The Modern .NET Show

Episode 80 - VR Applications in Unity with Justin Barnett

Embedded Player

Episode 80 - VR Applications in Unity with Justin Barnett
The .NET Core Podcast

Episode 80 - VR Applications in Unity with Justin Barnett

Supporting The Show

If this episode was interesting or useful to you, please consider supporting the show with one of the above options.

Episode Transcription

Hello everyone and welcome to THE .NET Core Podcast. A podcast where we reach into the core of the .NET technology stack and, with the help of the .NET community, present you with the information that you need in order to grok the many moving parts of one of the biggest cross-platform, multi-application frameworks on the planet.

I am your host, Jamie “GaProgMan” Taylor, and in this episode I talked with Justin Barnett about building Virtual Reality applications in .NET using the Unity game engine. Along the way, Justin talks us through how you can get started in VR development without having to spend thousands of dollars on equipment. He also talks us through some of the most innovative and exciting VR applications he has tried out.

So let’s sit back, open up a terminal, type in dotnet new podcast and let the show begin.

The following is a machine transcription, as such there may be subtle errors. If you would like to help to fix this transcription, please see this GitHub repository

Jamie

First thing I’d like to say Justin is, thank you ever so much for being on the show. It is a great pleasure to talk to someone who knows all the things about VR. And I know nothing about VR. And I’m always interested to meet new developers anyway. So thank you ever so much.

Justin

Yeah, thank you for having me on, I would say to all the things, but we’ll see how far we get.

Jamie

We, you know, infinitely more than me. So in my eyes, you’re the expert, right?

Justin

Yeah, there we go. We’ll call it that. We could say expert for the sake of the show. I’ll take that title.

Jamie

Expert for a given value of expert. That’s what it is.

Justin

Yeah, exactly. very narrow band of knowledge.

Jamie

Oh, my goodness. So I was wondering, could you for the listeners, just give us a brief introduction to like the work you’re doing. Or maybe how you discovered VR and things like that? A bit about you sort of thing?

Justin

Sure thing? Yeah. I’m Justin Barnett. I go by Justin P Barnett on all the socials, because Justin Barnett is a fairly common name I found out. But I mainly do a YouTube channel about virtual reality development tutorials. So I mainly develop in Unity, which is C# based. And through that I kind of teach how to make virtual reality applications and games and that kind of thing.

It’s, I found throughout, like, when I was first start getting into virtual reality, like, there were no good tutorials, there was like maybe one or like two other guys who do virtual reality tutorials, but they’re all really outdated. And Unity, likes to update things, you know, every single quarter. So it’s a different thing you have to learn every single time you want to, you know, do a new mechanic or something like that. So I was struggling through trying to learn how do I code virtual reality because I think it was at Five Below at one point, and I found one of those super cheap, you know, like strap on your head virtual reality headsets that were like, you just plug your phone into it. And it’s like the Google Cardboard, I guess, except Five Below’s version. And it was like, you know, a couple bucks. And I put it on. And the first thing I remember watching was I just like, looked on YouTube and found a 360 video. And I just need to find something that I can actually like, you know, use this thing with. And it was a it was like a safari video. And in it, this Tiger walks right up to this 360 camera. And so I’m sitting in the chair, looking around, and I look behind me and there’s just like a tiger like sitting right there, you know, a couple feet from me. And it was mind blowing, because it’s like, nothing I’ve ever experienced before. Like, you don’t get the whole vision that you normally do in real life. But I mean, a good nine degrees of your vision is filled up with this experience this it’s almost like an IMAX movie, but you can move your head and like it’s, it’s a crazy experience. If you’ve never, you know, had that before, like your first VR experience. I feel like everyone always remembers their first VR experience, because it’s absolutely mind blowing.

But that was my intro to it. And that kind of got me hooked. I was like, “Okay, well, now I have to, you know, figure out what else can I do with this?” or like, “what other applications out there, like that I can get into?” And I was looking around. And it was like virtual reality has been an idea and even like a thing for a good little while now. It’s been since like, the 1990s was when they first like, you know, came out with like, VR prototypes and whatnot. But then getting into, like, nowadays, like, it’s still really hasn’t come that far still feels very, like, you know, gimmicky, I guess. And so it was like, all the things that there are is like games, and it’s like, just like, you know, video games that you can play. And I was like, “I want to find like something a little more substance to, you know,” to be able to like because like there’s a lot of arcade games you can play. It’s just like, you know, there’s Beat Sabre, which is a pretty big one right now. And there’s a few other[s], but there’s not like a you know, business application or like anything like that.

So I was like, looking into like, I wanted to like you know, develop something that’s a little more has a little more substance. So I my idea came about I want to do like an education platform like well, what if like, have you ever seen The Magic Schoolbus

Jamie

Yeah

Justin

So my idea was like to do the Magic School Bus. But like in VR, so like you get to go experience like they had all these experiences where it would be like “okay, well we’re gonna go and like, talk about like blood cells or whatever,” so they go inside of like, the bloodstream, and they’d see all the cells and get to, like, have that up close and personal kind of interaction with that. And so I love that idea. I was like, “what if I can just transform that into a virtual reality experience that people could have?” And I would love to, like, you know, transform the education and with everyone working from home now and kids going to school from home, it would be a game changer to be able to have your kid, you know, at nine o’clock in the morning, when you have to, like, you know, hook them up to a Zoom call, instead of doing that, you put them in a VR headset, and they’re like, sitting in this virtual classroom and their teacher shows up and they can see all the other students virtual avatars, and then the teacher says, “Okay, today we’re talking about, you know, the Roman Colosseum,” and he snaps his fingers, and the classroom melts away. And now the entire class is standing inside of the Roman Colosseum. And it’s like, “Okay, this, this is pretty cool. Like your assignment for today is to go talk to this Gladiator, go talk to, you know, one of the Roman citizens and like, go talk to like, go find the Roman emperor and like, talk to him.” And like, you get this like, you know, real world experience that you’re not really gonna forget in like, too long, like, instead of listening to a teacher drone on and like, give a lecture and whatnot. Anyway, that’s, that’s a long way of saying, that was my intro to VR, and kind of a little bit of the direction that I’m headed.

Jamie

I love that idea of like making almost like making that education real and making a sort of magical. Long term listeners will and listens to other shows that I do. Well know that in a previous career, I was a teacher for a while I High School. And I tried my best. And that was kind of what I tried to do. But obviously, there’s only so much you could do without the technology. Right? Right. But I found that if you were able to make the things seem real, right, so I was teaching high school math, right? And high school math, you’ve got a theory and theory, but geometry, and you’ve got all of these things that almost everyone will say at some point in their high school career. Why do I need to learn this? Right? Oh, you know, learning is here’s a triangle. Here’s a workout the science, right? Whereas I was like, okay, so imagine you are Greek and you’re living in ancient Greece, and you’re tiling the floor, and there’s a triangle bit left. How much of the tile Do you need to get to that slot? Right? Rather than here is a triangle that is the hypotenuse, you do this divided by that times this? Do you know is that kind of learning? Boring, right. But it I mean, he never he never he never really caught on? Because playing, you know, sneaking that psps into class?

