Posts

I am working on an Intro to WebXR presentation for the Phoenix VR Meetup group. As part of this I’ve been trying to make a diagram of the WebXR technology stack. These sorts of things are always oversimplifications. With feedback from several people on the WebXR Discord, I was able to come up with a decent diagram which is shown below. This diagram is split roughly into the blue/green “Application Layer”, the orange “Browser Layer” and the red “Hardware Layer” at the bottom. The WebGL and WebXR boxes are the “new” APIs that browsers have implemented which provide access to the relevant GPU/XR hardware. Of course Javascript and WASM are both browser APIs, but I omit them since, despite their importance, they aren’t the new enabling technologies. ...

Last week Tony Parisi shared the Seven Rules of the Metaverse which Kent Bye (host of the Voices of VR Podcast) endorsed as “Tony Parisi’s Metaverse Manifesto”. These seven rules and the entire manifesto really resonated with me and bear repeating here. Rule #1. There is only one Metaverse. Rule #2: The Metaverse is for everyone. Rule #3: Nobody controls the Metaverse. Rule #4: The Metaverse is open. Rule #5: The Metaverse is hardware-independent. Rule #6: The Metaverse is a Network. Rule #7: The Metaverse is the Internet. The Problem Inspired, I threw together some A-Frame code, donned my headset, eager to leap from page to page, but alas there was sadness in my virtual land. It seems that the state of link traversal in WebXR is no better today than it was in 2017 when I first picked up my headset. When following a link between two web pages in “vr mode” the user is kicked out of “vr mode” to see the 2D browser window and URL bar. This is bad, how do we fix this missing link? ...

The above image is a smaller version of the first decent picture I took with my recently acquired astrophotography setup. It was taken on Feb 11th, 2019 from, my driveway in Tempe, AZ, in the middle of the Phoenix, AZ metropolitan area. The image is a composite of 19 x 30s exposures, stacked with the free Windows program, DSS, and a little histogram tweaking in Photoshop. The image is of the Orion nebula (M42) and M43. More info and the full resolution image can be found where I uploaded the image to Astrobin. ...

Recently, in my free time, I’ve been playing with VR/AR related technologies. My interests have mostly been building photorealistic scenes or models using photogrammetry tools like Agisoft Photoscan. I may start sharing more of my experiments, like this one, here in the future. In November 2017 friends and I went for a hike deep into the Superstition Mountains in central Arizona to 600 year old Native American Indian ruins called “Rogers Canyon Ruins” (GPS route). I documented the hike with a few 360 photos along the trail using my 2016 Samsung Gear 360 camera and used Google’s Marzipano to create this 360 Tour of Roger’s Trough Trail hike ...

I have recently created two Homebrew formulas to help OS X users install GQRX on 10.11, El Capitan. Fortunately most of the dependencies are already available so all I had to do was create a formula for GQRX and Osmosdr. The source to these formulas can be found in my homebrew-godber github project. Though to install GQRX all you have to do is setup my ’tap’ and then install the package as shown below: ...

At the November 2014 DesertPy meeting I learned about ANTLR the parser generator and thought that would be the proper way to approach writing a parser for the labels of NASA’s PDS3 file format. I spent some time and read The Definitive ANTLR 4 Reference (affiliate link) and have pieced together a grammar that works fairly well at this point. The ANTLR grammar and corresponding generated Python parser are Open Source, BSD Licensed and are available on GitHub: ...

This is one of those blog posts a person writes in hopes of eventually finding it’s contents via a Google search when an error is encountered again. So, hello Austin, you have found the answer to your ‘debmirror ubuntu package 404’ error problem. I have my own Ubuntu mirror for precise and trusty packages. This mirror is maintained with the debmirror program. There are occasionally situations where it starts reporting 404 errors for Packages files when there are Packages.gz and Packages.bz2 files that it should be using. These errors look like this when running my mirror script: ...

NOTE: This post was converted from HTML generated from an Jupyter Notebook to markdown so it includes discussion of using Jupyter notebook, I left this language in the post itself. Image reprojection My friend Brien is a bit of an artist and a bit of a tech nerd so he thought it would be a great idea to make a timelapse video of him drawing. So he put the CHDK firmware on his Canon S90 camera and set it up to take an exposure every 2-3 seconds. He reprojected the drawing portion of the image back into a rectangle and made a video out of it. He managed to do the original video using only ImageMagick command line tools. You can watch his Timelapse Drawing 1 on YouTube. ...

I’ve seen some people ask about making the Docker command docker.io on Ubuntu work like it does in the examples: docker. I found this inconvenient too, but fortunately, Ubuntu and Debian have had a solution to this for a long time, it’s called alternatives. In this particular case, there is already an Ubuntu package called docker which is why they are trying to de-conflict executable names by using docker.io in the first place. Ironically, the original docker package doesn’t even contain an executable named docker. Or at least it doesn’t as of Ubuntu 14.04. ...