Want a HoloLens and a $100K and a Unity Pro 12 month subscription?

Yes, Microsoft and Unity are giving away cold hard cash as well as subscriptions to Unity Pro.

Oh, yeah … and 3 HoloLens devices!

1st place gets $100K + HoloLens Dev Edition + Unity Pro 12 month subscription

2nd place gets $30K + HoloLens Dev Edition + Unity Pro 12 month subscription

3rd place gets $20K + HoloLens Dev Edition + Unity Pro 12 month subscription

Plus 5 Honorable mentions each get a Unity Pro 12 month subscription.

The contest began on 5/10.

If you receive my emails, then you already know about the contest. If you don’t get my emails, today would be a good day to start 🙂

Simply opt-in on my About page or on the Ultimate HoloLens Resource List page.

Submissions for your app idea need to be in by June 10, 2017.

Then, just 6 days after that… Unity and Microsoft will announce the finalists.

Finalists should build out the app and submit it by October 30.

Winners will be announced in November.

For all the details on what you need to do and how to submit, you can head over to the Unity site.

It’s time to get those creative juices flowing…

2017-05-242017-05-23Chad Carter Leave a comment

Tub of War Game by Martin aka Quill18 (Ludum Dare 38)

This weekend the Ludum Dare game jam and competition took place.

Due to too many other obligations I wasn’t able to take part, but I was able to watch a little while Martin created a great game by himself in just 48 hours. He did it live on Twitch, which apparently he has done for quite a while now.

I really like the idea of a timed jam which forces you to focus on just what is needed to get done.

If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you know that a favorite book of mine is Essentialism. Everything comes with a tradeoff. Saying yes to one thing means saying no to something else – maybe even everything else.

When you are creating something under a time constraint, it forces you to think like an essentialist. You can only do a few things, so focus on them.

You can grab the source code and the executables on Martin’s site at http://quill18.com/ld38/

I made a quick video of me trying out the game Tub of War.

2017-04-262017-04-25Chad Carter Leave a comment

Medieval VR on the HoloLens

The Unity Asset Store is really a phenomenal thing. In a matter of an hour I was able to start a project from scratch and search for free medieval assets and bring them in to a new project without any idea what I was going to create.

First I found free music that can randomly generate itself.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/34407

Then I found a cool cartoon character.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/19641

Finally, I found a neat little cartoon house.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/16674

I started a new project in Unity and brought in the HoloToolkit for Unity and then imported each of those projects.

Simply opening the house scene and removing the First Person camera and adding in the HoloLens Camera and InputManager I was off to the races. I actually placed the camera in the middle of the house and then placed the character in the house facing the camera.

Finally, I created an object to hold the music script to play the music.

I said it was an hour, but it was more like 30 minutes and then another 30 minutes of me deploying to the HoloLens and recording and editing the video.

I’m happy with the results. What do you think? Leave me a comment and let me know!

By the way, this was deployed using Visual Studio 2017. If you are using Visual Studio 2015, stop what you are doing and go grab 2017 right now. It is really excellent.

In order to make Unity use it instead of VS 2015, simply open up preferences and browse to devenv.exe in the VS 2017 folder.

2017-03-152017-03-15Chad Carter Leave a comment

Unity MIDI Player on GitHub

This week I took the MIDI Player that I utilized in my HoloValentine App (get the source code) and put it on GitHub. The source code originally came from a project in CodePlex. The license was a MIT license and the code was originally created for XNA.

I took that and code from folks who had done similar work in Unity and cleaned up some bits to create a MIDIPlayer project that should easily load into any Unity project.

You can find the MIDI Player on GitHub.

Below is a video where I show checking in the latest change of creating a demo scene that plays a MIDI file on demand. The MIDI file loops, but the MIDIPlayer script can be updated to allow for a playlist. The HoloValentine App shows how to create and play a playlist.