the most relevant languages out there.  Let's go over a few things about why C++ is a big deal, and why you should learn it if you don't know it.

Fading with Shaders

This is a fun little post I thought I could do really quick.  While I'm still getting the hang of using shaders and such, recently I thought of something that I thought was kind of clever to do with shaders.  This is a quick post about what the problem was and how I solved it.  Shout out to Michael C. Johnson for suggesting to blog about this!

The Current World of Virtual Reality

For the past few months I've spent some time with the Oculus Rift, and have gotten to learn the basic ins and outs of how to make virtual reality applications, where the market for it is going, and some of the challenges that come along with it.  It's been quite a fun experience, and while I am no means an expert now, I feel pretty comfortable with my ability to use these technologies and develop applications for them should I ever need to.  While I plan to slowly add-on new features to Project Virtua as needed, there is not much more to do on it as of now, and so I've decided to start looking into other realms of technology to mess with.  This post is a quick summary of some of the things I've learned, as well as some of my views on where this technology should go.  While I won't be super active on these technologies, I will still post some things about them, so don't count me out completely.  Specifically, I have a few games I would like to code for it that I plan to start sometime over the summer if I can muster up the free time!

Game Systems - 8th Generation Current Status

Game systems are a very tricky business to read into.  While your favorite system may have all the games that you like, that doesn't mean that it is selling well.  At the same time, high sales for one console at the start might not mean that it will be the best selling in the end.  There are quite a few ups and downs specifically to the current 8th generation of game systems, each complete with coming challenges as well.

Please note that this was written prior to E3 2014, and so this is just my personal opinions and thoughts on the current generation of consoles before then.  I will be writing up a post E3 version soon.

Project Virtua Demo - Using Just the Rift

This is a quick tutorial on how to get a simple Oculus Rift demo up and running with Project Virtua.  The library is designed to be quick and easy to use, with little to no extra work on the developer or users end.  We will also be using the MiddleMan library included with Project Virtua to create the basic window scene and handle the model rendering for our basic floor, though I will not cover their usage in this tutorial (see the Github code at the end for that, it's pretty easy to use).

Project Virtua - Create the Future

With the very recent announcement that Facebook has bought Oculus VR, I've already seen quite a few people who are absolutely horrified at this.  Minecraft with official Oculus Rift support has been canceled, I received a few messages of people who were worried, and I myself was very concerned after hearing this news.

But then, I thought about what I had read.

Facebook, a company whose CEO talks all the time about a connected world, a company who Microsoft has a large stake in, a company with easily over one billion users, has acquired Oculus VR, a company that wants to bring virtual reality to the masses, a company that has re-ignited the virtual reality future of the 90's, a company that has incredible visions of the future.

Think about what a company like Facebook could do for the Oculus Rift.  They have the money to let them further develop their technology.  They have the users to bring even more awareness to the Oculus Rift (something that my parents had not heard of until this past January).   But there is one key thing that Facebook could potentially bring to the table: Microsoft.  Why does Microsoft matter?  Because they have the Kinect.  The Microsoft Kinect is the last missing piece to the puzzle of virtual reality.  It is the key item to solving a large portion of the needs for Oculus VR, such as the issue of body-tracking, or the getting rid of a controller since you can't see it anyways.  It is an incredibly important part of making sure that virtual reality does not become another gimmicky controller.

There's also another side: Mark Zuckerberg's desire to connect the world.  This is a huge deal, and even those who just want the Oculus Rift for gaming should care.  The Oculus Rift cannot succeed on gaming alone, and yet that's all that people seem to think of with it.  Even I do, and it's a problem, because there are not enough gamers in the world to buy a $300 product and allow a company to make a decent profit.  The Oculus Rift needs everyone, not just gamers, and if Facebook is able to get it to other markets, that's yet another good thing.

That being said, I too am still skeptical.  Facebook does not have a solid track record with doing what is best for a product in my opinion, and I worry about whether they will completely mess this up.  If they don't go to Microsoft for help, and don't properly utilize the potential, the Oculus Rift will end up as a terrible gimmick that's nothing more than a novelty.

Still, I want to try and help make sure that the Oculus Rift stays on track.  What I think would help with this is to start looking towards full virtual reality games and applications, rather than just things that use the Oculus Rift.  By doing this, I believe we can help the Oculus Rift stay on track for what it needs to do, rather than what Facebook may do.  That's why, I am doing a very early release of my recent project: Project Virtua.

Let's create the future

Project Virtua is an open-sourced set of tools for creating virtual reality applications, using a combination of the Oculus Rift and Microsoft Kinect, as well as future releases of newer versions of these devices, and other companies versions too.  Using it, you can create entirely new worlds that users can be physically put into.  Need to swing a sword at a bad guy?  Just swing it then.  Want a better seat to view a sports game from?  Then just scoot a few seats over.  Want to sit at the front of a class?  Just stand up and walk to it.  The possibilities are endless, and now, with Facebook's acquisition of Oculus VR, I have no doubts that Mark Zuckerberg sees similar potential in it.  So where does Project Virtua play in then?  It aims to make developing virtual reality applications simple.  Need to get a user's head rotation?  Just call GetRotation.  Need to warp the display for the lenses?  Just call ComposeFinalImage.  Want to get the position of a person?  Just call GetPosition.  The idea with this is an incredibly simple library for developing anything from games to apps.

I want to stress that this is still a very early release.  There is still a lot of work that needs to be done, especially when it comes to creating a nice system for rendering to the screen.  We are still considering DirectX support, as right now we only support OpenGL.  The plus side to this is that it is partially cross-platform already, so Mac and Linux users can take a look into this as well for certain parts.  This is something I am using as a school project too however, and as a result it will definitely continue to be worked on for the next few months at the least, but again, this is very early on.  Everything from the Kinect support to the website itself is still under heavy construction, so please bear with us while we work on it.

I too want to see virtual reality succeed.  I was born in the early 90's, and grew up with the it right within reach.  I hope this time around we can see it succeed, but this deal that Oculus VR has made with Facebook is very risky.  It can either end as a complete success, or end up becoming a complete failure.  Only time will tell unfortunately.

One PC, Three Kinects

Recently I managed to get a hold of three Microsoft Kinects.  A few of my family members had one (including myself) and ended up not needing them since they never used them.  Being the "techy" I am, the first thing I did was attempt to integrate them into my recent Oculus Rift projects.  While the code seems to be correct, there was an issue from a hardware perspective that I was hoping to not run into.  Alas, I have, and thus am writing this blog post about what exactly is going on.  It's an interesting little hardware problem that I'm hopeful Kinect 2.0 will solve a bit more, and that'd I decided to do a quick write-up about.