RK's Rambling

  This is a news close to my heart. My project "Immersive Payment" has been awarded with Grant for the Web , and I will be focusing on using Web Monetization to enable Micro Payment and for Web Mixed Reality assets, as well as for 3d contents. It took me almost five months from learning about the initiative to actually getting thee Grant. It all started back when in Mozilla TechSpeaker call a fellow TechSpeaker and a friend Andrzej Mazur explained bout the program. He himself is also an early awardee . After the talk, I got really excited and interested in the potential and concept of Web Monetization, however, it wasn't until June that I really decided to apply. The application process was a bit of roller coaster ride for me. I had an idea of what I wanted to do and also explored what is possible right now. But a bit of termoil in my personal life kept me from going beyond toy implementations. Fast forward to June end and I finally had the project chalked out with init...

In our last blog post ( part 1 ), we took a look at how algorithms detect keypoints in camera images. These form the basis of our world tracking and environment recognition. But for Mixed Reality, that alone is not enough. We have to be able to calculate the 3d position in the real world. It is often calculated by the spatial distance between itself and multiple keypoints. This is often called Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). And this is what is responsible for all the world tracking we see in ARCore/ARKit. What we will cover today: How ARCore and ARKit does it's SLAM/Visual Inertia Odometry Can we D.I.Y our own SLAM with reasonable accuracy to understand the process better Sensing the world: as a computer When we start any augmented reality application in mobile or elsewhere, the first thing it tries to do is to detect a plane. When you first start any MR app in ARKit, ARCore, the system doesn't know anything about the surroundings. It starts pro...

Reading Time: 7 MIn Some of you know I have been recently experimenting a bit more with WebXR than a WebVR and when we talk about mobile Mixed Reality, ARkit and ARCore is something which plays a pivotal role to map and understand the environment inside our applications. I am planning to write a series of blog posts on how you can start developing WebXR applications now and play with them starting with the basics and then going on to using different features of it. But before that, I planned to pen down this series of how actually the "world mapping" works in arcore and arkit. So that we have a better understanding of the Mixed Reality capabilities of the devices we will be working with. Mapping: feature detection and anchors Creating apps that work seamlessly with arcore/kit requires a little bit of knowledge about the algorithms that work in the back and that involves knowing about Anchors. What are anchors: Anchors are your virtual markers in the rea...

I am part of a program called Mozilla Reps. Though I am involved as a volunteer contributor with Mozilla for quite some time now, I am relatively new to the Mozilla Reps program and hardly know anything about the program apart from my scope of work in it. Apparently, this is the Election time for voting the nominated candidates for the Council who will spearhead the program for the next session. Since I am new to the program reading about everyone's election campaign and hearing about what they will do for the program was not giving me any clear motivation to vote for anyone specific. Though this wasn't anything super important, I still thought since I have a bit of time in my hand why not do something interesting about it. This is my own impartial way of voting  for those candidates. How the voting works: Each of the candidates was asked a specific number of questions and they all answered in a public forum for all of us to read and evaluate those answers. We ...

At the end of last year, I was invited to speak at the Immersive Technology Conference, which took place at the University Of Houston. It was a two-day event with my talk being the first one. That always is something I simultaneously hate and still crave for. Because even if it's stressful, that is the only timeslot which allows me to actually listen to and enjoy other talks after me. Otherwise, I keep fretting over my own and can't concentrate on anything else. The conference line-up was pretty good. I enjoyed the talk by Ann McNamara. Ron Dagdag, Brian Dornbos and Angel Muniz. The only problem was the two rooms had conflicting sessions so I had to prioritize and choose. Which made me miss the talk by Chris Gerty from NASA since my own talk had a clashing slot. The event also had a few expo stalls. And I managed to try my first Hololens experience here. Admittedly I look a bit foolish in these glasses. This also was the first conference as a Mozilla Tech...

  I was invited for a talk at Mobile Day, Mexico last week on 31st October. Mobile Day is a day of conferences aimed at the development of business mobile applications. It consists of a series of lectures, workshops, and a showcase. Mobile Day 2017 was focused on Cross-platform mobile development, especially Progressive Web Applications, Cognitive services (chatbots, recognition of language and images), Virtual and augmented reality and User experience design for mobile applications. I was speaking about Web Mixed Reality at the session. Though initially my session was focused on WebVR and AR, " Virtual Reality for Humans: Build your world using WebVR and aframe " judging from the reaction of the audience and what interaction I had with them, I tweaked it to include the full spectrum of Mixed Reality. The event was held at "Salón Los Candiles Polanco" which essentially was housed a Hospital as well. The venue was a spacious one and my only complain with the venue ...

It's almost no secret that I love Open Source Bridge. There are plenty of super awesome developer conferences out there. A lot of which I never visited. But even among the ones I was fortunate enough to visit, Open Source Bridge is very special. This all-volunteer run conference has a special place in my heart and this time it was my third time visiting it. The first two times were pretty interesting for me too. The very first time I visited Open Source Bridge was in 2015, to talk about my first contribution to Firefox OS Keyboard . It was my first talk at a conference in the United States, and at a developer conference. Needless to say, I was pretty tensed and excited as well. I still remember that talk, and also OSB made a video of the talk so that I would not forget -_- In 2016, I was invited to present a talk regarding some IoT work which at that time was still important to Mozilla. OSB stopped recording videos from that year, but this resulted in an opensource.com arti...

Linux Foundation held a combination of three events in China as part of their foray into Asia early this year. It was a big move for them since this was supposed to be the first time Linux Foundation would hold an event in Asia. I was invited to present a talk on Hardening IoT endpoints . The event was held in Beijing, and since I have never been to Beijing before I was pretty excited for the talk. However, it turned out the journey is pretty long and expensive . Much more than a student like me can hope to bear. Normally I represent Mozilla in such situations, but the topic of the talk was too much into security and not aligned much with the goals of Mozilla at that moment. Fortunately, Linux Foundation gave me a Scholarship to come and speak at LinuxCon China which enabled me to attend LinuxCon and the awesome team at Mozilla TechSpeakers including Michael Ellis and Havi helped me get ready for the talk. The event was held at China National Convention Center. It's ...