viernes, 22 de diciembre de 2017

Amazon Sumerian - First impressions

For those who know me and for those who doesn't...as I work as a Developer Evangelist...my main job is to learn, explore and evangelize new technologies and programming languages...so of course...AR/VR had been on my plate for quite some time...

I have played with Unity3D and Unreal Engine...and of course I have developed for the Google Glass, Microsoft HoloLens and Oculus Rift...

When the good folks at Amazon announced Amazon Sumerian you can figure out that I completely thrilled -:D

So yesterday, I finally got accepted into the Beta program, so of course I started to follow a couple of tutorials and get to know the tool -;)

Please be advised that I'm starting...so I haven't tried or used everything...I want to go step by step following the tutorials and trying to understand everything in the most positive way...

Have I mentioned that Sumerian runs on your browser? How crazy is that? No installation...just launch up your browser and start building AR/VR experiences...

When you first launch it, you will be presented with the following screen...



Where you can create a new screen or simply use a template.

Sumerian provides many tutorials, and so far I have only made my way through the first 3...


So here's how my TV room looks like...


As you can see...Sumerian is a full blown editor that provides all the tools that you can find on any other editor...plus many things that I believe are brand new and exciting...

Of course, you can preview your work...


As for the TV Room tutorial...the idea is that below the TV Screen, there's an Amazon Echo, so you can press it to change the videos presented on the screen. For this you need to use a State Machine and also create a script that will manage the different videos. For the scripting you need to use NodeJS...which is really nice as is the language that I mainly use when developing application for Alexa...



This is how my TV Room looks like when playing a video on render mode -:)


Before moving on to learn more about Sumerian...I need to say that the navigation system doesn't seem to be too good by now...you can use the mouse buttons, Tab and Shift...but control keys or AWSD doesn't seem to work like you would expect on Unity3D or Unreal Engine...I have forwarded my question to the Sumerian Team on Slack...so I will update this post as soon as I get an answer :)

*UPDATE* By following the "Lights and Camera" tutorial I found out that while the default camera doesn't allow fine grain navigation...the FlyCam does it! -:D All good in the hood -;)

Till next time,

Blag.
Development Culture.