What: Introduction : create Virtual Reality applications with Cardboard and ThreeJS
When: Monday 4th of May, 12-3pm
Where: Parsons Paris room 500
Who: Cyril Dagne
Cyril is a French digital interaction artist born in 1985 in Bagnols-sur-Cèze (France). He graduated from Gobelins, l’école de l’image (Paris – France) in 2008, where he studied graphic design, communication and programming. He co-founded the collective lab212along with 5 other students. He now lives and work in Montreuil, Paris eastern suburb.
His work focuses on merging digital technologies with unconventional techniques and unexpected places to create poetic interactive experiences. His projects try to empower users and cast a different light on the technology that surrounds us.
With more than 10 years experience in creating digital artworks, he likes to be involved in most technical aspects required by innovative projects. His favorite tools include programming, web technologies, CS & cad softwares, and electronics. Always curious of fabrication techniques, his work also include tinkering with various physical tools such as 3D printers, milling machines, soldering…etc
This workshop will act as a quick introduction to the possibilities of building immersive experiences leveraging opensource, highly accessible and easy to distribute VR technologies.
Last year, Google introduced Cardboard, an open source Virtual Reality headset made of cardboard and uses the smartphone for sensing, computation and display. The biggest advantage of this headset is that it offers a convincing & ergonomic VR platform despite its very low production price (< 3$ in China).
This low price has helped gathering a growing community of developpers who suddenly got access to Virtual Reality.
Some developers have worked on opensource web technologies that enables the web-browsers to deliver VR experiences. That pushed one step further the accessibility of VR experiences.
During this workshop, we’ll see how we can create an online Virtual Reality application that anyone can access from their smartphone web bowser. We’ll be usingVR.chromeexperiments as the base framework.
See also:
Setup
- Install the dependencies by double clicking on the configuration script :scripts/install.command
Getting Started
- launch the webserver by double clicking on : scripts/launch.command
- if the webpage opened shows a 404 error message try reloading the page
Access from the phone
- Connect both your phone and computer to the same local network
- Find out the ip adress of your computer
- type : ifconfig and press Enter
- Access your computer’s webserver from the phone browser by navigating tohttp://<your ip address>:8080
Development workflow / Debug
IOS (using safari) :
- Make sure your phone is plugged via USB to your computer and both are on the same local network
- Launch Safari mobile on your iPhone
- Open Safari on your computer
- Go to : Develop > “your iphone name” > Click on the page you want to debug
- If you can’t see the develop tab you can activate it in the preferences : Advanced / Show development tools
- That will open the debug tools where you can see errors and you can just press Cmr+R to reload on the phone
Android (using chrome) :
- Make sure your phone is plugged via USB to your computer and both are on the same local network
- Launch chrome mobile on your Android phone
- Open Chrome on your computer
