Author: Chad Carter

Xbox E3–Jump In

The Electronic Entertainment Expo or E3 is a popular conference where new games and consoles are announced.

There was no expectation of new consoles being announced, but I had even heard murmurs that this would be the last generation of consoles. I didn’t think that would be the case, but you never know.

Fortunately, Phil Spencer, head of Xbox at Microsoft, announced that the hardware team is in fact working on the next generation of consoles. There was no timeframe given and I’d expect it wouldn’t come any sooner than 2020 or 2021, but it was encouraging to see that they are working on the next generation.

There are some great looking games coming as well. It reminded me of my pile of shame… the long list of games I have that I’ve never played. Some were from the Xbox Games with Gold that are free with the Xbox Live Gold membership and some are from where I bought them on sale.

You can watch a small part of the E3 conference where Microsoft commits to gaming in the video this week as well as some changes coming to my YouTube channel.

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Microsoft Buys GitHub

On Monday, the news came out that Microsoft acquired GitHub for 7.5 Billion dollars. As with most things, there are those who think it is great news and those who think the news spells doom for GitHub.

I’m in the former camp. I think this will ultimately be great. Microsoft has said they will continue to have GitHub run as its own entity just like they did with LinkedIn and Minecraft.

You can read both GitHub’s announcement as well as Microsoft’s announcement.

Or you can hear me summarize them while playing some Forza 6 below.

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Unity Project Templates

Starting with Unity 2018.1, Unity Technologies introduced new Project Templates. The 2D and 3D project templates have been a part of Unity for years, but now there are additional ones. They include the following:

  • 3D with Extras
  • Lightweight Render Pipeline
  • VR Lightweight Render Pipeline
  • High Definition Render Pipeline
  • AR Basic
  • AR Sample

Each one has its own strength and weaknesses. High Definition Render Pipeline has the best graphics, but requires a lot of computing power.

If you are doing work for the HoloLens, you probably want to stick with the Lightweight Render Pipeline or just 3D.

If you are using an immersive mixed reality headset / VR headset, you probably want the VR Lightweight Render Pipeline.

In this week’s video I talk more about it here.

You can see Unity’s official blog post which has more information here.

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SharePoint spaces–Mixed Reality for the Enterprise

On Monday, Microsoft had the SharePoint Conference and in the keynote they introduced SharePoint spaces.

SharePoint spaces brings Mixed Reality to the enterprise. The reason why I’m talking about this is because it shows that Microsoft is planning on utilizing the immersive headsets in the enterprise and not just in the consumer market.

SharePoint spaces will be utilizing WebVR and BabylonJS, which makes sense, because SharePoint is a website building tool. Many enterprises utilize SharePoint for their company intranet’s.

If you are on the fence about digging into Mixed Reality and HoloLens development, this should tip you on over to the side of actually doing something to start learning this new way of development.

Head over to LearnHoloLens.com and sign up to learn what you need to develop mixed reality games, apps, and experiences for the HoloLens. This information is the very similar to what you need for the immersive headsets as well.

To see part of the SharePoint Conference keynote, you can watch my video here:

Chad Carter Leave a comment