I now have the basic terrain system with water working for Zotbox. This all runs very smoothly on the Quest 2 with a lot of headroom for future CPU/GPU needs. I use the Quest 2 for testing since this is the baseline. The terrain is scalable so on Quest 3 there will be a larger view distance for example. Getting to this point hasn’t been easy and I am very excited for where this is… Continue reading
I have been slowly working on rebuilding the entire terrain system for Zotbox with a Minecraft style block terrain while also shifting over to the URP from the legacy built-in renderer. I am now at a point where I am excited to reveal all the coolness of where this is heading. Zotbox and No Future were originally created using a tile based terrain system that was flat with each tile being 10mx10m. This provided a… Continue reading
I recently found a great channel if you are interested in learning the new Unity XR framework. Valem is really cool and he has a series called Introduction to VR in Unity – UNITY XR TOOLKIT that provides a nice foundation for basic cross-platform VR interaction. This is excellent for beginners and is pretty easy to follow along. I just love listening to this guy!
Recently BUG had a great presentation by Jonathan Linowes of Parkerhill XR Studio on the new multi-platform XR framework that is now in Unity 2019.3. This is a replacement for the existing legacy XR integrations that were built into the engine in recent years. If you have been doing any VR development since the DK1 you have likely been through the ups and downs of Unity VR integrations which have been quite the ride. There… Continue reading
After four amazing years at Wayfair doing really cool XR projects I am now moving on! I am hoping to find some new and exciting projects to get involved in. Going forward I plan to work on some of my own concepts while looking for freelance Unity development opportunities!
I have many years of experience with Unity and leading XR platforms and devices – SteamVR, Oculus, Magic Leap, HoloLens, Google Daydream/Cardboard/ARCore etc. I also have plenty of experience doing mobile development and performance optimization with Unity including on standalone devices beyond phones like Oculus Quest and Magic Leap One.
I am willing to take on any project. I am reliable, detail oriented, and passionate about what I work on. Check out my LinkedIn profile to see more about my skill set, past projects, and published experiences.
If you need help with a Unity project feel free to contact me via mike@pixelatedramblings.com or reach out through LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.
After switching Alien Assimilator over to Steam VR I wanted to figure out what options there were for spatialized audio. I ended up searching around some on the internet and found this great post that covers the Oculus, Google and Valve spatializers. I had the same requirements they outline: Free to use and ship in your app. Currently supported by active development. Cross-platform compatibility with Unity. The article does a fantastic job outlining the strengths… Continue reading
Here are a few links that I have found helpful to get a great overview of optimizing graphics and code in Unity. There are so many great tips in these that you can’t really take them in all at once and I often go back to them when I am dealing with performance issues.
Best practices from the Unity manual:
Tutorials from the Unity learn site:
When I have time I want to add a Unity Tips page to the blog and start putting these kinds of links in it. There are also some good general links in the sidebar.
A few years ago I purchased some property in the mountains of southern Vermont where I am planning to eventually build a house. It’s a beautiful place and is about 15 acres with approximately a third of that open fields and the rest woods. There is a stream, a farm pond, and a three season cabin on the lower portion that is enjoyed many weekends throughout the year – except the coldest parts of the… Continue reading
So I decided to spend some time with Steam VR and try the new Steam VR Unity Plugin 2.0. I am mentoring at the Reality Virtually hackathon at MIT next week helping represent Wayfair and the Next team there and wanted to be knowledgeable of all these recent changes. I also wanted to test my current game project in both the Rift and the Vive so now seems like a good time. I currently have… Continue reading
I wanted to discuss Pica Voxel which is a great little voxel framework for Unity that I have been using in my latest project. It is written entirely in C# and works pretty well. I have had success with it and plan to use it as the core in my next project. The best thing I like about it is that it has shaders that produce a really nice flat shaded look. The… Continue reading
If you are not using Unity Hub to manage all those versions of the engine you have installed you should get it now (download is at the end of the linked Unity Blog post). I have been using it for a while and find it almost indispensable for managing the installs, related components, and launching the right one for various projects.
You can likely surmise from the absence of posts over the last two years that the update to Lost Loot stalled and lost momentum. I ran into too many issues with performance around the terrain and the trees that made it just not workable and I couldn’t reliably meet frame rate on minimum spec machines. Another big reason was that I felt the third person miniature approach I switched to was ultimately the wrong direction and dependent on a controller that wasn’t the future of VR where room scale and hand presence is the standard. I may jump back into it once Unity revamps the whole terrain portion of the engine but that may be a while!
So, it has been a long while since I put anything on this website and I have decided I don’t want it to go to waste any longer. In that spirit I am now just going to write about my current development efforts and share some fun and insightful things about whatever I am working on. I will also share some tips on Unity and XR where it makes sense but everything will be fairly short and informal. It will be kind of a rambling development blog. 😉
I was very fortunate to be able to attend both Unite 15 and Oculus Connect 2. Unite was is Boston, and since I live there, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to be a part of that. Unfortunately the two conferences were one after the other and even overlapped for a day. This made for a fun but exhausting week of Unity and VR. There were many exciting moments throughout both events, and way… Continue reading
I don’t attend many conferences, but when I first heard about Oculus Connect I knew it was going to be awesome. An invitation only developer conference for something as world changing as VR is just too hard to resist. Now that it is over, I have to say that it has inspired me, and put a human face on Oculus and the larger VR community. I hope they do it the same way… Continue reading