Justin

Oh, yeah.

Jamie

There you go. But yeah, there is something that you brought up there about VR. Yeah, I think the commercial side of it as an outsider, the commercial side of it, definitely in the 90s. But what I like to do, I’ll put a link into the show notes. But what I like to do is I’m going to share a link with a chat system we’re using for a VR headset was built in 1968. And I’d like you to watch the 22 seconds of it. And tell me what you think. For the listeners, it’s called a sword of Damocles. And it’s it’s pretty cool.

Justin

That is quite a device he has on his head. Holy cow. It’s like, hold it up against his head so that it moves with him. That’s crazy.

Jamie

Yep. 1966

Justin

this one, this

Jamie

came next. All right, yeah. But this week, was back when he was in his research stages. I only know about that. Because there’s another show I do called waffling dealers. And we interviewed a guy. Sean Hass, who does a show called this, the advent of computing. And he brought a whole bunch of VR and AR stuff onto the show and was like, okay, so you got to know about this right? full colour, plasma screens in 1970. But they made them because they needed them, but they didn’t have a commercial way of selling. Wow. So they didn’t get sold until the early 2000s. It was amazing listening to that. But yes, so for the people who obviously for the listeners, the device that the gentleman in the video has is kind of like, you know, the big apparatus, you get the when he goes to the optometrist, it’s kinda like that. But it projects things in front of the person who’s using it on screen, I guess kind of how VR works, but in less fidelity is

Justin

in black and white. Actually, coincidentally, the Oculus quest two which is like sort of 20% of the market share of VR headsets right now. It came out last year pretty sure. But it when it there’s a camera system that pretty Jack’s the outside world that you’re in into like the screen so you can see them and that projects in black and white into your, onto the screen. So a little nod back to the old days, I guess

Jamie

maybe that’s it?

Justin

Yeah,

Jamie

I do know from back when I was at university, they were building. They were building a VR suite, we never got to play in it. But they were building a VR suite. And the professor who was building it was saying that the way that the way that they were building, it was right on the edges of your peripheral vision, you are actually colorblind. Oh, no, he said, colorblind. What he meant was, you see it, you perceive it in black and white, and your brain colours, everything in and they know, the way that he knows this is he would have lights, now I’m holding up my hands, like roughly where my peripheral vision is. And he would have lights that would flash different colours, just like LEDs or whatever, you know, so not very bright LEDs. And he would have the research students turn the time which colour they were. And every single time before looking they’re getting wrong. And they look across Oh, it’s a red LED. And then he continued to look forward and yet read read read, because the brain was filling in with the information they previously had. Why? Or maybe it’s related to that. I don’t know. That is interesting. There’s

Justin

there’s some commercial headsets. It’s the barrio, va RJO, I think is how it’s spelled. But they are doing a thing where you’re like the right in front of you. Vision is a really concentrated like 4k image. And then your peripheral vision, they’re doing like lesser like 10, ADP, almost like a little bit, hazy, blurry. So like the closer and you get the more high definition, the pixels are and whatnot, which is pretty smart. And they say it’s the I don’t know what their term for it is. But it’s like the same graphics that you see in pretty much. So which is gonna be super cool. If I can ever get my hands on a 60 $500 VR headset, that would be amazing.

Jamie

I mean, that kind of makes sense, right? Why? Why waste? waste is such the wrong term, right? But if you’re building essentially two small wraparound screens, why have all of the expensive parts of the screen where you’re never going to look?

Justin

right? Exactly? Like how often do you like look all the way to the left or all the way to the right without actually moving your head, like with just your eyeballs? And so having that in a VR headset doesn’t really, you know, make sense if you have the capability of you know, concentrating, like why don’t we concentrate all of the good hardware in the centre? And then we can leave the outer to like just good enough. Yeah.

Jamie

Yep. Yeah, I agree. Okay, so one of the things that we, we’ve talked a lot about VR. So far, we haven’t really said what it is. But I think we can assume that maybe some of the listeners will know what it is. But what I’ll say is, we’ve already discussed AR, or augmented reality back in Episode 64, with Li engelstad. But we haven’t really discussed what VR is, I know that it stands for virtual reality. I know that when I was at university, they were building a VR lab. But that’s really all I know about it. So I was wondering, could you tell us? I mean, do you have a personal definition of what VR is? Or do you just go with what everybody says it is? And do you know if there is a difference between VR and AR,

Justin

there is actually a little bit of a debate in the virtual reality world about what constitutes a fully virtual reality application. So in like traditional sense, virtual reality is a fully encompass, like virtual world. So augmented reality, you know, we’ll have a semi transparent glass in front of you that you can see through and IT projects things over top of that, same with mixed reality. So mixed reality can also mixed reality is basically augmented reality Plus, it recognises objects within your world. So if I’m sitting here and there’s a door in front of me, it’ll know there’s a door, and it can project someone you know, on the other side of the door, and like the door will like cut it off. If the doors like halfway open that kind of thing, as opposed to augmented reality, or just kind of, oh, paint over the door and like, whatever, it doesn’t really recognise whatever is in your space. But virtual reality is you’re fully in, you can’t see anything of the real world at the moment. And then if you’re doing it, right, you have like noise cancelling headphones on to and then you’re, you’re like fully immersed. But then there’s different levels of immersiveness. So now they have haptic rigs that you can put on that gives you the feeling of being in a virtual reality. So if you get like shot in the chest or something, it’ll just kind of like give you a little haptic feedback in that spot. Which is really cool. And they so they’re developing it for that they have a chest and back rig and like arms and stuff. And then the but the real the real debate is so you can go like crazy. You can be on a virtuality treadmill. So when you walk, you walk in the virtual reality world, fully immersed, kind of like Ready Player One, if you’ve ever read that book, crazy kind of stuff, but people are you like, Okay, well, was the 360 Safari Tiger video that I saw actual virtual reality, because I wasn’t really, like they’re interacting with the world, I was just kind of, you know, passively experiencing it in a 360 video, I couldn’t even be like, if I move my head to the left or right, I wouldn’t even be able to move it. Like, you know, positionally inside of the video is, like I’m setting, it’s only three degrees of freedom, not six. And so people argue with you is that actual virtual reality, but then I could go the other way, and say, our phones are a virtual reality. And anything that you do on your mobile device, or even on your computer PC, is in virtual reality that you’re experiencing and live again, it’s not fully encompassing your, like, you know, peripherals and your senses. But it’s a virtual space that you’re living in, and so could be a virtual reality. So it’s kind of wild, like how far that definition can flex back and forth. But my definition is basically anything that when like, when you put on a headset, it fully blocks out your, your view, that’s kind of my standard go to definition for virtual reality. Cool. Okay,

Jamie

so we’re not talking. I wonder whether this is a reference that was the Wheatland or not, we’re not talking Minority Report with you know, the gloves and the fake screen is now in front of you. That’s more mixed reality.

