Wooden Puzzle - My first Amazon Sumerian Game

If you read my previous blog Amazon Sumerian - First impressions you will know that I wouldn't stop there -;)

I have been able to play a lot with Sumerian and most important...to learn a lot...the tutorials are pretty good so you should read them even if you don't have access to Sumerian yet...

Once thing that I always wanted to do...was to animate my Cozmo model...that I did on Blender...

I tried doing it on Blender (rigging it and doing the animation but it was getting weird as it worked fine on Blender but not on Sumerian...now I know why...but at the time I got frustrated) but failed...so instead I thought on doing it on Sumerian using its tools...

I gotta admit...at first it didn't worked...but then I kept exploring and realized that the Timeline was my friend...and after many testings...I got it working -;)

Here is how it looks like...

So just go to Cozmo and click on the robot to start the animation and then click on him again to restart the animation...

Simple but really cool -:)

After that...I start thinking about doing something else...something more interesting and this time involving some programming...which is actually JavaScript and not NodeJS like I though initially -:(

Anyway...I tried to do that once in Unity and also in Flare3D, but didn't had enough luck...although fair enough...by that time I didn't knew Blender...so I put myself into working on it...

I designed a Wooden Puzzle board using Blender and then imported into Sumerian and applied a Mesh Collision to it...that way...the ball can run around the board and fall down if it gets over a hole...

Here is how it looks like...

To play...simple use the cursor keys to move the board and guide the ball from "Start" to "Finish". Pressing "r" restarts the game.

Here's the link to play it "Wooden Puzzle"...

Was it hard to build? Not really -:) Sumerian is very awesome and pretty powerful...on top of that...the Sumerian team is really nice and they are always more than willing to help...

So far...my Sumerian experience had been nothing but joy...so I can see myself doing more and more projects...

Of course...I'm already working on a couple more -;) Specially one involving using Oculus Rift...but that will take more time for sure....as I need to do a lot of Blender work..

Have you tried Sumerian? Not yet? Why don't you go ahead and request access?

Greetings,

Blag.
Development Culture.

Blender Lego Art for HoloLens

This blog was originally posted on Blender Lego Art for HoloLens.

Who doesn’t love Lego? And if you have used Blender before…who doesn’t love Blender? -:)

Combining both seemed like a great idea, so that’s what I did…Using Blender I create some pretty simple Lego pieces that can be used to build both simple and complicated models.

A single piece is 0.25 by 0.25 and it’s made out of a single vertex. In the image, the colors are just used to give an idea of the different pieces.

The main point is simply to create a new Blender file, append the different pieces and start building.

At first it’s kind of complicate because you need to deal with the X, Y and Z positions…but once you get used to it…it’s becomes a little bit addictive -:)

Now, the name of the blog is Lego Art, right? So…if you look online for Pixel Art instead, you will find a lot of nice images…like this one…

The perfect candidate for Lego construction! By putting the pieces together and simply assign them the right material…we can get this…

And with some more time and dedication…we can get this…

Anyway…with a collection of models…we can think up and bundle them together into a Microsoft HoloLens application -;)

The application itself is easy…you start by looking at all the models on a shelve…you can select one, make it smaller, bigger, turn it left or right or simply go back to the shelve.

Here’s a video showing how it’s look like.

Greetings,

Blag.

Development Culture.

Room with a View – HoloLens, Unity3D and Blender

This post was originally posted on Room with a View – HoloLens, Unity3D and Blender.

Since the last month or so I have been enlighten myself with an awesome Blender course…and while I had some previous experience by reading some books…nothing could get me to the point that I’m at now as this course…so…enough said…it’s more than highly recommended 🙂

So…one of the challenges was to create something just using primitives…that means…cubes, spheres, cones and so on…nothing fancy…no modifiers…no extra knowledge…so I was able to come up with this…

That was a nice start…but I knew it needed something else…beside getting textures for it of course 🙂 It looked pretty plain…so next step was making it nicer…and this came along the way…

Now…it looks fancy, doesn’t it? Everything hand made created in Blender -;)

