!//publishing-project.rivendellweb.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/holodeckempty.jpg A holodeck from Star Trek: The Next Generation The Holodeck is a lot more complex than I thought it was when I first started working on putting these ideas together. The stories we tell, how we tell them and how much they become the reader/participant's stories is still being fleshed out and a lot of the work will fall to designers and developers. Story Ideas We've talked a lot about the how and what technologies to use when working in AR and VR storytelling. The following section will work on the what, ideas of types of stories that because...
We've looked at three events I consider ancestors to our modern AR and VR efforts, we've looked at some of the technologies, both hardware and software, we can use to create AR and VR experiences. Using beacons is easy. Telling stories with beacons, or any sort of AR and VR, gets more complicated. I've chosen to play with interactive story telling as a way to tell stories in the metaverse. Using tools like these allows me to build both the main stories and the branches for it... how we translate the stories is the real challenge. The more I think...
We've looked at using beacons and we've began our discussion of digital storytelling using Augmented Reality. Now we'll look at a fully immersive experience using Virtual Reality Gear. This section is less about code and more about the possibilities inherent in telling stories in this medium using a small set of technologies: Leap Motion to provide a set of interaction gestures WebGL 3D environments to build the world we'll be interacting in A-Frame Possible voice interfaces to add further interfaces to the stories we tell Speech Synthesis API Unity 3D environment As we explore these tools we'll also look at:...
One of the things that has really caught my attention is place-based story telling. How can a place tell a story that is different depending on the occasion or the type of story we want to tell. The two biggest technologies for this type of story telling are augmented reality and beacons/Physical web. Using beacons to tell a story Beacons, iBeacons or the Physical Web all refer to the same group of technologies that use Bluetooth Low Energy to broadcast information to devices and apps that are ready to use them. In this section I will concentrate in the Physical...
Building the holodeck I've been in and out virtual worlds since I was an undergraduate in the mid '90s and man how have things changed between now and then. This series of essays outline some of the historical context for some ideas for augmented additions to the real world and fully immersive virtual environment. In 1987 we were introduced to Star Trek: The Next Generationhttps://www.wikiwand.com/en/StarTrek:TheNextGeneration and the multiple new technologies it introduced, the holodeck chief among them. > A Holographic Environment Simulator, or holodeck for short, was a form of holotechnology designed and used by Starfleet. They were installed aboard...
Pandochttp://pandoc.org/ is a converter to and from different text formats. What attracted me to the tool is that it allows me to work with Microsoft Word documents and convert them to Markdown or any other formats. Figure 1 shows the formts that Pandoc converts to and from. !Pandoc Input and Output Format Visualizationhttp://pandoc.org/diagram.jpg Pandoc Input and Output Format Visualization Since I already work with Markdown this is a valued added tool as it allows me to convert Markdown to formats that would be very difficult or impossible to do without a tool. We'll explore converting Markdown to epub3, an ebook...
PostCSS is an interesting project. In a nutshell, It takes CSS and turns it into an Abstract Syntax Tree, a form of data that JavaScript can manipulate. JavaScript-based plugins for PostCSS then performs different code manipulations. PostCSS itself doesn’t change your CSS, it allows plugins to perform transformations they’ve been designed to make. There are essentially no limitations on the kind of manipulation PostCSS plugins can apply to CSS. If you can think of it, you can probably write a PostCSS plugin to make it happen. It's important to also know what PostCSS is not. This material is adapted from...
There is nothing more anoying than having audio/video playing in a tab when it's in the background or when the browser is minimized. The Page Visibility APIhttps://www.w3.org/TR/page-visibility/ gives us control of what to do with media or any other element of a page when the tab is hidden or not visible. Some of the things we can do with this API: - Pausing a video when the page has lost user focus. - Stop an HTML5 canvas animation from running when a user is not on the page. - Show a notification to the user only when the page is...
HTTP/2 Server Push, Link Preload And Resource Hints We've become performance obsessed, it's important and the obsession shows. Firtunately we're also given the tools to acommodate the need for speed. We'll look at three ways of helping our servers give us the resources we need before we actually need them. We're not covering service workers in this post. Even thoough they are very much a performance feature they are client-side and we want to discuss server side performance improvements or improvements t hat are used directly from the HTML code, not Javascript. What is Server Push Accessing websites has always...
Browsers are beginning to support es6 modules without polyfills! This means that we can take modules and use them as is without having to transpile if we're only supporting modern browsers. We'll revisit modules: what they are and how they work. Unlike the cursory look we did when we discussed modules in the context of Rollup and Webpack, we'll take a deeper look at how do modules work in the browser and look at examples of how we can best leverage them today by using new syntax on the script tag. ES6/ES2015 Modules Modules allow you to package related variables...
