Evryway dev blog is live!

After a hard week bashing away at the keyboard, I thought I'd get my first dev blog post up. I'll be moving pretty much all my technical posts over to Evryway from now on. Take a gander!

http://www.evryway.com/Dev-Blog-Week-1/

What a week!

This week, I have mostly been making a holodeck.

I've got motion tracking working with a mobile headset (Tango in a durovis Dive) including device input (Droidbox), gaze tracking, world-space menus and a bit more. From scratch. The Unity ecosystem that enables all of this stuff is simply incredible.

This morning I also received confirmation that I'm incorporated!

Videos to come shortly, but I'm really happy with progress so far.

Next week I'll be getting live environment capture into the device working, which I think is going to be pretty special - possibly something that no-one else has shown yet.

There's a huge amount of work ahead of me, but it's amazing what you can get done in one week, even with the distractions that come with working in your garage!

Rift confirmation

The Oculus kickstarter just asked me to confirm my address. Awesome sauce. It's coming!

Good lord, this is scary

So, I'm sitting here.

ready to begin.

I have a *huge* number of plans for things to make and things to do. Enough for a lifetime.

Where do I start?

Step 1. Breathe.

Step 2. Start a new repo!

OK, that's step one done.

A new beginning!

I'm unemployed! woohoo!

Yesterday was my last day as a Zynga / NaturalMotion employee. Lots of mixed feelings - leaving behind the Boss Alien crew has been really hard, I get the feeling I'm going to be missed which is nice. No paycheck is going to be very hard to adjust to.

I'll not be sorry to see the back of the corporate environment. The way big companies make games is just - well, not ideal. I think I have enough information now to write a book on it. Whether anyone would listen is another matter entirely.

I'm incredibly proud of the work I've done over the last 4 and a bit years. We've made a lot of mistakes along the way but we've created a game that's spawned a franchise, has over 200 million downloads across the various platforms and incarnations so far, and I wouldn't be surprised to see that double over the franchise lifetime. We've been running a live game for over three years, which is just crazy.

I've had a large number of awesome times working with team Boss Alien. Given that I was involved in hiring a large majority of the folks I've worked with, I can safely say that our "only hire people who are competent that we like" policy and our "yes, maybe, no - and a maybe is a no" policy has worked out fantastically. Or maybe it's confirmation bias. Anyway, it was the best leaving card I've had ;)

So - what's next?

VR is next! a big steaming bucket of VR!

and the first thing I'm going to be working on is a holodeck.

And I'm going to try and document my progress, pretty much live.

If you're interested in watching or participating, drop me a mail. I'll be looking at ways to fund this over the next month or two - I've got a warchest that'll get me through summer but if I can figure out a revenue stream by then I'll be able to think a bit bigger. Patreon and Kickstarter are options, I guess.

I've got a lot of bills and logistics to get cracking on next, and I've got to recreate all of my hacking and prototyping of the last year or two, from scratch, starting today.

Time to get cracking!

Last day ...

Last day today.

First day tomorrow!

squeeeee!

Failure before ubiquity - and undoubtedly some lessons to be learned

Failure before ubiquity

On a rare day off (love you, missus) I've been doing the usual Reddit browsing and stumbled over this article as to why laptop computers were a failure - from 1985, no less. Take a read, pop on back - I'll wait.

http://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/08/business/the-executive-computer.html

I don't think any sane person today would say that laptop computers, and mobile computing in general, is a failure. Nearly every pain point mentioned in the article then has been conquered by technological and process improvements - better screens and batteries, vastly improved computational power, the internet (and mobile connections to the internet), app stores - the list is enormous and each brought paradigm shifts in use cases and general usage. Nearly all of those have been to the advantage of some new industry, and to the detriment of an old established industry. Anyone involved in print media, especially newspapers, would hopefully be nodding in agreement.

There's some technological paradigm changes coming - some are here now if you look - that are going to have similar swan songs written for them, and then become so ubiquitous that people in 2050 will be looking back at today, shaking their heads and thinking "Boy, were they wrong". AI, automation, robots and VR/AR are the cases I'm most interested in and I think VR is about to be the next chunk of tech that people buy and scratch their heads over, quickly declaring "Well, that doesn't work because thing X is a bit rubbish".

Here's a mental exercise - what's going to be the things that, in 2017, stop people from realising they are doing something that's going to become ubiquitous, but just doesn't work properly right now? Because those are the areas where the fun is going to be (and possibly the money). I'm going to pick VR as my highest close-term interest, but the same exercise can be applied to Automated cars, Rocketry, medicine - pick your poison.

For VR, Here's my top three:

HCI (Human computer interaction).

Remember that scene where Scotty talks to the mouse? Funny at the time, blindingly obviously necessary right now. My typing speed is, if I might toot a horn, pretty bloody good - if I needed to get a job as a secretary, I'd probably do just fine. I've used keyboard input for computers since I was a wee bairn, and it's a very normal part of my day. But that's not going to work in VR, or AR, and the control and speed of that interface is required for decent computer interaction. What's going to change here?

