Author: Kolja

Characters and portraits

Various character sketches, mostly digital; I do enjoy 3D and drawing traditionally, too!

Here’s some portrait pieces, in various degrees of stylization. Haven’t done this in a while, would be good to get back into it.

Inktober

For the Inktober challenge, the task is to produce one ink drawing on every day of October. I usually follow the official prompts, and set myself a subject matter for the month. In 2018, I created a small sci-fi story setting for each prompt – here are my favorites:

In 2017, I wanted to draw animals and be a little more experimental with various types of ink. These were all done on toned kraft paper, which doesn’t take copious amounts of ink so well – sorry for the wrinkles!

Landscape sketching

Every once in a while, I’ll try my luck with landscape sketches in gouache. I like gouache because it allows painting opaquely, and together with my small watercolor kit, it’s still convenient enough to carry around.

Pocket Observatory at Make Munich

Pocket Observatory at Make Munich! Slipped in at the very last minute, and probably had the tiniest desk in the hall. But the response was great, I am still totally overwhelmed by the positive response and all the enthusiasm. A huge THANK YOU to everyone who came over to check out the app on Gear VR! Nice people, great conversations, useful feedback, and even more ideas for future development. After two days working the desk non-stop (together with my wonderful GF) I feel a little spent but very inspired 🙂

Pocket Observatory released for Gear VR

On 3/16, Pocket Observatory has been released to the Oculus App Store for Gear VR! It has taken a lot longer than expected, but in the end, the additional iterations and feedback have improved the product tremendously. Of course, this is only version 1 – there are tons of additions on my list already, and I am open to suggestions 🙂

Here’s a link to the product page in the store.

Venturing into social VR with Pocket Observatory!

The past few weeks I’ve been working away on a really exciting feature for the upcoming Gear VR version of Pocket Observatory: You will be able to invite a friend (on the Oculus platform) and start a voice chat beneath the stars! GPS coordinates are exchanged between the app instances, so players can visit each other’s GPS locations. This is currently under review, and will hopefully be up in a few weeks in the Oculus Store.

To my knowledge, this is the very first social VR astronomy app ever! I’ve been thinking about this for quite a while during initial development, but didn’t realize how easy it would be to integrate using the Oculus platform SDK. Mind you, setting up peer-to-peer networking can still be nerve-wrecking, given the unreliable nature of network communication, but still… managed to pull this off in just a few weeks. Happy!

Check out the updated page at https://pocketobservatory.com for the details. Here’s a screenshot of the chat UI: (thinking about avatars and a shared space experience, too, but that’s for later.)

Educational VR molecules

Now that I’ve gained some experience with Virtual Reality and my astronomy app, I’m thinking educational software for VR could be a worthwhile field for future projects. So I’ve started tossing ideas about, one of which involves playing with molecules in a VR environment.

Aspirin molecule

p5.js Animated Grid

So here’s a simple processing demo I did a while ago, ported to p5.js, a library allowing you to essentially write processing in JavaScript, using an HTML canvas! As you will see when running the demo, JavaScript performance is not really where you’d like it to be when doing animation 🙂 The JavaScript engine of your browser makes a huge difference here. I recommend running this in Chrome, it’s quite noticably faster than Firefox.

Open demo in new browser tab

Source code

Pocket Observatory for Google Cardboard

Just finished and submitted the iPhone / Google Cardboard version of Pocket Observatory! It really paid off to use Unity – porting from Android with the Oculus SDK to iPhone with GoogleVR turned out to be really easy.

Here are the quirks I encountered, might be useful to know if you’re embarking on a similar project:

  • In Gear VR, system messages (e.g., asking for permissions) are displayed properly and can be confirmed while you’re in VR. On the iPhone, a standard system dialog pops up. To deal with location service permissions, I trigger the message from within a special startup scene, before entering VR mode in the main scene.
  • Texture compression support has to be adjusted with the platform. On the iPhone, compression defaults to PVRTC, which requires square textures. The Unity importer stretches non-square textures to make them  compressible with PVRTC. This results in awful artifacts, so I had to go over the compressions options for all of my (non-square) textures.
  • Make sure the text for camera use permission is set in the iOS player settings – in GoogleVR, there is a UI button to allow the user to switch viewers. This will activate the phone’s camera in order to scan the QR code on the viewer. Not setting the text will result in an app crash.
  • Unfortunately, the Cardboard app doesn’t run in the simulator – there is no suitable architecture of the gvr library, so the app crashes at startup. I guess it would be possible to build the library from source, but haven’t tried that yet.

Visit https://pocketobservatory.com for details regarding app features and release plans!