Currently my home office has been largely taken apart so that I can lay hardwood in the room so my vive is packed away. I’m running through the other things I want to come up to speed on as I move forwards and the list is getting large.

Lots and lots of hopping around on my end. At the moment I don’t have anything here that I HAVE to do so I’m just hitting things as they catch my attention. In the long run I’d love to capture some of the interesting complexity of the board wargames I played in college and play with 3D immersive environments (not sure these two exactly mix). Add in the real world bits from 3D printing and such and that’s about where I’m at…

• OpenGL in all of its forms has been on there for some time.
  I’ve done some work with 3D APIs in the past, but things have come a long way since then. This seems like to most powerful way to build things, but clearly has the steepest learning curve.
• OpenVR appears to be the vive’s mechanism for bolting OpenGL rendering into the VR framework.
  Going to have to play with this seriously once I get things back together in the office.
• OpenCV seems to be a decent toolkit for acquiring images and processing them.
  I’d love to be able to fuse the VR environment with items (especially things like hands) that are captured separately but lie within the field of the VR system. Perhaps using the controllers to locate the hands initially and then allowing the user to put the controller down and work with a hand or fingers for finer detail. Wondering if a second webcam would help with this by providing binocular views…also wondering if an LED beacon on the finger tips might help. Need to play with this.
• Computer Vision in general
  Part of the OpenCV item but broader. I have substantial background in image processing and 3D math but little in the area of segmentation and object recognition in images. Looking to backfill this with some reading in the area. Several books on my shelf or in the process of being read. Lots to learn and some gaps in my math background to deal with.
• RESTful web interfaces, particularly hosted on LAMP
  My main web hosting is a shared, LAMP based hosting. If I want to build code that allows multiple players to interact with a common state then I’ll need to provide access to the MySQL back end on my site through some interface. RESTful interfaces have served me well in the past and I’m expecting them to serve me well in the future
• SQLite for local storage
  SQLite seems like the best fit for the sorts of local, searchable storage that I see in the near future. MySQL or MariaDB are more powerful and more scalable but require much more care and feeding to make use of this power.
• Unity for quicker VR and 3D designs
  I’ve been tending to look at OpenGL and OpenVR as they are the professional tools for building 3D and VR code (at least one choice). Lately as my time has been consumed by work and home projects I’m thinking that some familiarity with Unity would permit me to do certain things more quickly and get results that are nicer that I’d otherwise have time to achieve.
• Machine Learning largely as an adjunct to the computer vision investigations.
  Much of the computer vision work out there seems to use statistical methods and machine learning to  train the recognizers. Reading a few books on machine learning to come up to speed on what’s where and why.
• JavaScript, WebGL and related bits.
  Another possible area of interest. Smaller, low intensity board game like games seem to fit this environment very, very well. No install on the target system, relatively low system requirements. Pretty much the polar opposite of the VR side of things.
• Node.js because I’m curious.
  Being able to wrap together a web server with programmable back end in JavaScript with a tiny footprint and low learning curve is just cool. I can see many places where node would be handy to have around. Now I just need to find time to come up to speed.
• Blender because 3D programming isn’t much use if you don’t have 3D art assets to go with it.
  Blender seems to be the high power, free option out there (seems like the GIMP of 3D). So far i haven’t even made it to the point of installing blender at home, but I’ve started reading a couple of kindle books.
•  3D Printing because I should have a printer headed this way come the beginning of the year.
  I’ve been poking at RepRap machines for some time now but never getting enough time to take things seriously. Now I will have what looks like a pretty decent machine to get started with and can perhaps also print out RepRap vertices to move forward on a machine I can play with. So many places this could go…laser cutter would be interesting and probably not prohibitively hard to put together with a 3D printer available.