You and Your Students Can Build Cardboard VR Apps With Unity

I wrote about making your own Google Cardboard apps for iOS with Unity before, but the examples I provided have since become obsolete after the Unity update 5.6.0, which integrated support for VR into its own build tools, and, separately, the Google Cardboard SDK starting with v1.50 was drastically changed, replacing GvrViewerMain with GvrEditorEmulator. The example I had for moving around while pressing the Cardboard button still moved, but the image was flipped over. Talk about a nauseating experience.

Light Play With LightLogo

I've been admiring the work the Tinkerers at The Exploratorium have been doing with light. They've developed an amazing and rich environment for creating moving light and shadow compositions in which fading lights of different colors cast shadows of objects arranged on a slowly rotating turntable. The displays of moving and overlapping shapes on the white scrim are mesmerizing.

Making a Strobing Zoetrope at DDD

Design Do Discover

I loved participating in Design Do Discover 2017! The people and facilities are fantastic and I really enjoyed taking a project idea from start to finish (-ed enough) in the 2-day whirlwind workshop. I just want to document here our process of making a zoetrope, which I went in thinking I would like to make. One of the best parts of D3 was experiencing the epiphany that in the process of trying to make something you come to understand something so much better than if it were just explained or shown to you. The thing I came to understand was how persistence of vision works.

Opensim in the Classroom: How To Get Started

I've run sims with Opensimulator in my school for eight years now (!). I think it's immensely rewarding for students and well worth the effort. It's come a long way as a practical technology for schools. I'm not a techno-wizard but I'm so familiar with it now that it's pretty easy for me to run saved worlds or set up a sim from scratch, so I'm documenting the steps here for newcomers to the technology to use in their own forays into Opensim work.

Workflows for Virtual Worlds/Virtual Reality

These are some notes I'm taking to remember how I got some things to work for student projects.

Scenario 1: Importing 3D Models Into Opensim

Correcting Collada Model Errors

First time I spent money ($15!) on a 3D model to use there was an issue. The snow leopard was inside-out; the texture was on the inside and the outside was transparent. I learned after much searching that the "normals" had to be recalculated, which can only be done in a 3D program. The download included an FXB file so I used Blender, imported the FXB file, went to Edit Mode > Mesh > Normals > re-calculate outside normals which flipped the orientation of the faces to outside. Then I exported that as an OBJ file. Then I could import into Opensim with Singularity viewer. I chose File > Upload Mesh > High detail. It comes in gray so change the color to

16 X 32 LED Matrix USB > serial adapter driver

Just putting this here.
To communicate with this 16 X 32 LED matrix I use this FT232 Serial Module FTDI-Compatible Helper, which requires this Silabs driver.

Make a Video from a Processing Sketch

I needed to do this and found the steps challenging enough I wanted to keep them here, and maybe they will be helpful to others. I needed to take the words in a static wordle-type presentation and animate them, so they move around a bit. Then I needed to add that animation to a video of a dance.

OpenSimulator In the Classroom Through the Years

I haven't run any sim projects for a while and I miss it. I just found a cache of pictures of sim projects and am amazed at how far it's come. Here are some of the pictures to give an idea of the territory students and I covered together. What an adventure!

Our first sim, 2009! With a spare assortment of prims students acted out skits for
their drama class.

ShapeTiler App with WaterColorBot

I updated my Shape Tiler program,
made with Processing.js,
to be a standalone version that exports a PDF of your shape tile, which you can then import to Inkscape and send to your WaterColorBot to draw. Why make a plotter draw your shape tile design rather than just printing out the png from the online version? I don't know! But it's fun to watch.

Getting Oriented With Minecraft Pi

Minecraft Pi is Python for Minecraft. You can run Python programs from a folder on your computer that make things happen in a Minecraft server in the same computer or even on a remote one. Actually Minecraft Pi is for the Raspberry Pi but I'm using the MCPI mod which can work on a regular (vanilla) Minecraft server or I have it working on a MinecraftEdu server (version 1.7.10).