XR Dad

In this Boxing Day 2019 episode, we've joined up with Gabe Paez... in The Wild. Gabe is also an XR dad as well as the CEO and founder of said XR company, The Wild! The Wild is a collaboration platform for architecture and design teams to experience their work together in virtual and augmented reality.   In this episode we cover: - Our kids' favorite experiences of the year (Vacation Simulator, Job Simulator, The Under, Dinosaur Kit, Project Create, Bogo, The Wild) - Why do kids love XR so much? - Oculus Quest, our favorite new device of the year - How easy it was to repurpose a virtual theatre built for High Fidelity desktop VR into The Wild - Selection via raycasts vs hand radius - Public vs Private information when in VR - Magic Leap's clipping plane is a problem for kids - Logan's new company: Argyle, effortless AR tracking on the construction site - What you can do in VR vs AR vs IRL (the real world) - What 2020 has in store for XR (Tilt Five, faster boot times, further friction reduction) and why it's NOT a "make or break" year ... and much much more!   Video version:  https://www.xr-dad.com/post/2019-recap-with-gabe-paez-of-the-wild   Reach out on Twitter: Gabe - https://twitter.com/gzeap Alex - https://twitter.com/ibrews Logan - https://twitter.com/CptnRadbeard   Other Links: https://thewild.com https://argyle.build https://www.agilelens.com https://www.xr-dad.com https://xrdad.podbean.com/

Archive episode from July 2019, but actually more fitting to release it near Christmas of 2019 (the footage is actually from Christmas 2018... extra confusing!) Video available here: https://youtu.be/H7Y_6uIGoaU Using photogrammetry (Recap pro) and Unity 3D, Logan blew up his kid's first gingerbread house to the size of a house and let him explore it in virtual reality. And you can to! Photogrammetry - https://www.autodesk.com/products/recap/overview Game engine - https://unity.com/ VR - https://www.vive.com/us/ As usual, if you want access to his build, send him a message and I'll put it up in a usable format.

Welcome to the XR Dad podcast! Alex and Logan live on opposite sides of the country but meet up in meat-space at the Agile Lens office in NYC to chat about XR and their kids. They're just two XR nerds chatting about what they love. Topics covered: (coming soon) (Archive Episode from March 2019. No video version available)

(Archive Episode from February 2019. Video version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPVfbwgty98) Welcome to the XR Dad podcast! Alex and Logan live on opposite sides of the country but meet up in High Fidelity to chat about XR and their kids. They're just two XR nerds chatting about what they love. Topics covered:SolAR System and Google Earth VRTV ShowsHigh Fidelity - social world / live events (see video)Child destructionChild safetyRec RoomBeat SaberWhy having kids with big heads is great for VRHololens 2Valve new headsetPrototyping using Magic Leap’s Project Create Stuff:Alex (twitter.com/ibrews youtube.com/ibrews) Too Hip Podcast - http://toohippodcast.com/post/182220561187/episode-003-with-alex-coulombe-vr-ninjaSimply Complex Podcast - http://simplycomplex.sharedcoordinates.com/SXSW “Producing Live Performance in VR” - https://schedule.sxsw.com/2019/events/PP93017Total Chaos: “VR and Architecture: A Strange Symbiosis” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWlV4NgVWjo Logan (https://twitter.com/cptnradbeard) IBS https://www.buildersshow.com/Search/V... Silicon Valley Hackathon https://aechackathon.com/silicon-vall...

Vlog Episode 6: Riffing off Logan's last episode, we continue to explore the theme of XR's usefulness in exploring scale. Because I (Alex) am not cool enough to program my own AR app, and Alasdair already loves Google Earth, we started there, progressed into "Smash! Smash! Smash!" and even managed to fit in some VR swim-time. Anyone remember Encarta 95? As a kid I couldn't get enough of exploring that awesome 2.5D world.   Also, Google Earth has been great for helping Alasdair understand places that we encounter in books (check out "Architecture for Babies") as well as in my travels. In the past year I've been all over the world and it's become a standard ritual to come home and show Alasdair the places I went to and what I did there. He thinks it's all pretty cool, but mostly he just wants to go into the water :) Vlog version at: https://www.xr-dad.com/blog/ep06-google-earth-vr-even-better-than-encarta-95 More fun at: https://www.xr-dad.com/, sign up for our monthly newsletter and be the first to find out about new episodes.

Vlog Episode 5: Did you ever read the Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy? This was my favorite book for most of my childhood. The introduction to the book within the book perfectly encapsulates what I want to talk about today…. Space it says is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely mind-boggling big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space…  Join Logan on a trek through space and his quest to teach his XR Dad mini-me how vastly big our universe really is.   Using ARKit with Unity on an iPad, they drop into a truly scaled solar system (rare, actually). You can walk from planet to planet to get a feel for interplanetary distances. Vlog version of this episode:https://www.xr-dad.com/blog/ep05-arkit-with-unity-scale-solar-system  More fun at: https://www.xr-dad.com/, sign up for our monthly newsletter and be the first to find out about new episodes.  

