APPLE LIDAR SCANNING (MN VR PRESENTATION)

The LIDAR scanning capabilities of the new iPhone 12 Pro and 2020 iPad Pros are really incredible. I’ve been experimenting myself, and this led to some interesting projects at space150. I wrote about my first experiment in a previous post, you can see that here. In my view, LIDAR on iOS devices is great for mobile AR today, but is really a step towards bigger things, and is a critical ingredient for future AR specific devices.

I was asked to give an overview of the experiments and learnings at the MN VR monthly meetup, so I put together a deck, and presented this to the entire crew in the MN VR Theater in Altspace.

A short clip of the MN VR Theater in Altspace

Altspace is one of the few places that you can meet in VR that allows large groups, your own content, and supports the Oculus Quest. It’s really (really) clunky to get your content into Altspace, but I managed to get all 94 slides in, and many of them were videos.

This presentation was meant to serve as a quick intro to LIDAR, then we got deep into the details. The discussion that happened throughout is always the best part, and we were still able to do this in VR, which is amazing, and shows how powerful VR can be for meeting and hanging out - in a way that’s just different than video calls.

I’ve had a few requests for the slides, so here is the full presentation below - videos have been replaced with short animated clips.

It's been a year, and it's been a while

It’s odd to add a post to this page, since the last one was in December of 2014, but here I am.

2020 has been a year like no other, no doubt. I live in Minnesota, and when George Floyd was killed, it exposed and put a spotlight on the Minnesota Paradox. This is something I had been researching as part of my work as a member of the Minneapolis College Foundation Board. More awareness and exposure to this systemic problem is a really good thing, and is the first step towards fixing it.

George Floyd Square, June 2020

George Floyd Square, June 2020

We’re also in the middle of a global pandemic, and it’s really been a forcing function for change, impacting everyone in many different ways. I’m a person of science, and I’ve been using that as my guiding light through this time.

Given all of this, I’ve been fortunate this year - I’ve read more than ever, spent more time outside than I normally do, made many new friends (while gaming), and experienced some amazing new things in the emerging AR and VR technology space that has led to some of the best work of my career.

The word “virtual” get used and misused, and I promise not to do that here. At space150, we got behind the Kickstarter for the original Oculus Rift in 2013, and we haven’t looked back. From that time forward, it’s been an amazing experience understanding how it works, what’s it’s best at, and what it all means going forward. Our early VR work at space150 was experiential (like our work with Polaris), but we quickly transitioned to using it to make our work better - like helping us design this amazing Coca-Cola billboard in Times Square NYC. Using VR, we could understand not just what it looked like, but what if felt like to stand near it.

space150 x Coca-Cola Times Square

space150 x Coca-Cola Times Square

This in turn helped us use VR to design better Innovation Centers for 3M. It’s one thing to see a space, it’s another to experience it, and with VR, you can do that. We used VR to experience our space before we started to build it, which allowed us to make changes earlier in the process. We could experience the space before we built it, and it made the end result so much better. Below are a few clips of what we created using Unreal Engine 4 around the time the HTC Vive was first released.

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I’ve been fortunate to be early in the AR space too, with the Meta 1 and 2, the Hololens 1 and 2, and in the mobile AR space when Apple Launched ARKit and Google followed with ARCore. I’ll post more about what we’ve seen in this space too, as things are just advancing at an amazing clip right now…

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Ralph Baer: End of his Odyssey

A legend in the world of videogames has passed on: Ralph Baer died on Saturday Dec 6, 2014.

Magnavox Odyssey Console

Magnavox Odyssey Console

Ralph is somebody I've studied extensively, and have a great appreciation for. I taught videogame history for about 10 years at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and he is a big part of the origin story of videogames.

As far back at the 1950's, as a TV technician, he envisioned a way to use a TV as something other than just a viewing device - though he received hard pushback in the early days, he kept pushing. In 1966, while at Sanders Associates (a military and defense contractor), he made this work official, and transcribed four pages of notes about the idea. In the next two years, he and a small team worked on a prototype that would ultimately play simple tv games: pong, a chase game, a simple shooting game, and more. He called this the "brown box" prototype.

It's one thing to develop a product, it's another to get it produced: after many dead ends, his company struck a deal with Magnavox in 1971, and produced the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972, the first commercial home videogame console.

When people think about the early days of gaming, they often think "Atari". It's a long and complicated story, and it must be mentioned here: Ralph made incredible contributions to gaming, but was overshadowed by Nolan Bushnell and Atari. While the Magnavox Odyssey was the first home console, the first true smash videogame hit wasn't in the home: it was in the arcade. Atari's first game, Arcade Pong, was released in 1972, and was a smash hit. They would follow with many more, and enter into the home console market as well. Over the next 10 years, Atari would dominate the business, and become the fastest growing company in US history (NYT, 1982). 

In the end, both men were incredibly important to the industry, in different ways. They ran in the same circles, attended the same events, competed and fought in court. Both brought something unique, and we're better for both of them,.

I purchased a mint condition Odyssey console quite a few years ago, and dug it out today in his honor. Things have changed a bit from 1972 to today: this console is powered by 6 "C" batteries, and has overlays for the TV that you would place over the screen to add color and important gameplay elements.

Thanks for pushing and fighting Ralph, I can't count the hours of fun I've had gaming. Hope your Odyssey continues.

If you'd like to learn more about Ralph and the Odyssey, start here:

ADR1FT: FPX (First Person Experience)

If you call yourself a gamer, you get the variety of games that exist. If you don't, you might think that most of them are violent shooters centered around shooting everything in sight. These games are a genre called First Person Shooters (FPS). Call of Duty is the monster in this genre right now, and while some people are experiencing shooter fatigue, i'm not at all not even a bit.

With that out of the way, ADR1FT looks amazing, and they're calling it a First Person Experience (FPX). Lots of exploring, no shooting. The game is set in space, and you play as an astronaut, and things have gone bad in space.

Polygon has a great writeup on the game, and you can check out the studio page at ThreeOneZero.com.