Interesting article in Venture Beat that gets at the heart of why WebVR is such a powerful concept (old, just stumbled across it again). Zeros in on the lack of friction and ease of creating simple cross-platform experiences, but goes beyond that to illustrate a number of situations and user experiences that rely on the underlying nature of the web.

⊕I decided to deal with it for a practical reason: I have been giving presentation about our WebAR work using the web, combining the reveal.js web presentation package with our argon.js AR web framework, and running the presentation (with embedded AR demos) in our Argon4 AR-capable mobile web browser. When presenting, it’s best to run the server locally, to avoid being at the mercy of whatever net connection is available at a conference, but to access the web location API, websites must be hosted securely. And, while invalid certficate warnings are annoying, Argon4 currently does not work with invalid certficates at all. After running into problems with a very slow conference network last week, I decided to fix this. In the category of “technical things that are mildly annoying, but I never get around to fixing”, the inability to use https:// with a valid SSL certficate when doing local webdev on my laptop is way up there. Or, was.

As part of GoogleIO this past week, Google released some sample code on github for a little demo that exposes Tango’s sensing into Chromium.

Amid the rumors of Apple working on an AR gadget, I’ve been thinking about what I’d like to see. Now, it seems clear that a full-blown, standalone immersive 3D AR display isn’t going to happen anytime soon, but given their assets and what’s been happening in the AR/VR tech world, here’s one possibility I find interesting.

Getting blogging again. Found a great article on posting to my Jekyll blog from iOS that works great!

A little crafting can go a long way, it turns out. Here’s a story of how we raised some money for Planned Parenthood by 3D printing Pussy Hats for Lego Minifigs.

Today I am excited to start a new job, while on leave from Georgia Tech, as a Principal Research Scientist at Mozilla⊕
Blair MacIntyre
Principal Research Scientist. I’ll be working for Sean White in the Emerging Technologies Group, looking at adding AR capabilities to the web.

Over the past week, I’ve finished cleaning up the blog on my personal website, which I started moving from Wordpress to Jekyll earlier this year. As I was going through the posts, I ran across a lot of old content I want to revisit, but was especially pleased to see an old post from back in 2008 about the architectural projective AR art of Pablo Valbuena. He’s continued making really interesting pieces, here are a few of the newer ones.

I recently gave a talk (with my colleage Maribeth) at Moxie’s FutureXLive event.