So…next step was to figure out what to do with this…it looks too nice to just leave it there on my hard drive…so I start thinking and then remembered that the Holographic Academy has a really nice demo called Origami…in this demo you need to select an origami ball that will drop down a paper plane and then hit a fan that will explode and in turn open a crack on the floor where a nice underground world can be seen…truly amazing if you ask me…so…I had an idea 🙂 Why not have a d-shop frame that will explode when selected and then open a hole in the wall where the room that I designed in Blender could be seen…that sound like an impressive demo to me…so that’s exactly what I did 😉

Here’s the video for your viewing pleasure…hope you like it 🙂

At first I though it was going to be a lot of work…but it wasn't really like that…here are some highlights…

* I enclosed the room in a black box with a hole so it be looked through…

* In Unity3D I simply used an Unlit shader…as black is processed as invisible on HoloLens, having the model in a black unlit box gives the same impression as being invisible…hence…it looks like a hole in the wall…

* I used some spatial mapping to be able to pin the frame and the room to the wall…so it didn’t float around but instead looked like the room was inside the wall…

* When I first imported the model from Blender into Unity3D…none of my textures were available…which seemed odd to me…as they were there and were actually assigned…it turned out that I need to choose every single piece of the model and do a smart unwrapping…so the shader knows exactly how to implement the texture…

* I first I tested out with the emulator…which is good…but doesn’t really implement the same measure units that the real device uses…so while it looked fine on the emulator…it looked too far away on the HoloLens…so a lot of testing was needed in order to get it into the right position…

* To shoot the video, at first I tried using Camtasia…but of course…the rendering wasn’t was I was expecting…one thing is to look it from the HoloLens and other thing is looking from the laptop…so instead I used a recording from the Live Streaming of the HoloLens itself…and that was the trick…

As you can imagine…this now brings a whole world of new possibilities and demos…

Now it’s your turn to show us…what can you do 😉

Greetings,

Blag.

Development Culture.

SAP d-shop’s Virtual House – A journey from Physical to Virtual

This post was originally posted on SAP d-shop’s Virtual House – A journey from Physical to Virtual.

Some time ago…our good friends from SAP d-shop Newtown Square (Namely John Astill et all) built a IoT House for SAP Insurance. This little house (hand made by the way) used an Arduino Nano, a bunch of sensors and LED lights…and…which is pretty cool by the way…a 3D Printed washing machine with a water sensor…and of course…it was and it is…IoT enabled.

We thought it was pretty cool…so we have one at our own SAP d-shop at Silicon Valley and it had become a key part in all our d-shop tours.

Then…some time later, our friends from HCP Marketing (Namely Joe Binkley et all) and Intel build a Smart Building. A really nice building…controlled by Amazon Alexa that used an Intel Galileo, some Arduinos as well as servos, lights, a solar panel and even a fan…everything again…IoT enabled…but also as you may have guessed…voice controlled…so you can send the elevator up and down…open or closed the doors and even send the whole building on emergency mode…gladly…we had keep it on the d-shop for quite some time and it’s another of our “wow” factor demos every time someone comes to visit…

Having these two available for us…slowly sparked the fire of innovation and creativity…why don’t we build a Virtual House that can be used on the Oculus Rift and it’s controlled by Alexa?

Not an easy thing…but we for sure love challenges…and thanks to our previous experience Unity3D and Alexa working together we already knew how to start…

The architecture is pretty simple… The Heroku server is just an echo server, so it will repeat everything we pass to it as a JSON response. Our Unity app is constantly checking the Heroku server to see if there’s a message to respond to. Of course, for this to work as intended, we need to setup a skill on Amazon Alexa just to update the server. So, when we say “open door”, then Alexa will send a command to the Heroku server and this server then will produce an “open door” message in JSON. Our Unity app will read the Heroku Server, and act accordingly by opening the door…of course, we don’t want this to happened all over…so after Unity executes the action it sent a null message to the Heroku server, so next time the JSON response is going to be null as well and Unity will simply wait for the next valid command.