Justin

Yeah, I would, I would say that would be mixed reality, or even augmented reality at a certain point. Just like overlaying your real world. Yeah. And the virtual reality, like you can go anywhere, do anything be in space, like that kind of stuff. That’s, and I think that’s why I’m more leaning towards the virtual reality side of development, as opposed to the augmented or mixed reality side of development. Because the virtual, like, there’s unlimited possibilities, I can do crazy stuff. Whereas, I mean, arguably mixed reality, augmented reality, have more practical applications, the virtual side of things, just, you know, gets me more excited. So that’s the route I’m going follow the excitement.

Jamie

Sure, that makes sense. You could you could with a emceeing, like, with a virtual reality, you can maybe like, experience a walk along the Great Wall of China, or indeed experience walking on the moon. Exactly. Just visually, oh, maybe with one of those haptic feedback devices, treadmill, whereas like a mixed reality, might be okay, his part of the wall, and you can reach out and touch it. But as soon as you do, your hands will go through, you’ll fall flat on your face will point and laugh at you. Yeah, exactly.

Okay, fair enough. I mean, that that makes sense. So, let’s talk about so you say I’m a dotnet Dev. And the majority of the people listen to this dotnet devs. You talked about unity earlier on, I know that Unity has, you can add C sharp scripts to it. But is unity the way that I need to be going if I woke up tomorrow and said, You know what? Justin was right. I want to make a VR application for my virtual reality headset, whatever model it is, for my mobile phone, whatever. Do I start with Unity? Or can I? Can I maybe do something with dotnet? Or is do I have to go with Unity like was was the path I can take? Right?

Justin

Well, anything you develop in virtual reality is gonna be like almost your you got to think about it like you’re developing a video game, because it has all of those 3d graphic elements and visual effects kind of things to it. So essentially, you can think of it as like you’re developing a video game with very specific types of input. So instead of having a joystick and controller or mouse and keyboard that you use to move your character and look around, you are actually doing it with a head mounted display and controllers plus whatever other extra haptic rigs and stuff that the player will have on so when you develop for you know, video games like that, and 3d video games, you need a game engine plus your code base. So the game engine will allow you to add game objects on to the end of the world essentially. So you can add lights and you can add players and you you add the ground and you anything that you’ve visually See in the world, we’ll get added through that game engine, and then you attach scripts to the game engine. And then that’s what you know, performs all the actions and does all the goals and achievements and anything else like that. I use unity, which is a C sharp base game engine. And it’s free open source. And there is a another one that is like Unity and Unreal or Unreal Engine is the other one. And those are like neck and neck, top of the line, triple A companies uses them. Unreal Engine is known for its better graphical quality, good looking stuff. But since I have no artistic talent at all, I go the Unity route, because C sharp was what I kind of learned in college and unity is C sharp and Unreal Engine is c++ based. But if you’re more of a artist or visually, like, inclined you can do you can go that route. And do c++ coding or Unreal Engine has a visual scripting language. So it’s node based, you can just drag and drop if statements and all that stuff that you need. So you don’t actually no need to know how to code or what the syntax is or anything like that. You can so long as you know the logic structure you can make a game in Unreal Engine. And I think unity still Unity has plugins and stuff you could do that with to unreal as a built in though. And then the notable mention, I guess would be Godot is another game engine, but I haven’t really dabbled in it. So I can’t say how good it is or not. But I do know it does support virtual reality development as well.

Jamie

Cool. Okay. So as a dev, I have a number of options. That’s, that’s always good to know. I like one of the in my personal opinion, one of the great things about dotnet growing cross platform is that I’m no longer tied to one specific or broken system, right? If it goes like, at the time when they were when there was grumblings of we’re going to make dotnet cross platform. I was. I still am. I mean, I’m using a Windows machine right now. But my daily driver is as an a boon to based computer, right, I’ve got I’ve got a Mac somewhere in the house as well. So like back then there was like, Well, how am I going to do my dotnet stuff at home? I wanted to donate stuff, but I can’t. And I had to look like there was this crazy build system that I had for producing a it was a dotnet framework application that were run in Mac OS but had with a Windows Forms idea and have icons and all that kind of stuff. But he took about 25 minutes to build. And I’m like, I can’t believe this is no good. But that’s ridiculous. Yeah, but but what I really like is having all of those options, right? Because, like you say, if you want to get started, and I think you said that unity is free to start with C sharp, it’s right there, right? Exactly down the route of go. You want to learn go over the G script and do go up you can go that way. Or if you presumably if you know C sharp where you can get your head around the the visual builder, you can go down the unity, right? There’s there’s lots of different paths, right? Because that’s what I don’t like I don’t like being hemmed into one over one choice. Because invariably, you’ll always find Oh, right. Okay, so how do i do particle effects. And you know, Google App particle effects and particle effects in in Unreal effects in Unreal.

Justin

I haven’t considered swapping back and actually started in Unreal Engine. But once I got to the actual, you know, coding bit, the digital scripting language is good. But yeah, I’m just a coder at heart. So I needed to do that. And I didn’t want to learn a whole new language in order to develop VR stuff, because this is my side job. I still have a full time job doing dotnet development, my nine to five. But so I didn’t want to learn a whole new language. I just want to use the stuff I already have and want to be able to jump into it. So I ended up going with Unity, but a lot of the stuff that I researched and one of the big reasons why I started making this YouTube channel is because all the stuff was either outdated unity stuff, or it was for Unreal Engine, which I couldn’t use, because it’s C sharp and different language and like the platform has different integrations and stuff. So it just didn’t work. So I just had to figure it out. Go to the documents.

Jamie

Yeah, I’ve always hated that when when everything you find is outdated. Oh my god, how does that help? Right. And the danger of learning a new language for a side project is if I’m learning a new language and a new tool, and I’m doing something completely new. Well, that’s three possible things that could go wrong, right? And if I get a syntax error, okay, I can look that up. But if there’s a toolchain error, or if there’s some esoteric error, because my line endings in my file are wrong, I’m not going to know what that means I may as well nuke and pave my computer, again.

Justin

Exactly,

Jamie

I’m totally with you with not learning a new language to do a new project on a new thing and new technology are totally with you on that.

