Barth Cave

Okay, I know what you are thinking: “Non Euclidean Black holes? What is this guy talking about?”. I know, I told myself so at first, but bear with me, it is actually fun!

What is a black hole?

A black hole is a region of space where the gravitational field get so strong the bending of spacetime becomes very noticable (and deadly, mom’s spaghetti). It becomes so strong that scientists predict the bending becomes infinite at its center at what is called a singularity. This is where the laws of physics breaks down and we don’t know what happens.

Realtime shader programming is challenging. Although the GPU is very fast, when adding more and more shaders, you always reach a point where your GPU is no longer fast enough. This is where optimization comes into play.

Shaders can be optimized in 2 ways: improve the shader code itself, which can give decent improvements, and precomputing data, which can make the difference between 20fps and 500fps.

In this blog post series, I will be presenting how I optimized the shaders of Cosmos Journeyer: a procedural universe running in the web browser.

Have you ever been in a supermarket and felt overwhelmed by the task of grabbing objects from the shelves? I know, i know.

Of course you have! This feeling of frustration is not uncommon for people not using advanced VR selection techniques in real supermarkets.

That is why we will explore some techniques that could be used to make your VR experience more enjoyable while shopping for groceries.

Raycasting from the eyes

In mainstream VR, the most common selection technique is raycasting from the controller. It is simple and cheap to implement, but having to move the hands around can be tiring.

Using your gaze allows for a very natural way to select distant object (the reach is infinite). It is used in newer headsets such as the Apple Vision Pro that take advantage of cutting edge hardware.

When talking about VR nowadays, we often think about headsets and controllers. But VR is far more diverse than you would think at first glance. In this post, I will present the CAVE system, an alternative to headsets that is still used today in many research labs.

What is a CAVE?

CAVE stands for Cave Automatic Virtual Environment. It is a room where the walls are screens and where you can walk around freely. It is usually achieved by using projectors and tracking systems. The first CAVE was built in 1992 at the University of Illinois at Chicago Electronic Visualization Laboratory.

Let’s do some real VR development! The school lent me an Oculus Quest, so I will be doing the next tutorials with it.

What are we doing today?

Okay so last week we created a simple game, following the Roll a ball tutorial from Unity. The ball was controlled using the keyboard, but today we will control it by grabbing the game board with our hands, and moving it around to make the ball roll!

Hello again! This is the second part of my compute shader series. If you haven’t read the first part yet, you can find it here.

Now that we know how to create simple compute shaders, we will see how to parameterize them with uniforms.

No, not that kind of uniform!

What are shader uniforms?

Last time we added 2 arrays on the GPU. What if we wanted to add the first one to twice the second one? We would have to change the underlying WGSL code to do so.

This blog post is the 2nd in the VR with Unity series.

This week, we are setting a small scene in Unity to get familiar with the editor and have something to work with in VR next week. This is essentially the Roll a Ball tutorial from Unity, but with a few changes.

If you already know how to use Unity, you can go crazy and expend on Roll a Ball as long as the core mechanic is the same (we will need it next week).

Welcome to my tutorial on compute shaders using WebGPU and BabylonJS! It is meant to be accessible to beginers and then to provide concrete use cases of compute shaders in the context of terrain generation and grass rendering.

What is a compute shader?

Let’s say you have an array of numbers like this:

let numbers = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10];

Now if you want to add 1 to each number, you can do it like this:

Hello, welcome to my blog! This is the first post of a series of posts about VR development with Unity. I am currently a student at Telecom Paris and writing this blog is part of our assignment. I will try to keep things as simple as possible so that everyone can follow along.

For this first part, I will only cover the setup part of our development environment with Unity. If you already have Unity installed and know how to use it, you can skip this part.