I’m going to start with the disclaimer: this process involves a number of wonky settings on your computer and isn’t something that runs smoothly “out of the box” with a single click, nor is it an officially supported feature of either Hubs or Zoom. However, if you’re interested in upping your video meetings by appearing as an avatar in a virtual world, and you like messing around with applications and settings, read on. Background I’ve
Read moreThe social app that I find myself unexpectedly spending more time in these days (other than Hubs) isn’t a game that I was familiar with prior to a couple of weeks ago. Despite being an avid Nintendo fan since I got my first console at the age of seven, I had never had the delight of playing Animal Crossing until the latest release. Now, it’s hard to imagine my daily routine without it. Part of
Read moreThe conference world has been thrown for a loop with the wide-reaching recommendations for COVID-19 discouraging or prohibiting large gatherings. As the games and VR industry raced towards March, the month where both GDC and SXSW were scheduled to overlap, cancellations have meant that almost everyone has had a change in plans Naturally, VR Twitter began to weigh the pros and cons of “GDC in VR”, hoping to embrace the growing medium for a chance
Read moreI was invited to give a lightning talk at the W3C Inclusive Design for Immersive Technology workshop about what we’re doing with scene authoring through Spoke for Hubs. As with many of my talks, I think they make better blog posts, and I’m excited to share this one with you today. About Hubs & Spoke For those of you who aren’t familiar with the work we’re doing a Mozilla on social mixed reality, Hubs is
Read moreI just skimmed back into an earlier blog post and realized that while I posted about leaving High Fidelity, I never actually updated with where I was headed. I didn’t post it here, though I did an announcement on Twitter with the news: I joined Mozilla back in March to work on their Mixed Reality initiatives, and finally have been able to go full-time into open source, web-based, asymmetric social 3D / VR spaces. Working
Read moreHi from Austin, everyone! I’m here in town for South By Southwest, a giant conference that takes over the city of Austin, Texas and has tracks across all sorts of themes relating to immersive media, virtual reality, technology, music, politics, and beyond. It’s been a little overwhelming and a lot exciting, and it will culminate with a panel that I’m on tomorrow called How VR and AR Change the Way we Express Ourselves. In preparing
Read moreIt’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to get a new blog post up – I’ve been working my way slowly but surely through my list of 27 goals for the year, and I finally got around to one that I’ve been hoping to do for a while – creating my own Visual Studio Code editor theme! I wanted a dark color theme with simple syntax highlighting for writing JavaScript code, and I
Read moreA couple of weeks back, I saw a request on Twitter for information about how to go about starting or contributing to open source software and projects, and I wanted to share what my experience with OSS has been, and my recommendations for anyone looking to get more involved with it (especially focusing on virtual reality). Firstly, some background on my experience with open source: I started developing virtual reality applications and prototypes using the
Read moreThe problems and challenges that have led up to the state of virtual and augmented reality technologies as they exist today have been exactly that: problems and challenges. Teams have worked tirelessly to bring the hardware, sensors, firmware, tools, and applications to us, and our work in the immersive technology industry is just beginning.
Read moreThis past Thursday, I had the privilege of speaking about the VR Web, a topic near and dear to my heart, at Coldfront, a front-end focused, single-track conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. Despite battling off the remnants of a particularly nasty cold, my talk at Coldfront was one of my favorites that I’ve ever given. Why? The audience was great, the organizers were wonderful – but what really excited me about giving this talk was that
Read more