

Leap Motion Furniture Test
I hooked up Leap Motion to my furniture demo and made a few changes. I stole the hand from the SixSense razer demo, and used that instead of the usual finger sticks Leap has, I also limited the number of instances to 1 so that only 1 hand would appear. I have control over the hand's animation via mechanim, and it translates and rotates using the Leap Input. The hand can interact directly with objects and push them around etc, it can also pick them up and drop them (as of now


Rift Experiment #6: Fixing the Zoom issue
Now that I have convergence, the issue I've noticed is that the streams in the background are zoomed in, i.e. they do not emulate my actual vision, but rather a zoomed in version, so it is hard to operate (like walking around town wearing binoculars). I managed to fix this, and the effect is that I can operate perfectly with the rift on, like having "magic eyes". The downside is that my 1 camera rig and resolution issues prevent me from filling the whole rift view, so it spoi


Rift Experiment #5: Getting Background Convergence
So I started tinkering with the values for the background streams, trying to get convergence with them. I managed to do it, but the cost was a strange offset with the right camera (suppose it could have been the left too) that sacrifices a slice of the right stream area, but is unnoticeable in the rift. From the screenshot, you can see the slice that gets shifted. Nonetheless, convergence is perfect for background and 3D objects, so progress... #chriswrenaugmentedrealityresea


Rift Experiment #4: Metaio, An AR toolkit that publishes to Windows
With the aforementioned shortcoming of Vuforia, I was forced to look into other AR toolkits for publishing standalone Windows AR builds that would work with the Oculus Rift. I downloaded the "AR Toolkit", "Daram", "Wikitude" and "Metaio". Daram was an extension of Vuforia, so no good for me here, AR Toolkit had some interesting tools, but crude and not user friendly, Wikitude was not geared for 3D content well, but makes great use of location services. Finally, there was Meta


Rift Experiment #3: Limitations of Vuforia
First of all, I have really loved the Vuforia toolkit for making AR prototypes, but I ran into a limitation with it this week which really screws up some of my prototyping...For whatever reason, Qualcomm has decided to make it so that Vuforia doesn't publish to Windows or Mac, it only publishes to Andriod or IOS. Prior to the Rift and Glass, all of my prototyping was on Android, so I never noticed, but with the Rift and Leap Motion on PC, I needed a standalone solution for pr


My First week with the Oculus Rift
This week I got my hands on an Oculus Rift. Our department had ordered a couple of these, but due to the shortage of Dev Kit 1s, we got bumped to wait for Dev Kit 2, which has not shipped yet. Luckily, I was asked by a group in another college to come work on a PhD project they were working on, they needed a Unity and AR expert to build prototypes, and they had a Rift, didn't take much convincing. I started with the Tuscany demo that comes with the rift. I merged in the Vuf