Development

Browsing posts in: Development

Nov 9, 2017 |

What are Digital Realities? – New Pluralsight Course

Just yesterday I did another interview about HoloLens, what it is and how it fits into the world of virtual and augmented reality. It is a question I get a lot at conferences, user groups, client meetings and of course on social media. Had you asked me two years ago it was a reasonably straight forward answer, with three distinct categories of digital realities.

However, as the technologies evolve, and especially with the introduction of Apple’s AR Kit and Google’s AR Core, the lines are blurring. The once firm definitions are becoming more gray so much so that fellow HoloDeveloper Rene Schulte the other day did a 12min video to explain where mixed reality belong. It will likely end up being all the same definition, whether it is virtual, augmented, mixed or something else entirely. It is both exciting and frustrating at the same time.

Back in June 2017 I was presenting at NDC Oslo and while there I recorded a number of play by play courses for Pluralsight. One of those was with my good mate Stephen Haunts (who has glorious hair) on exactly this topic: digital realities. If you don’t know what a play by play is, go read Steve’s post about it in detail.

Pluralsight Play by Play Recordings at NDC Oslo

The course is now live and is a great insight into how you can get started building apps for mixed reality and HoloLens. Go watch the trailer now!

Nov 3, 2017 |

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Introduction to Google ARCore Development

I have been experimenting with augmented reality on various platforms for a while, and this article describes how to get started with Google’s AR Core platform. First published on gooroo.io.

In the past couple of years, if not more, the technology of virtual, augmented and, lately, mixed realities have taken a huge leap forward both for consumers as well as enterprise. Initially augmented reality (AR) almost entirely consisted of overlaying data on the real world, triggered by a shape, a logo, a QR code, or something else that could be easily recognised. Most of all it was very similar to a heads up display. Not really interacting with the real world, not really being part of your reality.

In January 2015 Microsoft announced the HoloLens Mixed Reality headset, which was released a year later. The HoloLens took augmented reality to an entirely new level, and Microsoft called this “mixed reality” (MR). The groundbreaking aspect of it is the environmental scanning and spatial mapping capabilities, which means the device knows the physical layout of your surroundings to an amazing degree of details.

3D model of my living room captured with HoloLens

This detailed awareness of the environment means that digital assets, or holograms, knows where their surroundings are and can act accordingly. You can have people sitting next to you on a chair or couch, place digital flowers on top of a real table, have characters navigate your actual living room and much much more. This spatial mapping and tracking capability essentially left other augmented reality implementations for dead.

Android AR Core Google

Oct 13, 2017 |

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Pluralsight Course – Emerging Threats in IoT

The fact is that more and more things are being connected to the Internet. We have the obvious things like TVs, game consoles, cars and smartphones. But have you considered your hair brush, your dog feeder or even your special items for the bedroom? Yes, we are making everything connected and with this comes a lot of questions about privacy, safety and not least security. How do you update your light bulbs, and do you know if your dishwasher is also a web server? These are real questions in the world that we are creating.

In this fourth play by play course with my good mate Troy Hunt, we dive into what devices are making this world so difficult and what the real problems are with these. We look at precedents for where it all went wrong and what happened. We discuss the worst examples that Troy has come across in recent years and how the incidents impacted the industry.

Of course, we also discuss solutions to securing your IoT devices, both as a consumer and as a developer. Developers need to take ownership of all the vulnerabilities that are constantly exposed, fix them, and then document the solutions for the entire industry to learn from.

Join us for this very relevant, entertaining and very educational course on Pluralsight. See you there.

Watch the course trailer here

iot security

Oct 9, 2017 |

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Using Geo-Location in Your Web App

I am currently building a new web product that relies on client location to a large extent. During the development I had to learn about the geo-location API for use within HTML5 compatible browsers, and thought I’d share how simple it is to use. Article first published on gooroo.io.

The use of GPS data has become second nature for most everyday tasks. The most common scenario of finding your way from A to B using GPS is obvious, but there are a lot of other uses as well. When you ask to find the nearest store on a company website, GPS is used. When you log into Facebook in a foreign country and you subsequently get ads for all of the Swedish natural foods you can eat, GPS is used. When you ask Google to remember where you parked your car, GPS is used. And many more ways.

Using GPS in your web app is not difficult, but there are a few points to note and some pit falls to avoid. This article will show you how to use the GPS hardware on the user’s device, and then take that one step further to use Google’s Map API to reverse geo-code the result and make it some kind of useful.

geolocation html5 web

Sep 25, 2017 |

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Getting Started with Windows Template Studio

Microsoft has for a long time been pioneering developer tooling with Visual Studio as the main backbone of the effort. The investment continues and is not likely to ever stop. For this reason, change is necessary and some tools will disappear as their use becomes less, and new ones will appear. This article was first published on gooroo.io

Developers are always looking for shortcuts to make their programming more efficient and let them focus on the fun bits. Deep down inside developers are lazy people that don’t want to do boring work. Repetitive work. About a year ago I finished a Pluralsight course on building your first Universal Windows App, which aimed to give developers a great shortcut for building apps for Windows 10. It took me three goes to finish the course (Microsoft kept moving the goal posts), but I was happy with the result. The course focused on using App Studio, which essentially is a code completion tool. A tool that generated really well structured and usable code, meant to be extended and built on top of. And now App Studio has received the death sentence. Slowly being moved to the drawer of broken dreams.