If you want to take a sneak peak of how the Virtual House looks like…here are a couple of screenshots…but don’t forget to watch the video, J You will get the full experience -;)

Now…this project started as a “Project in a Box” (for internal only…sorry about that) which means…all the source code and explanations on how to build it from the scratch should be provided…but…for obvious reasons…that didn’t happened L So instead…we turned this into a “Product in a Box” meaning that (Sorry again…internals only) you can download the compiled application and simply edit the configuration file to have it running on your own J No source code is provided by obviously a nice email can get you that -;)

Grab it from here

Now…that I got your full attention…please watch the video J It’s a nice journey from the IoT House to the Virtual House passing by the Smart Building…

Now…you may wonder about the 3D Models used for this Virtual House…as you can see on one of the images, most of them were downloaded but some of them were developed in house J using Blender…Like the Amazon Echo, the 3D Printed Robot and name tags, the Amazon Echo and obviously the house itself J For some other things like the plants and tables…those were imported into Blender and “hand painted” as the textures were not available.

Now…something that we believe it’s pretty important…is to list all the Pain Points and lessons learned while developing this application…

Pain Points and lesson learned:

• As this is a Product in a Box and not a Project in a Box, we’re not going to include the source code for this application, but what we’re going to do instead is let you know the pain points and lessons learned that came from this project.
• Unity uses the .NET Framework 3.5, which is already deprecated by .NET 4.0 so many things are not going to work simply because they haven’t been implemented…and why is that? Well…Unity uses Mono (which is .NET for Linux) and I guess they do it to maintain uniformity in all platforms. While Mono remains on .NET 3.5, Unity will not likely upgrade either.
• When loading scenes, the lighting gets all messed up…so you start in level one…more to level two and suddenly it looks like nighttime…the solution to that is simple…choose “Window à Lighting à Lightmaps”, uncheck the “Auto” checkbox and press “Build” to bake the light again.
• Coroutines are simply awesome. Normally, you can’t make your application wait or sleep…but by using Coroutines you certainly can…Coroutines are like threads.
• When using a light, make sure it’s turn off while the character is not in the room, because this will save some graphic processing and because even virtually…we need to be environment aware…
• Unity doesn’t have a wrap function or property for 3D Text…which is kind of problematic especially if you want to do a Twitter Wall…so your only chance is to build you own…although that’s not that hard…simply grab the incoming text, split it by space into an array…concatenate each word by checking first if the length of the string is lower than our threshold (which should be the maximum number of characters that fit where our 3D text is), is the string is bigger than the threshold, we simply add a carriage return (“\n”) before doing the concatenation.
• As your application grows you might feel the need to duplicate some assets, which is perfectly fine and doesn’t add too much processing (Especially if you create a Prefab and use that prefab), but don’t forget to assign them unique names, otherwise you’re going to have a headache if you application needs to interact with those assets.
• Sometimes you will download some 3D models from the web…other times you will create them using Blender…but don’t forget that sometimes just a simple sphere, cube or any other Unity primitive can work just fine by just using an image attached to it as its texture.
• When creating your Alexa skill…make sure not to make any spelling mistake…otherwise you will hit you head thinking why Alexa is doing what you’re asking her to do…
• When testing our your application both Debug.log() and Print() will become your best friends…nothing better than a printed value or message to realize what going wrong.
• When moving an object, always make sure to record its original position and then add the new value to that recorded position. Otherwise, something might provoke the values to go wrong…by having the original values recorded, you avoid having to recalculate the position but just call that variable and get things where they belong.
• When using 3D Text you will notice that even if you put another object in front of it…it will be always visible…which is not very likely…so we have two options…either create a shader to occlude it…or the easiest one…make the material that it’s in front of it transparent. That’s not perfect for all situations but at least will work.
• The biggest problems when making Unity and Alexa speak, is that when you ask Alexa to turn on the lights, she will respond “The lights are on” …but then if you ask a second time her response should be “The lights are already on” …to make this…we should need to use a Database or something to store state information…and when closing the application, we would need to clean up the states…while this might be doable…it’s a lot of work, and what happens if the application crashes? Would we need to go and reset the states manually? Not ideal…
• That leads me to the point of using the elevator…you can open the doors or sent it to any of the floors…for the main part…that’s easy…each floor is a scene, so you need to be on the first floor in order to make the elevator to floor two or three…but…what if you’re outside the elevator? You are on floor one…ask for floor three…and then you open the door…as your characters moves along with the elevator floor…when you open the door everything will look bad…solution? Simply using a cube without a mesh renderer, so it’s invisible…assign a collider with “is trigger” enabled…and validate that the player is colliding with the cube in order to make the elevator move…that way, even you ask for floor three and Alexa confirms that the elevator is going up…nothing will happen…when you open the door…we can assume that the elevator went down or up to your floor in order for you to hop in…just an illusion…but it works…
• Alexa doesn’t have an option to delay the re-prompt, so when exploring the Virtual House she will ask you “What else can I do for you?” and if we don’t respond the skill will just die…so we will need to wake her up again…that’s kind of sad due to the nature of the application…but nothing to be done unless Amazon releases a way on making the re-prompt to wait longer…
• As the whole Alexa-Unity3D relays on Heroku…expect some downtimes or responses from Alexa that are not actually replicated in the virtual world…might be an internet connection glitch or just Heroku glitch…