Justin

Mm hmm. Yep, I want to be able to just have to learn the SDK. And I want to actually need to like learn the language and the syntax and all that kind of stuff. Which actually, unity is just last month or two really, like released a 1.0 version of like, baseline SDK. So used to you had to do an Oculus. SDK, and then you had a steam SDK for the valve index, and then you had or the HTC Vive. And then the valve index had a different SDK. And then windows mixed reality had a different SDK. So you had to almost develop for like, as if you were developing for the you know, PlayStation, and for Xbox kind of mentality, like a two completely different platforms. But it was like every single headset had to if you if you wanted your game to be played on that headset, you had to develop for a different SDK, which was ridiculous. But unity just came out with a SDK called Open ACC, open xR, and it is like one baseline like you can hit all the other it’ll feed and all the all the rest of them, which is so nice. So I only have to develop for like one thing now, which is good, but also means that all the other tutorials are outdated.

Jamie

So you end up googling for, let’s say that particle physics stuff again, right? You want to do this thing where you raise your hand to fire a fireball. He needs to do Particle Physics for that. You Google further and he’s like, okay, so put the HTC Vive SDK in and type these type in this code. And this will work on anything else

Justin

you’d like? Well, that’s exactly. It’s like each SDK has like a little different way of picking up objects and like making the hand move and all this kind of stuff. And it’s all different. And I love developers, or YouTubers who put outdated in the title of the video if they have like, no, that their old stuff is outdated, because that is so helpful when I’m like, trying to debug and like going through YouTube or Stack Overflow and trying to figure out something if I see the outdated takeaway. Oh, thank God, I have to, like dive into that rabbit hole.

Jamie

saves me 25 minutes. Yeah,

Justin

exactly.

Jamie

Okay, so let’s say we’re using unity, and we’re gonna develop something in VR. So what kind of hardware do I need? Do I need? The expensive? I’m guessing the the Oculus Rift is going to be the sort of middle of the road? Do I need the expensive hardware? You mentioned earlier on? there? I need the the Oculus do I need? I mean, does a HoloLens even count? I feel like that’s mixed reality. Like, which bits of hardware do I need? And do I need a super powerful computer with like 12 t bajillion gigs of RAM 1000 CPU cores or something? Where, what am I talking to be able to power this this device? Well, there’s

Justin

three different categories of headset. So you have the normal, like your phone can act as a headset. So if you wanted to absolutely start from scratch and didn’t want to spend a lot of money, you can use your phone as a device to you know, develop and test on what the problem with that is you only have three degrees of freedom. So you have all the rotational axes, but you don’t have any positional movement. So if you move your body around in your inside of the room, your character is not going to move around to the game, which is a little disorienting when you first get started because like, you take a step over, but you’re you you don’t in your like visual range. And it’s kind of weird. But you could do that. And actually Unity has a virtual virtual reality device that you can control with a mouse and keyboard to if you wanted to go that route, which is completely free and you don’t even need a nice, like phone or whatever. But then the my recommended so the next level of headset I’d say is standalone devices. So you have the Oculus quest. And also, I don’t even know if there are any more standalone devices out yet. I know HTC is just released today that they’re working on a standalone device. But Oculus quest and the quest two are the only two ones that I know of that are actually standalone so which means they don’t need a PC connected to it at all times. So as long as you have a Wi Fi connection, or the game is downloaded on to the actual headset. You can do that wirelessly. And the Oculus quest two is either right now, either 300 or 400 US dollars to get into. And yeah, that’s a pretty good all around headset like I would definitely recommend that to anyone has their first VR headset. It’s Oculus, it’s it’s Facebook, the Facebook owns Oculus. And I think they have 25% of the market in VR right now. Like, what if you look at all the total VR devices out right now, I think Oculus quest has about 25% of them, which is a good chunk, if you wanted to start developing like that, that would probably be the best, like, you know, go to like, when apps are released on the iPhone before they go Android, of course, it’s, I don’t know what that split is anymore. But and then if you want it to go a little bit bigger and a little more, so you’re limited with a standalone device, as far as how much you can do in your game, as far as the visuals, the processing power, that kind of stuff, because it’s a, it’s a really tiny computer compacted into that little headset. So if you want to actually develop for like a bigger, you know, triple A quality game, you’ll need to do a what they call PC VR, so connected into your device that with a long cable, or you can stream wirelessly if you have like the both ends of the the wireless connection, which is pretty cool. When when people hook that up, that is an interesting thing. But the you can get so like half life Alex just released last year, Around this time, maybe. And that was the I think the second that was the first triple A game I think that was ever released in VR, which was like a crazy step. And then Medal of honour, just released in VR after that. And I think those are the only two triple A games that we have in virtual reality right now. But both of those are PC VR games that are like crazy processing power. I mean, you don’t need like a tonne of power. But it’s definitely like you need a GPU and your computer, then like a decent amount of RAM and PC power and all that kind of stuff. It’s not for the faint of heart.

Jamie

So what he’s saying is I won’t be able to get away with using my MacBook Air running, you know, with four gigs of RAM, eight gigs of RAM.

Justin

Yeah. Maybe not, you might you might be able to stutter through some games.

Jamie

So we talked about the you said there are quite a lot. And we’ve talked about that as well, is there because you have to think of VR applications as being like games because they have all of those same, those same. All the all of the things that make a game a game, right into VR, right? You’ve got a controller of some kind, maybe it’s those paddle controller things, you get one of the Oculus says, or maybe like you say, as a game controller all in the end. And you know, you’re interacting with a world in your standard crud app, you’re not going to be interacting with a world you’re pushing a button. It pulls a record changes and values you push the record back into the database. Exactly. It’s not the most exciting thing. If we could somehow virtualize that, that might be exciting. Maybe

Justin

you just fantasise like,

Jamie

I did once have an idea of how to teach people how things like Google look to. The idea was, you are a packet of information, leaving a computer, going to some search engine, and then walking around their network, finding all of the things that you’ve learned, oh, well, there’s this page. And there’s that page, and there’s that page and cover almost like a detective game. And they bring that back to the user. But whether that would be actually useful? I don’t know.

Justin

Find the fun.

Jamie

But yeah, so. So in that case, then what’s the what are the basic elements of a VR? Like, as someone who has written You know, a lot of VR stuff, and enjoys doing it and sharing it with the world? What are some of the things that I need to put into my VR game VR application to make the phone right, you said that you got to find the fun? Fun? No one’s going to download it.

