Software Beginnings

For the time being, I’ve decided to stray away from Unity 3D and the safety of C#’s .NET framework. As much as I love Unity I also felt it was somewhat of a limiting factor for the North Star Project. For anyone who has worked on North Star, you know that the Leap Rig was often awkward and clunky.

As I decided to look for other sources of inspiration, at the time the North Star community created a SteamVR launcher for the North Star. I was more impressed with the launcher aspect of the project.

As you can see it’s a relatively simple UI that completely throws out the need for the Unity rig setup. You just click a few boxes for what you want and launch SteamVR directly onto the headset. So that’s the direction I wanted to use for the Triton. I decided I would build a launcher that will abstract away all the messy details.

Rather than deal with Window’s code to build a visual UI, I opted to use Electron.js. If you don’t know Electron is an open-source framework that allows you to build cross-platform desktop apps using Javascript, HTML, and CSS. It's very easy to get up and running and I so happen to be fairly good at Javascript. JS is a great choice because there have been a bunch of open-source frameworks created by the WebXR community. This made it super easy to get a cool looking stereo 3d rendering into my headset.

The UI aspect looks pretty cruddy right now but some CSS magic will fix that in the future. Here is some more through the lens footage to show you what the green-tiled sphere looks like in mid-air.

Once again I apologize for the image quality. Next up to do is get the Leap Motion JS framework up and running for some hand-tracking. Following that is to get the Intel Realsense plugged in so I can start (hopefully) doing 6DoF Slam tracking. Now at this moment, I’m not 100% sure if I’ll be sticking with the Electron JS setup to pioneer the software side of things. But I think it is a good choice as the WebXR community could use a new open-source device to work with. More thought on that down the line…

Pt. 1 Conclusion

There will be a part 2 to all of this. At the time of me writing this, I am more than halfway done with a new 3d printed prototype that is more advanced then what I’ve shown so far.

I want to focus on getting work done and then I can update you on progress being made. If you’re interested in more short term updates you can follow me on Twitter or by joining the discussion on Dischord.

Thanks for reading.