Max Glenister

Throughout October Ben and I are working on a project called Cardboctober. The challenge is hacking on something new every day using Google Cardboard. Read more

Kicking off Cardboctober I’ve decided to go with something very simple. This is actually pretty much one of the JSCard demos that I created last November for my 20 Minutes into the Future with Google Cardboard and JavaScript talk. Read more

For today’s Cardboctober hack I’m doing some basic look interaction. As you look at each ghost in the circle surrounding you the ghost will cover their eyes. Read more

Improving on yesterday’s Raycaster based look interaction, I’ve improved the raycasting experience. I’m using a library called vreticle.js, though I’ve tweaked it a bit. Read more

Skyboxes There are a couple of ways you can create a skybox in Three.js Using a skydome (a textured sphere) Using a skybox (a textured cube) I’m using the textured cube approach. For this approach, our skybox texture has to be broken up into six textures. Read more

Using a couple of Three.js plugins you can load external models in to your scene. The plugins are: OBJLoader.js MTLLoader.js OBJLoader lets you load .obj format models, and MTLLoader lets you load .mtl material definitions to apply textures to the models. Read more

Todays hack is intended more as an activity to pull together various bits from the first week of Cardboctober and make a game. So here we go, it’s a “pairs” game. Read more

Today’s hack (and each Friday for the rest of October) is going to be hardware rather than software themed. If you get all the way to the end of the post I’ll even throw in a recap of the week so far. This is totally not a cop-out. Read more

Kicking off Cardboctober week 2 (in which I’ll be talking about using various Web APIs) today we’re looking at audio. Or more specifically how to get audio in to your VR things. Read more

Today’s hack is using the speechRecognition API. How can this be useful in Google Cardboard VR? It can add another level of input to our limited arsenal. So let’s take a closer look at that. Read more

Today we’re looking at HTML5 video – well not in the traditional sense. We’re looking at using the <video> element to create a texture and then applying it to an object in our 3D scene. Read more

For today’s hack I’ve decided to make a VR beat sequencer. Nothing says inclusive-fun like a VR experience that makes noise! So let’s get on with that. Read more

Today’s hack was going to be built around the gamepad API – but I utterly failed to get it working nicely with any of my USB or Bluetooth controllers. Not to mention that support seems patchy at best across all platforms/browsers. So I decided to make a little game instead. Read more

For today’s hack I’m revisiting yesterday’s zombie game again. With a full re-write to un-bodge the implementation. Read more

Today I’m going to be talking about how I test and debug while working on this Cardboctober hacks. If you make it to the end I’ll have a recap of Week 2 of Cardboctober. Read more

This week I’m going to be writing about some of the UX challenges encountered while creating Cardboctober hacks. In VR experiences it’s important to consider the needs of the person using what you’ve created. We can look at the Hierarchy of Needs in Virtual Reality that Beau Cronin adapted from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Read more

Today we’re looking at the task of getting in and out of Fullscreen. Fullscreen helps maintain an immersive experience. When using JavaScript as we’re confined to the capabilities of the web browser. Read more

Some Cardboard experiences might require pertinent information to always be visible to the user. As we’re working with a stereoscopic and not particularly high resolution screen this raises a couple of challenges. Read more

Unless your VR experience is a roller coaster or some other sort of rail-based experience, you shouldn’t take movement control away from the user. Lack of movement control can cause VR sickness. Here are a couple of approaches for user-controlled movement in VR: Read more

When developing for Google Cardboard VR with JavaScript we’re depending on the browser’s support of device orientation to know which way the user is looking. You can’t guarantee the user is always looking in the direction you’ve oriented your scene. Read more

In yesterday’s post I talked about the problem of using Cardinal North with device orientation, and how Three.js’ Device Orientation Camera provides a utility function for setting the alphaOffsetAngle, today we’re going to cover building a device to use this function. Read more

An important factor in whether VR works for you or not is how well the hardware fits – both in terms of fitting your head shape and being aligned with your eyes. For today’s post I’ll be looking at some of the things that affect the fit of Google Cardboard headsets. Read more

We’re starting the final (full) week of Cardboctober now, so I thought I’d do a week-long project to pull together some of the ideas from Cardboctober. Read more

I outlined the plan for the week yesterday: To make a tetromino game. So here’s how we’re going to do that. Read more

For today’s hack we’re going to start putting the teVRis game board together. We’ve already looked at positioning objects in a circle around the camera, but that doesn’t solve the whole problem. Read more

Today we’re going to be looking at creating Tetromino pieces and moving them around the board. Read more

For today’s Cardboctober we’re still working with Tetris. The task today is to make the pieces rotate. Read more

Today’s hack is more an aside while I’m focussing on yet another Tevris rewrite. Read more

I thought it’d be weird to drop a hardware post in this week as I’ve not finished the Tevris game yet, so this week’s post will continue the Tetris theme and then there will be a Cardboctober Week 4 round-up at the end. Read more

Bit of a lame one for today. I feel like I’ve not been making much progress with the Tetris rewrite, and tackling collision detection with unexpected results is getting quite annoying, so I think I might just leave teVRis where it is for now. Read more

For today’s Cardboctober, having shed the burden of creating Tetris in VR, I decided to hack around with data visualisation. Read more

Today is the last day of Cardboctober! And less surprisingly, it’s also Halloween 🎃 - For today’s hack I’ve made something spooky. If you don’t like spiders, you should look away now. Read more