As I mentioned first…the environment gets affected by the weather…if it’s sunny…you will see a sunny clear sky…if it’s rainy you will see a dark and gloomy sky…and this involves using a Skybox…although not your regular Skybox…and what is a Skybox, anyway? Well…simply put…is a cube that covers your whole environment and has different images to simulate the environment…the problems is that the regular Skybox only allows you to assign six sides…which is of course not likely…you need to use a twelve side Skybox…then you can assign sunny image and also cloudy images…that way when checking the weather you can modify the luminosity and that will also affect the Skybox as it will use one or the other giving that nice effect on reflecting the outside weather…

Greetings,

Blag.

Development Culture.

Microsoft HoloLens on SAP’s d-shop

This post was originally posted on Microsoft HoloLens on SAP’s d-shop.

One of SAP’s d-shop main goals is to gather, learn and share knowledge on the latest technologies and Microsoft HoloLens haven’t been out of our radar -;)

But…what is HoloLens?

HoloLens is a Mixed reality device…which is basically a mix of Virtual (Oculus Rift) and Augmented (Google Glass) Realities.

One of the most important features on Mixed Reality is that it allows you to create Holograms that can be blended into the real world and interact with them.

HoloLens will map your room and recognize that you have a coffee table, a sofa, a lamp, and so on…when you place your Holograms on a table or sofa, the Hologram will not go through it, but instead sit on it…and this allows to do amazing things like creating a Hologram of a lamp to be placed next the sofa and see how it looks. And that’s just one of the many uses cases that HoloLens can provide.

At the d-shop Silicon Valley, we believe that using and coding the HoloLens is an awesome experience.

So…what you do need to start coding and creating amazing experiences?

In this page you will find all the tools that you need, which includes Visual Studio, a tailor made version of Unity3D and the HoloLens emulator.

Also, it would be really good for you to take a look at the Holographic Academy videos…which guide you through the basics notions of HoloLens coding…

But…with this blog what we really want to show you a video with some of the demos/projects that we have created at the d-shop Silicon Valley.

Word Clock With this app, you can literally read the time -;) This demonstrates text usage in Unity and it was adapted from a Python application.

d-shop Robot This app uses a d-shop robot model built using Blender. This demonstrate Spatial Mapping and simple voice commands.

SAP Puzzle Game This app displays a sliding puzzle game that has two modes…easy and hard…it demonstrates how to clip an image and distributed into multiple cubes, it also demonstrates basic voice commands and physics.

HoloHouse This app is a project built for a bank in Dubai to be used as a real state application. The models were build using 3ds Max by an external company. This app demonstrates how to use Unity scripting to rotate the houses, fade the lights, lift the roof and floors of the houses and display annotations.

Now that you have seen what can be done in a couple of weeks…why don’t you join us at the d-shop and show us what you can do! -:D

Greetings,

Blag.

Development Culture.