Vlog Episode 4: When Alasdair was 2 years old, about a year ago, we read him a book called Scary Scary Halloween. I decided to make some ghosts. I took the ghosts from the book, I took the ghosts from Alan Noon's team's demo, I took the Magic Leap ghost and I just took another ghost that I happen to like a lot and I decided to have them orbit around the player wherever they are. Vlog version of this episode: https://www.xr-dad.com/blog/xrdad04-halloween-from-book-to-porch  More fun at: https://www.xr-dad.com/, sign up for our monthly newsletter and be the first to find out about new episodes.  Transcript: Oh Logan Logan Logan. That video of you and Troubadour hiding ghosts. So lovely. So inspiring. I just had to do something even more wild and (spoiler alert) it was a little too much. When Alasdair was 2 years old, about a year ago, we read him a book called Scary Scary Halloween. This is a book that me and my brothers loved when we were kids and Alasdair loved it too and so I thought it would be fun to do an XR experience that kind of takes some of the things he likes in that book and brought it to life a little bit because he's he's a funny kid he kind of likes being scared sometimes. Let's let him see the cats. And that went really well. He enjoyed that in all the ways I thought he would. And even some ways that I wasn't quite expecting. Now the second part which was much more complicated was I decided to make some ghosts. I took the ghosts from the book, I took the ghosts from Alan Noon's team's demo, I took the Magic Leap ghost and I just took another ghost that I happen to like a lot and I decided to have them orbit around the player wherever they are, so Logan: I used your scary sounds and then I took some scary sounds from Alasdair reading the book and used two of those, but then also very simple in Unreal Engine I changed the pitch to make Alasdair's scary sounds a little more scary. A cool XR dad thing to me is allowing kids to feel more powerful than they actually are. The idea of the ghosts was that you could look at them and we use some eye tracking and there'd be a little green light wherever your eye was and whenever you look at a ghost it disappears. And then you also have a flashlight and when you shine your flashlight at the ghost that makes it fly away. Design flaw pointed out by Alasdair: they never actually go away. They disappear or they fly away but they come back exactly to where they were like five seconds later and Alasdair noticed this. So Alasdair started to go around and see these ghosts and he started to get a little bit scared so he checked in on him. He said it was fun scary, but you know, I remember being a kid and watching my dad's music video for a song called Faces in the Night and he asked me if I thought it was too scary and I said no no it's fine it's fine. It was definitely too scary. So hey, here's a little XR Dad tip: if you're building something and you want it to be kid-friendly but there's anything in there that you're even the slightest bit afraid might not be kid-friendly, have a way to turn it off. So in this case I turned off the ghosts and we just left it at the cats. So, some takeaways: always cool to make something that your child cherishes like a book come to life in a more vivid and wonderful way than they imagined, and of course with something like Magic Leap or augmented reality if you can make it site-specific it becomes a part of your house and you can form these very cool memories where it's not just about "hey remember when we read the book on the couch," it's "hey remember where that thing from the book happened on our porch." That's pretty neat. So Logan, thank you for inspiring me and I can't wait to see the next XR dad thing you do. Also for anyone who isn't Logan watching these videos, we're very excited to start interviewing people and getting a podcast version of this up and running, so if you are an XR Dad or XR Mom or XR anything that involves small children, please reach out let us know. We'd love to talk to you! Thanks.

Vlog Episode 3: In the spirit of Halloween, Logan set out to create a spooky Magic Leap demo for Troubadore. By accident, it turned into a bit of hide and seek fun. Vlog version of this episode: https://www.xr-dad.com/blog/ghost-hunt-magic-leap-halloween-hide-and-seek  More fun at: https://www.xr-dad.com/, sign up for our monthly newsletter and be the first to find out about new episodes. Transcript: I love Halloween. Parties, dress up, spooky, carving pumpkins because they are an ephemeral art form with a silly overtone. Means I can't fret about doing it "right" so I get to just make. Halloween is a hidden world, the idea that there is this hidden world within our own that emerges during the spooky season. Invisible ghosts, vampires among us. The world of the dead coexisting with the world of the living. The idea of this spooky worlds all around us but invisible really speaks to human paranoia in a delightfully creepy way. My first explicit exposure to this idea was as a kid playing Silent Hill where the regular world transitions to this parallel "Otherworld". A little bit like the upside down in Stranger things. Well Augmented Reality manifests this idea of the world overlay. We see the world, but then peak into the hidden layers. At work it's about overlying construction documents or GIS data. At home I get to make the mythical spooky overlay a little more real. I wanted to share this idea of spooky overlay with Troubadore. While I was tempted to make the walls bleed and open up some hell portals. You know, and really creepy up my house in AR, I didn't think Troubadore was quite ready for that. Plus, that loses the spooky mystery of it. So I decided to play with spatialized audio to let the user hunt for the spooky thing by listening for it. When you find the spot where they are hiding, the spooks a revealed and run away with ridiculous ghost noises. I liked making it because: hand tracking, spatialized audio, controller input, multi player in a funny way. And an exploration of using an AR device in a primarily non-visual way. Troubadore liked it because everytime he found the ghosties hiding place, he was uncovering a magical secret, glimpsing into a previously inaccessible world.

Welcome to the XR Dad podcast! Alex and Logan live on opposite sides of the country but meet up in MagicLeap VR to chat about XR and their kids. They're just two XR nerds chatting about what they love.  Episode 1: Why kids should be in VR before the "recommended" age, VR Immunizations, family game nights, roleplaying board game "Fiasco", XR dad vlogs, etc. Alex Upcoming Events: "Alive in Plasticland" Live Improv Comedy in High Fidelity VR on December 15, 2018 - hubs.ly/H0fN2xJ0 https://www.highfidelity.com Im-Arch Singapore January 17-19, 2019 - http://www.im-arch.asia   Interviews this week with: Brian Lonsway, Kathleen Brandt, and Amber Bartosh of Syracuse University about kids and screens and VR/AR in architectural education. Interactive Design and Visualization Lab  - http://idvl.syr.edu Technology | Architecture + Design | https://www.tandfonline.com