Justin

Exactly. The so this is there’s been a lot of games recently that have been ported over to virtual reality from you know, a flat screen game. So like Borderlands is one. Doom three just got ported over to virtual reality, and some more games and you can really tell the difference with between when a game was made for VR, versus you know, it’s just a ported, flat screen console game and The one of the biggest rules that I have is you never take control of the player, you always have to, and that’s becoming more and more of a role in, you know, just 3d first person shooters anyway, but, and that goes for cutscenes, too, like, if you and we actually learned a lot about that, with Medal of honour, the Medal of honour was a game that took control of the player, a lot of the time where you couldn’t move, you just sat there and like, there was like a cutscene going on around you, but your player can move. And then contrast that with half life Alyx, where, when they had like a cutscene like element where there’s like, a lot of dialogue and story elements, they would just like confine you to like a little room, like, you could still like walk around and pick up stuff and like, play around and listen, if you wanted to, or not, but you were never, like, taken control of, I guess. And so that was a, that was a big thing for me. When I like got that contrast, I was like, Okay, this is how it’s, you know, supposed to be as I’m in the world, and, and even like, so like you’re playing a shooting first person shooter game. So they’ve got like, you know, Counter Strike version of virtual reality basically, and, but when you get shot and your player gets killed, your player will fall down, but you don’t as a character. And so you kind of like kind of ghost out of the player. And because if you like actually were taken to the ground with the player, that would be super disorienting. So there’s a lot of elements like that you have to think about that you don’t really think about, because like when you’re playing your first person shooter game, like, you can just have the character, like, the camera can go with the character’s head and fall on the ground, and it’d be fine. And then you can just cut away into cutscenes. And it looks super cool. But when you’re virtual reality, the I mean, the way that ported games do it is they just kind of space you back out into a 2d space. So it’s almost like you’re an IMAX theatre, for the cutscene. And then they bring you back into the world. And it’s very jarring, like you’re like, oh, like, it reminds me that I’m playing a game. And I don’t want to I don’t want to be reminded that I’m playing a game I want to do to be in it and like be in the zone and like have to just like you know.

So that’s one of the biggest things. And then there’s a game called bone works that was released about a year ago, too. And that one is there, there. One rule was, everything is physics based. So a lot of early virtual reality games, and even virtual reality games nowadays, still, you can, like, your hand isn’t really physics based. He can reach through walls and reach through objects and flail around your hand on a desk, but nothing moves. But bone works. It was different. They, like came up with this there. I mean, the one rule and I think it was basically just like a tech demo, it wasn’t even really a game, it was just like, Can we make like a game that is just pure physics based. And that’s, that’s a crazy game to play because you can, like, use every bit of your environment for as opposed to like, your normal, like con like controller based game, you have to walk around and find specific things that you need to interact with that have been pre set up from the game. But they can bone works, you can literally grab anything and use it as a weapon. And it’s insane. like you’d take this coffee cup and smash it over people’s heads and like you can grab so that a dad these little like Headcrab type things are like little spiders that jump at you. And so, so one guy grabbed both, like grab two spiders and smash them into each other. And like killed them both, just by smashing them into each other just like a ridiculous like, kind of like, like, That’s so cool. But then the development on that is a little bit easier too because like you literally just make one class that’s like a you know, make this physics based and pick up a ball. And then you give it like a mass. And if your character can pick up that amount of mass, then you can pick it up or some objects you need to pick up a two hands because he only one hand can carry a certain amount of mass. And then you just use the velocity to calculate the damage. And you there’s a game that’s, that’s all the coding you need. You just set up the the levels after that. So that was cool. And going from that game to any other game where your hand can like you know, go through go through walls and stuff. It’s just like the basically Yeah, I think my biggest thing is just like don’t let the player know that they’re in a game kind of thing like make it as real as possible. And a lot of games are like you know, Arcadian get away with it. Or if you just have one really good game mechanic like beat Sabre. It’s just one really good game mechanic that’s fun. And they’ve fine tuned it to like a really good like, even to the way that haptics like vibrate when you touch your lightsabers together. It’s like, it feels like you’re like actually, you know, almost lightsaber fighting with yourself kind of thing. But yeah, that one mechanic is really good. And so bone works is one mechanic was physics. And after that, I was like, that needs to be the mechanic of every single prk. Maybe that’s just my personal preference. I don’t know. Yeah, it’s it’s complicated, though. Because normally you you just like walk up to like this chest that you want to loot, you press a button on your controller, then your character goes through the animation. It like freezes up the character for two or three seconds, or however long it takes for that, that loading animation to process. And then you come up and you have stuff in your inventory. But then in VR, you’re like, Well, how do I do an inventory, because like, you can’t just have this unlimited backpack of stuff, like I mean, I guess you can, but like a lot of VR games now will have, like you have literal holsters that you’d need to reach down and grab a gun off of your holster, and you have a limited amount of space for holsters. You have like both to thigh holsters and like shoulder holsters and like, that’s all the space you have. And so you got to kind of prioritise what weapons you want to bring with you. And that kind of stuff. That I mean that you can, like, it’s a game, you can do whatever you want, you could make it so you can carry unlimited weapons, but like, then you have to pull up like a UI kind of thing. And like that breaks your immersion. So like yet the virtual reality, you want to be fully immersed. Like, that’s kind of why you went into virtual reality. So that’s my thought process behind that is, you keep the player in the game, and don’t let them know they’re there.

Jamie

That makes sense, right? Like you said, You’ve gone down the route of making this virtual reality. So why take them out of it? Right? I like that. So, okay, so I need to explain to my boss, why I need an Oculus, whatever it is, Oculus Rift, Oculus, whatever, so that I can play around with it and build enterprise application. How do I do that?

Justin

Actually, coincidentally, I was skiing like a month or two ago. And while I was waiting in line for the ski lift, this really chatty guy comes up to me and just start talking to me. And so I’m okay he Roman, somehow we got on the topic of virtual reality, maybe, I don’t know. You could call me an evangelist. He was like, yeah, we use that hidden, he turns out, he was like a miner for minerals. And so I mean, nowadays, they use the huge giant construction equipment. And it’s millions of millions of dollars to buy into run, and all this kind of stuff, huge, expensive equipment. And he’s like, Oh, yeah, we use virtual reality to train our workers on that, because if we have this newbie, go and operate this million dollar piece of equipment, like I don’t, like, it’s, we’re not making our money back from it while that guy’s learning. And like, it’s not like, we can just have an extra one come out here and like to use for training purposes. So they put people in virtual reality, have them learn the operating procedures and the steps to do it. And it’s nice, because like, when you’re a virtual reality, you can have a floating checklist beside you. And you can make sure that you did all the things, right. And we got to talk in a little bit. And he was saying that, they were looking at making the machines like fully virtual, like, what if we just instead of that, you would just replace the human, put a 360 camera where the humans supposed to be, or even just like post cameras, like over where the the digger is, so you’re more precise with the digger, or the saw or whatever the machine has on it, and like that kind of thing. And then the guy could just work from home, like, home, you gotta get you got a good Wi Fi connection, you put on a virtual reality headset, and you’re at work, like digging, you know, with all the controls, and you can do all the things. But I worked for a consulting company. And so we have a lot of different projects. And so they found out about my virtual reality YouTube channel and stuff and they’re like, well, if you can make a virtual reality version of the office, and like have people be able to like come and interact with it and that kind of stuff. Like we could probably pitch this as like a training kind of software like this would just be like a good prototype for a training software. Like let’s say you want to like train the electrician or something. And like what what are the different steps you need to do to wire this particular thing or debug wire this like thing I don’t know. Lots of different like, physical kind of applications. I was trying to come up with a way like, like coder programmers like us could like, use it. But best, the the best I can come up with is like, just having more monitors.