Instead we now have Windows Template Studio

windows template studio

May 12, 2017 |

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How to program a robotic brain

The field of robotics is often associated with either research or large manufacturing. Robots build cars or they attempt to do new things robots haven’t done before. Rarely do we think of robots as tools for education, but it is a field that is becoming more and more prominent. Universities around the world already offer courses and degrees to do with robotics, but where do we start before that? This article explores an easy way to get into robot programming and was first published for Pluralsight.

Ever since I saw “Alien” for the first time and the character of Ash turned out to be a robot (that went quite a bit mad), I have had a fascination for artificial humans and humanoid characters. The premise of being able to build machines that can do complex tasks for us independently is both scary and fascinating at the same time.

A recent article that outlined the ethics around robotics and their automation reinvigorated my interest in programming robots (to do my bidding). The article featured quotes from Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking on how to manage automation in a modern society and posed interesting thoughts on how to make robots part of our day-to-day life. Some economists have suggested that 45 percent of all U.S. jobs could be performed and replaced by robots in the next 20 years, so this question will only become more urgent.

Robotic programming

Because of the often bespoke nature of robotics, their programming has also traditionally been completely bespoke. We haven’t had the “PC” of robots, which has made a single paradigm the norm for robotic programming, so each platform has, in essence, created their own standard. In recent years, a number of frameworks , such as dLife for the Java language and CLARAty from NASA, have sprung to life. Even Microsoft has their own Robotics Developer Studio.
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Cozmo robots

May 1, 2017 |

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HoloLens Development: Spatial Mapping

I have been doing HoloLens for a while now, and I am continually amazed of the ideas and projects the community is creating. A lot of the best ideas evolve from the desire to interact with digital assets in a physical world, which is what mixed reality (MR) is all about. This is enabled through spatial mapping, which is easy to use and difficult to master. This article first published at Pluralsight.

Interest in HoloLens, and digital reality in general, is growing rapidly. And a large part of that interest comes from developers wanting to know how to build software for HoloLens, the mixed reality device from Microsoft.

mixed reality spatial mapping

Apr 23, 2017 |

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How to Build a Personal Brand

[This article was first posted on gooroo.io]

I have been freelancing as a software developer and architect for almost two years now and I have got a lot of valuable experiences from it. The reason I was able to start being my own boss was a combination of things, but it was in large part due to a personal brand I have built up. I had for a long time been doing several things to build a brand that is me, but is also recognizable and opens doors in the right places. In this article I will describe some of the things that enabled me to do what I love and significantly propel my career in a direction of my choice. All of these topics might not apply to you, but they are part of my journey. Take what you can use and leave the rest.

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freelancing

Apr 15, 2017 |

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Holographic Programming: a HoloLens How-to in a Mixed Reality World

Most people are aware of virtual reality (VR) and to a lesser extent augmented reality (AR). I the last couple of years a new digital reality, mixed reality (MR), has emerged with Microsoft and their HoloLens as the front runner. I have been absolutely blown away by the capabilities and promise of the technology, hence the activity in the form of blog posts, conference talks, workshops and Pluralsight courses. This article explains the various digital realities and was first published by Pluralsight.

In the last couple of years, digital realities have become a more and more stable part of the software landscape. While these technologies aren’t as mainstream as apps for your iPhone or a website for your favorite pizza place, they certainly are pushing their way forward and popping up their digitally distorted face in all kinds of places. Companies like Oculus, Facebook, Google and Microsoft are all heavily involved in developing digital realities for the future of computing. We are talking billions of dollars invested in these projects, which mean as developers and consumers, we should take these products and technologies seriously. They aren’t going anywhere.

However, they aren’t all created equal. In particular, there are three main areas of digital reality.

Apr 6, 2017 |

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Using the HoloToolkit for HoloLens

This article was first posted on gooroo.io

Developing applications and experiences for HoloLens is not hard to get started with, but after you have started a number of projects and worked through the same setup and plumbing a few times, you wish there was an easier way to do it. Well, there is! Created by the team that produced Fragments and Young Conker, the HoloToolkit is a collection of scripts and components intended to accelerate the development of holographic applications targeting Windows Holographic.

The toolkit is all free and comes in two varieties: one for Visual Studio and one for Unity 3D. Developing for HoloLens means spending a LOT of time in the Unity editor, and the HoloToolkit is a simple .unitypackage file you can download and import into your Unity project.

mixed reality UWP

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