#💻SoftwareDevelopment #🕶VirtualReality

I have been interested in Virtual Reality Glasses, hardware and software developments around 6 years now. My interest was mostly stayed on following articles and hardwares rather than working on real software until late February 2022.

I purchased Oculust Quest 2 glass to experience Meta’s hardware. Previously, I had a chance to try Hololens 1 by Microsoft. Hololens introduced as MR, Mixed Reality back then, I was in the meetup back in 2017. It was a good experience to see overall and stahelped me to imagine what to expect from the industry. Biggest downside that I can recall from that meet up from 5 years a go is the battery. Battery was lasting 45 minutes in heavy use. It is great to see that experience can last longer around 3 hours.

My VR Development Experience

It was a HackWeek for Twitter on early March. As a new tweep, I decided to work on a project. HackWeek is a culture, and great way to feel the company’s spirit. I can not share much details about my project but I worked on a VR application and developed usign Unity.

What did I learn?

I am an iOS Engineer and I will compare this experience with my iOS development experience. First, debugging what you have on Unity on your glass is fairly easy. Literally, you just switch on your developer mode and game is on! Second, what I do in daily life is, I create playgrounds and new XCode projects just to test and try, this is not as easy as I thought on Unity because all the projects that I added Oculus Integration Library has 3GB size. I realised that right after my 4th project. So, rather than learn each step on different projects, this is normally what I do, I think it is a great way to redo things and learn by not looking, I incrementally added what I had in mind one by one to the project. Third, 3D design is hard but so much fun with Unity! Maybe I enjoyed because I debugged and experienced each step with my Oculus glass. This was also the same reason, how I spent a lot of time on iOS development back in 2015, write and debug on your mobile device and experience your code. Fourth, how design interacts with code? This was a question that I would like to answer, and I purchased few courses on Udemy. Most of them focusing on how do you use preferences on Unity, which is I am not sure if developers job in VR development team, most likely this should be the designer’s responsibility. The part that I interact with code was assigning specific functionalities on actions such as buttons. I used C# to interact with other components which was super cool experience.