Jamie

I’m not gonna lie, one of my, when I first started hearing about the virtual reality, the proper virtual reality headsets, I was like, cool, I can ditch my monitors, and just have everything on in front of me, I literally move my head around and find that other file where there it is. Looking over here, and I type into that file. And we’ll look over there. over to my left. There’s that farmer type in there. Look over here. Alright. Okay, that’s literally behind that one. So, grab a

Justin

minority report.

Jamie

Maybe that’s what I because then who cares about screen space? Right? Yeah, exactly. screen space,

Justin

I never have to close the tab again.

Jamie

Maybe that’s it, maybe they have,

Justin

they actually do have a application immersed VR is one of the there’s a couple of immersive VR is the one that I keep seeing ads for. But they’re so and I tried out their free version. But the difficult part about that is you still need a keyboard. And when you’re a virtual reality you all you can do is touch type. And so the the Oculus quest, so most virtual reality headsets have controllers attached to them. But they’ve just started coming out with so the Oculus quest two has full hand tracking, so you don’t need a controller. So you bet different hands motions will trigger different actions, which is really cool and convenient. But it adds a little different element to because I can use a keyboard now, I don’t need controllers to control the windows, I can reach out and grab the windows with my hand and throw them across the screen. But I can also have a mouse and keyboard in front of me. And the Oculus is I think they’re still developing a basically a pass through. So I can look down and see almost like a little window into the real world down below me. And I can put my mouse and my keyboard in that little window where my big mouse pad is. And then I can always like see where my keys more My hands are for like typing and stuff. Because that’s that was that’s probably been my biggest issue with virtual reality is I can’t type. And the accuracy is you can’t get really like fine tune accuracy. So if I’m trying to code and like I have an error on line 171 and I’m trying to click on it, but like it’s, it’s like am I gonna click on that line, where am I gonna click on the line, it’s not very precise. So I need, I still need that mouse and keyboard, I still need those extra controls. But I also want to be able to, like, you know, turn around and grab a window from the side kind of stuff. So Merced is kind of overcome that by if you have a Bluetooth keyboard, it’ll, though they’ll have like a virtual keyboard that will mirror your actual keyboard position and everything, which is nice. But once the Oculus has passed through, little real world window comes out, that’s gonna be I might, I might just ditch the monitors. And I’ll just have a beefed up PC and like an empty desk with a keyboard. I think that’d be super cool.

Jamie

Yeah. And then you never have to worry about like, well, what if they can see through your window and see the code you’re working on? Well, yeah, you can’t see. Your bosses that write secure code, secure code. Exactly. Yeah,

Justin

no one will be able to look over my shoulder.

Jamie

Yeah, of course, that that brings in the question of how would you do? pair or I believe, I believe we’re walking away from that mob programming. I may be wrong about that. But like group programming, how would you get around that? I guess you’d have to just bring someone into your VR session, and they can maybe walk around your office? Yeah, behind,

Justin

you know, they have like a chat room kind of vibe to it. Yeah. The you can’t. So some of those, I think immerse Steven does it they have a that’s their paid version, you had a if you want more people, you know, the you can have a room and like I can share my screen with you. And I’ve actually showed up on a couple of zoom calls were in an application. And it’s a this application is called a big big screen, TV. Big Screen, just big screen. But basically its main purposes like for a movie watching. So you are like in this virtual theatre and you can but it mirrors your desktop. So I can play Netflix on my PC and it’ll look like I’m sitting in a movie theatre watching this movie, which is super cool, but I’ve used it for you can have multiple monitors up. But then also there’s a selfie camera in it. And so I’ve used that camera as my zoom camera. So I’ve had a like a it gives you like avatar, like a little, like, cartoonish kind of avatar. And so it’s like a selfie camera. So I’m like holding it up walking around this little like office that I have in, like, you can see my giant monitors behind me. And I’m like, looking around, and like walking around, it almost looks like I’m just holding a cell phone walking around this apartment, but it’s like this cartoon character. And it’s hilarious. And it like really like, when I like get on, like, all the conversation stops. And they’re like, what is that? It’s, it’s super cool. But yeah, the, I mean, it’s so gimmicky. But I feel like once we get to like VR, like to a place where it’s actually like, the standard for work, like, I mean, it’s very, like, you know, pre internet like 90s internet, or like, it’s cool thing, but like, no one really uses it. Like, there’s no reason for me to have an email. Like, it’s just cool. Like, I can email my friends, but like until you need an email for work, or you need VR for work, like there’s not really like going to be much of a point for like, much development. Actually, Microsoft just signed a $22 billion contract with the military to give them augmented reality glasses, which is a super big step forward in the virtual reality augmented reality world, because that’s going to be some heavy duty development going in going on over there, which is super cool.

Jamie

I wonder with a So you talked about the sort of big picture, because I my brother has that on his Oculus, whatever. I keep saying Oculus obviously, this is not sponsored by, you know, the big name. So yeah. So my brother has the Oculus, whatever. And he has a similar app. I don’t know whether it’s the same or not. But yeah, he’s sitting, he sitting in the middle of a movie theatre, and watches whatever film his PC is watching. Yeah, that you said that you have it set up. I wonder whether that could help like, so they’re one of the things I’ve noticed over the last, let’s call it a year or so of everybody working online is that a lot of people are read. I feel like reticence around were reluctant to have a camera pointing at them. whilst they’re talking to a screen full of people, right? Mm hmm. Perhaps the system that you’ve just described there could help those. Those people feel more comfortable with that they can design their own character design. Yeah, everyone backdrop, and they can have, you know, whatever they need to, if they indeed wanting to do that. I’m not saying that they should. But you know, even if you are, I’m worried that if I say in introverted, that may be the wrong word. But let’s say let’s say that I don’t like to be on camera. And I’ve got a big zoom meeting coming up. But our big teams meeting or whatever, big meeting coming up, I have to give a presentation. Well, as long as it’s not a super professional and talking to another company, I’m trying to sell services to that company. If it’s an inter intercompany meeting, I could totally get away with Yeah, this is my cartoon avatar. Because Yeah, I do my meetings, right.

