XR Explorations

It’s a commonly-held belief across the tech industry that XR, or extended reality, is the future. This becomes more obvious each year, with more powerful VR and AR devices being made available to the general public at shockingly reasonable prices. Meanwhile, the smartphones we use everyday are quietly being updated with their own AR capabilities, laying the foundation for developers to build future-proof content that will play nicely with next-gen headsets and glasses.

I’ve only scratched the surface with my VR and AR personal projects; I’m incredibly grateful to live in a time where I have access to both the technology itself and the resources to teach myself how to build for it.

VR House Visualization

On my long list of privileges in life is the recent opportunity for me and my wife to build our dream home, which will double as both our residence and our remote offices. Yuchia, my wife, happens to be an incredibly talented art director and 3D generalist, capable of accomplishing just about anything she sets out to do. She took it upon herself to design the initial layout of our house, and also model it in 3D as the final design took shape.

In order to get a feel for some of the spaces within the house, as well as the lighting throughout the course of a day, I decided to take Yuchia’s model and bring it into VR. Since I already owned an Oculus Quest, the easiest way to do this was to bring it into Unity and use the Oculus Integration asset. Once I had done this, I actually found that it would also be helpful to leverage the Mixed Reality Toolkit (MRTK) from Microsoft. This toolkit gave me access to some great controls, like the slider attached to my hand in the video above, which I rigged to a directional light that matches the sun angle for our latitude during an equinox.

AR Postcard

This was another project kickstarted by Yuchia. In this case, she had completed a series of illustrations for some of our favorite food and coffee shops in Taiwan, and she was planning on printing postcards for them. I saw this as a great opportunity to try “exploding” her illustrations into 3D space with AR, so recipients of the postcards could experience them in a new way with their smartphones.

The video here is a work in progress from that project, after I had implemented the main functionality in Unity and got it running on my iPhone.