Obvious candidates are speech recognition and gesture recognition, and both are on the cusp of breaking into normal usage. Google Now, Alexa, Cortana, CMU Sphinx and a variety of other controllable speech interfaces are out there now, and they're bleeding awesome. Why are we not using them every day? Possibly because the input tools themselves are not pervasive (although computers on wrists is the obvious channel, as is your home being mic'd up). Possibly because we don't have a really compelling reason to right now, but that's going to change as IoT devices and especially VR/AR devices need interfaces where we are not able to, or can't be bothered to, walk over and type stuff. I don't know many people who just talk into thin air yet, but I do know folks (including myself) who will happily talk to a computer - I use "OK, google" pretty much every day.

Gesture rec is a bit further out. Tracking of some form is required, and not everyone is living in a space that is understood by computers. Would it seem strange to have something like a Kinect in every room? Because that's what's required right now. The ideal is to have sensors tracking your fingers, face and pose with a feed into any apps that fancy interacting. None of this stuff is Sci-Fi, though - it's all eminently achievable right now. I've messed with the APIs for Kinect, Leap Motion, a few others (and I've been doing work around this stuff in the games industry for years now!) and it's technically ready. It's certainly not consumer ready, not by a long shot. I'm excited to get my hands on Constellation and Lighthouse (and more Lighthouse!), as they are going to be the first real generation of hardware that lets you feed things directly into VR apps natively, but this is really going to be the year where we see the space explode, both with understanding, technology and capabilities. Wiimote and PS Move, your time may be over shortly.

You've then got to do something with the speech and the gestures - and that's going to be very interesting to watch!

Motion

Knowing what you're doing is one thing. Knowing where you do it is another. This requires that the device you're interacting with knows both where you are and where you're looking. Gyros and accelerometers get you a tiny part of the way, GPS is another part of the picture, and the tracking capabilities of systems just discussed gets you a bit closer. the APIs and hardware for this stuff is crazy now and going to get better very quickly.

Oculus has very good seat-scale tracking, Vive has very good room-scale tracking. Of course, your definition of room scale may vary - church halls and multi-user shared spaces are rooms by my definition, and accurately tracking everyone within those spaces (ideally non-intrusively) is an interesting challenge right now. Once that's nailed, though ... Of course there's many other contenders about to properly change the space. I'm not talking about iBeacon or any of that other nonsense designed to tell things that you're close enough to purchase junk - I mean sub-centimeter accurate position and orientation information for you and your things.

One of the biggest perceptual disconnects with VR is that you are often expected to move in an environment where that motion isn't matched in the real world. Our brains really don't like this. Walking around in a virtual space where the real world and the projected space match, perceptually, suddenly makes it all click (and I don't mean this metaphorically). If you've yet to try out the Vive, then that's likely your best conduit to understanding what I'm talking about, right now. 

Computer Understanding the Environment 

I'm not sure of the best term for this, to be honest - computers have been understanding (directly, to a lesser or greater extent) the environment ever since we started using them as tools. However, right now, it doesn't tend to feel very personal.

Your personal devices understanding the space around you, however - that is where the gold is. Tango, RealSense and various other devices that do area learning, spacial rec, and feed that stuff back into your system - they're here, and they are very much in the developer-sphere right now, but boy are they going to explode really soon.

Laser scanners, photogrammetry, SLAM, lightfield capture (both static and dynamic) and other mechanisms to accurately represent world-geometry - they all feed into this. They're all very hard to do but they are becoming better and cheaper every day.

Once the computational system knows the difference between a chair and the floor, all kinds of awesome ensues. This stuff is critical for AR but it's a massive multiplier to the capabilities of VR systems too - just look at Vive's chaperone system for one obvious example.

You take photos and videos right now, yes? I'll lay good odds that you've probably got a video-capable camera within 5 meters. When you can record everything around you so that it can be played back in VR - would you want that? Why wouldn't you want that?

Putting it all together

Soon, baby. Soon.

If you want to change the world ...

Change it for the better, please?

This means positive action - make someone's day better.

This means persuasive discussion. If you want to change someone's mind, explain to them rationally why it's a good idea.

Anything else is just a waste of time, and will probably not make the world a better place.

Oculus Rift pre-orders are go!

I'm super excited (and I mean SUPER EXCITED - you just have no idea!) about getting my grubby mitts on a CV1. I've had a DK1 and DK2, and I'm awaiting my gratis KS edition CV1 in the post, but I want to get in there with a consumer kit via pre-order too - reasons why will become obvious in a few months.

The pre-order page is open now (click here : https://shop.oculus.com/en-us/cart/ ) and grab one if you've got $600 plus tax and delivery (or £500, or 700 euros!). Which is (imho) insanely pricey for their first release - but - (and I may be one of the first people to publicly say this) - it's NOT a ridiculous price point. After all, people pay that for a phone. If they're crazy.

And you'd have to be crazy to jump in on CV1 at this price point. Even if you can make it past the terrible first-day store experience (it may improve later, I hope it does!) - I've put in an order but I still have no idea if it's actually valid or not - no confirmation email, trying to update my order fails, etc. Whoever did their load-testing for day one on their shop could sure use some help! Either that, or they are getting absolutely loopy amounts of orders. I'm guessing the former, and I'm hoping for the latter.

Why? Because I'm one of the crazy ones who believes we're about to see a total sea-change - not just in games, but in all kinds of spheres. Communication. Travel. Media production. Learning. Games, obviously, and that's my background - but VR and AR are about to hit, and they will be here to stay - and it's only going to get better.

I really really want one. (And a Vive, and the next-gen GearVR, and ... )

Happy New Year!

2016 is going to be a BIG ONE for me and the family. Hope you all have an excellent year!