Justin

Yeah, exactly. And you can have like, more realistic type like that. I’m sure there’ll be applications that lets you put in like a more like, you know, visually aesthetic, like, almost a real real looking person. Unit. I think, you know, Unreal Engine just came out with a thing called the meta human. And it is basically just a software that lets you create, like humans, see, like CGI humans, but it is so lifelike, it is crazy, like crazy similarities. And if you just like kind of are scrolling through YouTube and glance at like, the picture and whatever it looks like, it’s real people. And I’m like, oh, wait a minute, that’s CGI. That’s crazy. And it’s like real time mimics your lip movement, and, like the facial tracking and everything super cool. But a lot of streamers have started to do that. So live streamers, will who want to remain anonymous. But like you can’t really live stream and not be on camera, it’s a very difficult thing to do. Like you can’t just like you know, play this game. And, you know, be good at the game. But like you have to you have to have a personality and be on there and be there. And a lot of people are starting to stream with these virtual avatars. And so they’re, they’re called, they’re called v v tubers are just virtual people, but it’s super cool. super crazy cut to the motion tracking and the they’ll buy like whole like motion tracking suits. So like the, instead of just having your head and controllers you have an entire like body motion tracking, which is super cool. And I’ve actually thought about doing that and like what if I just like, you know, I can livestream almost like I’m having a zoom call. But like be inside of a game. And so like the the people watching can kind of also interact with the game and like have monsters pop up and like that kind of stuff. Like, I feel like that’d be pretty cool. But it’s definitely a thing, definitely a thing that’s coming. As far as like people who like want to remain anonymous on the internet, you can have like virtual avatars and all that kind of stuff. Do you know?

Jamie

That’s really cool. I like that, I think is like, I feel like that helps with. I’m worried about saying accessibility, but like that, that makes less accessibility as in I can access. Like, if I am hard of hearing, or if I’m, if I need a screen reader is less that kind of accessibility, but more access to the actual technology if I want to be a live streamer, because maybe I’m the best person in the world at playing a game or I’m the best. I want to do some, maybe some live coding, but I’m worried about how I come across on camera. Maybe I don’t like the way I look. Maybe I don’t want a camera in my face. Maybe there’s some reason for me not to want to do that. Then the technology is there to help me Right. Exactly. Who’s that to actually, like you say anonymize myself or change the create my own little avatar, or create a super realistic or the sort of person. You know, wonder about some of these live streamers. You know that the big the big names? They must get people coming up to the ministry guide? Oh, my goodness, it’s you know, yeah,

Justin

like you don’t have any like seclusion or anything anymore. Like you can’t go to the grocery store without people wanting your autograph and whatnot. Your celebrity status?

Jamie

Yeah, definitely,

Justin

definitely a thing that could help with that. Okay.

Jamie

I liked the idea that you said earlier on about having like a virtual office as well, where you use the example of maybe we can use it, you know, I’m not trying to steal your company’s IP or whatever. But you could use a protect demo for training people to do things or perhaps, what about, I want to interact with my colleagues, I’ll put on the VR headset, we’ll all go into the office and walk around at the watercooler or we’ll go and make a coffee at the coffee machine or, you know, we’ll just have like a breakout exactly, throw some ideas around, well, I’ve got my controllers, I can write on the on the on the board on the you know, the dry wipe board or the whiteboard, whatever you want to call it, we can literally draw up block diagrams for how we’re going to do things, move the cards around, I’m in the office for all intents and

Justin

you know, it’s gonna be really cool is when they combine the when the Microsoft HoloLens augmented reality stuff, and virtual reality. And so everyone who’s actually goes into the office is wearing a augmented reality glasses. And then everyone who’s not in the office is virtual VR headset, and you can all see each other walking around the office, you can see each other writing on the whiteboards, like shows up virtually, let’s get that’s gonna be crazy. That’s gonna be super cool.

Jamie

I can imagine there being a lot of I mentioned earlier on a city you reach out and fall on your face. Maybe that could happen, you know, you go up to someone, you know, you got to pat them on the back. It’s a it’s great to see you reach out to shake their hand and fall over

Justin

you like forget they’re the virtual person. The fidelity is gonna be like, good enough for you to walk. You just walk through people. Are you still like walking through people for fun? And then you’d actually run into a person?

Jamie

Oh, cool. Now that’s awesome. So yeah, no, that’s great. Yeah, I mean, we’ve we’ve discussed a lot of the of the applications, and we’ve discussed a little bit about getting started as well. So you would recommend for at least for dotnet, devs. Get started with Unity. You can maybe use your phone if you need to. If you want to lay out some money, there’s some devices you can buy. And you don’t really need a super powerful computer. Yes, yeah. What you’re what I’ve gotten from that, that’s, that’s awesome. I like that.

Justin

As long as you can run unity, you’re I think you’re good.

Jamie

Awesome. But the that that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s the best news because like, you know, as long as I can, as long as I can run out, I could build it. You know, maybe I don’t have maybe I don’t have the most powerful computer, but as long as it can run the tools, and then I offload the the processing to the actual virtual reality. How do you exactly to worry about I gotta go. So I’ve got to get $1,000 worth of computer growing at $2,000 worth of headsets. I’ve got to move into a new apartment because it’s not big enough

Justin

space. Yeah.

I just moved into a bigger room so I can have some more walk arounds.

Jamie

That’s good. That’s good. I like the ability to sort of start. Again, I’m trying to, I’m trying to be more careful with my words. I don’t want to say start small but you Don’t have to jump straight into spending 1000s of sorry, spending 1000s of dollars having a massive space to work in having essentially a supercomputer, you can start with what you have and build up. I like right?

Justin

Try it, see if you like it. And if it’s something that you see yourself getting into, then you can start out at one of the entry level headsets or just using your phone for a little bit. And if that’s cool, then you can just start to upgrade and end up with a super big computer and multiple headsets like I do. I get the bug bit me and here I am.

Jamie

Okay, so. So what’s the best way for folks that because you mentioned earlier on the you do a YouTube channel? Is it YouTube and Twitter? or How can people sort of follow the progress? What? And how would you recommend people start? Do you recommend they load up your channel, go to video number one and watch from there? You know, how did they get started?

Justin

virtual reality is a I mean, at its heart, we talked about that it’s a it’s a video game. So if you’re going to start developing for virtual reality applications, you have to know how to code or be comfortable with a visual scripting kind of language like that. And you also need to know how to make a game. And it could just be a 2d game 3d, like first person shooter type game or anything like that, because a lot of the mechanics are still the same after you get past the the weird inputs that virtual reality has, in the end, you still have missions and goals and different objectives and interactions and that kind of stuff that a normal 2d 3d game would have. So you have to have those skills down as well. And then you so I would almost recommend learning how to do game development first, at least get like a good grasp of that. And then switching over to virtual reality. Because if you just jump straight into virtual reality, that is a dive in the deep end there, because it’s super complicated and technical at first, and you’re like, oh, what am I doing? Why am I doing this? I’m like, Oh, well, so you can you know, interact with different stuff, and you do the normal video game stuff. But yeah, you could find me I do. So I do a lot of virtual reality specific tutorials. There’s a lot of Game Dev tutorials already out there. So I ended up not going that route. But I do like, Okay, well, how do you jump? How’s that different in virtual reality than, you know, in a third person, Video game where, you know, how do you grab objects, because that’s a specific kind of virtual reality thing. So I have YouTube channel. My name is Justin P. Barnett, you can find me under that. And I talk about a lot of virtual reality applications for Well, I’m doing a lot of mechanics now. But I think in the future, I’m going to start doing like dev reviews of different games that are out more podcast, I want to kind of, you know, branch out, try a bunch of different things. And if you want to chat, you can find me on Twitter, also Justin P. Barnett. And yeah, those are the two best ways. I’m also on LinkedIn and all the other things, but if you want to get a hold of me, those are the two best ways. Sure. Okay.

