Virtual Reality

I met Rabi Satter at an event earlier this month and he invited me to attend a different event he was to hold at the Microsoft Center on Wednesday on Xamarin. I attended but Rabi, trapped in a meeting at his work, never made it and his Xamarin workshop was not to be. It ended up be a really fun evening nonetheless. I ended up getting to goof off with an Oculus virtual reality headset, and, yes, virtual reality is back!

The Oculus was owned by Dean Herko (below left) and he and I am another gentleman named Rahul Varanasi who joined us (below right) spent the evening in an impromptu meeting messing about with the toys that Dean happened to have with him. (Beyond the Oculus there was also a Kinect and a Leap.)

Inside of the headset, there are lenses which beam light directly into the eyes. You also wear earphones while you wear the headset so that your ears may be tricked along with your eyes. The headset does a good job of tricking you and giving you an immersive experience. It made me feel wobbly some. Dean recommended that I hold onto a table in front of me a couple of times while I was using the apparatus. It doesn't immediately hurt the eyes, but at the same time I was ready to come out from under the Oculus after using it for maybe five to ten minutes. It was good, but something more than a touch of this good thing is overwhelming.

Dean had me walk through maybe three environments. The one I liked the best that I recommended that Rahul try was one in which one walked around and in a villa overlooking what I suspect was meant to be the Mediterranean. It was awesome. This was what Dean and I could see on Dean's laptop while Rahul wore the headset. I promise that what Rahul was seeing was much more convincing.

An XBox Controller was used to walk forward and move about in this environment. (Even if the XBox is to die, it, in its day, brought us some interesting technology that will be used in other ways. I'll get to the Kinect in a moment. It ties heavily into the XBox giving you sort of a Nintendo Wii experience without having to hold a controller, and yet it should have life in other apps beyond the XBox.)

A sensor (which I suppose was also a camera???) focused on where the Oculus was so that the software could adjust imagery when you turned your head. When I turned my head and looked about the experience reacted accordingly seamlessly. One of the things you have to do at the start of using the Oculus is pose looking straight forward so that the software knows where your head should face when you are facing forward. Guys, whoever you are that made this stuff, good work! I was fooled. Keep doing what you're doing.

In the picture below the sensor for the Oculus sits atop Dean's laptop, but that other device in front of the laptop is a Kinect (a different kind of sensor/camera body motion detector) and we played with it some too.

It does skeletal tracking and will map twenty five points on your body onto a model which represents where your arms, legs, hands, etc., are at. There is a company called BODY{SNAP} that will allow you to make a 3D model of yourself for use in games. The models have Kinect-friendly skeletons which should react to the movement of your twenty-five points. On the laptop's screen above you may see the Kinect figuring the three of us out.

I only mention the Kinect because it has a counterpart in the Oculus world called the Leap. Above, the Leap is that device in front of the laptop below Rahul's hand. It is making sense of Rahul's hand as you may see on the screen. Cool stuff, huh?

I go to the Microsoft Center in Austin for talks a lot, but this isn't usually the format. As I mentioned there was a talk by Rabi Satter which ended up being not to be. There was also an event hosted by Jeffrey Palermo (above left) on Azure going on at the same time. Thanks to Shawn Weisfeld (below left) of Microsoft for keeping the doors open for us. Martin Tatar also helped man the shop so thanks to him too. I met him for the first time on Wednesday. He is in the purple shirt above. I guess you can't really tell who he is.

Interesting things mentioned by Shawn included that TFS (Team Foundation Server) is Microsoft's ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) solution and that he himself was an ADM (Application Development Manager) meaning that he did code reviews for best practices and helped with the deploying and packaging of apps.