Jamie

So just then to because obviously, what I’ll do is I’ll put, I’ll put links to all these in the show notes and make sure you click through to those. But let’s say I go and buy a HTC Oculus, right, I keep saying Oculus let’s let’s mix it up. I buy I don’t know Walmart’s virtual reality headset or whatever. And I’ve got it hooked up and I’m ready to go and I want to learn, right, okay, Justin, get me started. What’s the first video I should watch? Because obviously, I’m gonna I’m gonna hate your channel. There’s gonna be lots of news. Do you ever recommended sort of first almost like, beginner’s setup? Or is there like, I don’t want to say newbie, because I’m worried about the connotations of that. Like, I’m conscious of my language. But have you got a video? That’s like, okay, so you’ve just got that device, you just instal unity. Let’s get started. Right? Let’s create a particle physics. So let’s create a drill. That’s great. I think we can throw a ball like what’s where do I start with your

Justin

two videos I’d recommend so one of you are just thinking about getting into it, I have a video about what do I need to like make virtual reality games and stuff and that we’ll talk a little more in depth about different headsets, which one you should get the price points, different game engines different, you know, 3d modelling software that you would need, if you want to go that route, or if you just want to buy 3d models like I do, or get the free ones. So basically, it’ll go through like, what’s all the equipment that I need and what’s all the software that I need? So that’s that video how to make VR games and then how to start a VR Game is another video that I have that actually walked through. Okay, so we have unity installed, and we have VR headset, let’s go step by step and make a, like blank, 3d game VR that I can just, you know, walk around in, like how do I just like start from scratch and then from there, all my other tutorials are kind of build off of that one video where once you have the basics down, and a lot of the tutorials, I kind of will start from scratch, I’ll go quick and be like, Alright, well you need to, you know, this plugin and this SDK and all this kind of stuff to like, get the project going. So you could usually jump into any of my videos and get started. But that one had to start VR in 2021 is my most recent up to date up to date video. And that would be a good spot to start.

Jamie

Awesome, awesome. Well, we’re gonna say Justin, this has been an amazing conversation I, I want to go out and buy a VR headset now and build something, I think it’d be quite interesting to to be able to send something over the way it’s a my brother and grey installed on your on your phone. And he’s just walking around. He goes, wait a minute, you’re in this.

Justin

I mean, I think VR is gonna replace the phone, like people are gonna have phones anymore. It’s just gonna be like, you’ll have this AR headset, like you just have glasses, like you’re wearing right now just like thin like reading glasses almost. And you can like project Netflix onto the wall, like people will have TVs anymore. And you just project what Netflix on that wall. And if I’m watching it with my wife, I can just share with her and we can both be watching Netflix on the same wall in virtual space, like kind of things absolutely crazy. So like all my message notifications and stuff will be there. So if you if you’re not getting into VR now with a very cutting edge, you will be in the next 10 or 15 years. I’m sure it’s

Jamie

cool. Cool. So yeah, if else, folks, Justin is going to teach you VR, and you’re going to be awesome at it, because Justin’s the best.

Justin

Appreciate it.

Jamie

Awesome. Well, like I said, Justin, thanks for being on the show. I’ll put loads of links to all the stuff. So I may have to ask you offer to send me some links and stuff. But I’ll, I’ll make sure they’re on the show notes. And yeah, thanks for so much for talking. It’s been super exciting to hear. This is this is what I love about the podcast, right? So her about doing this show is I get to meet people who are so excited about the technologies that they’re I use the word play, right. But I don’t mean like playing or I mean like Right, right. Let’s see what we can build. I’m so I’m so enamoured with people when they’re so excited about let’s do this thing. Check this out. Right. Like

Justin

it’s so fun. This is so cool. Yeah. All the different stuff I can do. Like I try to tell my wife about and she’s like, fine, dear.

Jamie

Yeah, exactly.

Justin

Yeah, I’m kiyomi hanging this picture of

Jamie

the application. All the pictures you want. Yeah,

Justin

here’s classes, you could just put whatever picture you want. The picture looks different for me than it does for you. Absolutely.

Jamie

Maybe you can use Google to pull.

Justin

I think that’s actually a thing that Bill Gates has, like he like has like a lapel that he wears in his house. And so when he walks into a room, all the pictures changes, the ones that he likes him, his wife walks in the room while the pictures changed, like, the pictures that she likes. It’d be like, it’ll be like that in VR. Yeah, like I’m super excited for this technology to like get off the ground and start running but like we just need like more people to get into it. Start making stuff and it’s I can feel the wave start to build a little bit like it this year. And last year, like I feel like it started especially with everyone Big River remote and virtual. It’s starting to like gain popularity and this new the Oculus quest coming out. But yeah, we just need more developers just making stuff trying stuff out. Because it’s, if you get in it now you could probably you’d be the the guy to go to here in the next 510 years. Once everything starts to shift over Facebook has a fifth of its employees working on virtual reality development. just insane. They have like, like something like 60,000 employees now and a fifth of them are working on some kind of virtual reality application development can be crazy.

Jamie

That is that is cool. Excellent. Well, with that bombshell, I think. Yeah, no, it’s it’s been a lot of fun. I really appreciate you being Yeah.

Justin

Thanks for having me on. This has been super cool. No worries.

Jamie

No worries. This has been a lot of fun. But yes, yes. It’s time to say goodbye. So. I guess. See you next time. I mean, look, maybe maybe we can have you back on the show in a couple of months. See what you’ve built. Maybe.

Justin

Oh yeah,

Jamie

that’d be super cool. Once a year or something I see what see what see what

Justin

totally down. Excellent. Oh yeah.

Jamie

Excellent. Well, that being said, Thank you ever so much, Justin and yeah, catch you again. See ya

The above is a machine transcription, as such there may be subtle errors. If you would like to help to fix this transcription, please see this GitHub repository

Wrapping Up

That was my interview with Justin Barnett about building Virtual Reality applications in .NET using the Unity game engine. Be sure to check out the show notes for a bunch of links to some of the stuff that we covered, and full transcription of the interview. The show notes, as always, can be found at dotnetcore.show, and there will be a link directly to them in your podcatcher.

And don’t forget to spread the word, leave a rating or review on your podcatcher of choice - head over to dotnetcore.show/subscribe for ways to do that - and to come back next time for more .NET Core goodness.

I will see you again real soon. See you later folks.

Follow the show

You can find the show on any of these places