This week's Wednesday Evening Training: continuing Virtual Reality with Unity3D and getting to know BabylonJS

This Wednesday Evening Training, we have continued our exploration of Virtual Reality using Unity3D. In previous sessions, we already learned what Unity3D can do, so we continued our handson labs guided by our Unity3D champion Alexandra Belzon.

We have also started exploring BabylonJS, with which I have played around past weeks.

We know Unity3D, but what is BabylonJS?

BabylonJS is an open source 3D engine based on webGL and JavaScript. With BabylonJS you can create well performing 3D models and animations, even on your mobile. You can "walk through" your model, use a cardboard VR headset and implement augmented reality applications. It's a rather recent technology, but the platform is growing fast in popularity.

There are a lot of applications for BabylonJS, e.g. in product and data visualization, gaming, education. Recently I even stumbled upon an application of BabylonJS in Microsoft SharePoint, visualizing and manipulating data and documents in 3D. See the links below for more information.

This evening, we saw a lot of demo's and code examples and we did our first handson labs. In the past weeks I've experimented using BabylonJS for creating a 3d model of Archimate architecture views, generating JavaScript from Archi XML's (.achimate files) using XSLT. We did a code walkthrough and in the next sessions, I'll be showing progress on my prototypes.

To be continued for sure!

Further reading

Do you want to read more on BabylonJS? Here are some links...

BabylonJS portal: https://www.babylonjs.com
BabylonJS Playground (online editor): https://www.babylonjs-playground.com
BabylonJS examples (select, view, edit): https://doc.babylonjs.com/examples
BabylonJS GitHub repo: platform software, tools, extensions, reusables: https://github.com/BabylonJS
BabylonJS online editor: http://editor.babylonjs.com
BabylonJS Meshes Library: https://github.com/BabylonJS/MeshesLibrary
Building up a basic demo with Babylon.js: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Games/Techniques/3D_on_the_web/Building_up_a_basic_demo_with_Babylon.js
BabylonJS Sandbox - Drag and drop gltf, glb, obj or babylon files to view them: https://sandbox.babylonjs.com/
Babylon101 - Online course: https://doc.babylonjs.com/babylon101/
Introduction to WebGL 3D with HTML5 and Babylon.js: https://mva.microsoft.com/en-us/training-courses/introduction-to-webgl-3d-with-html5-and-babylonjs-8421
Microsoft is bringing the SharePoint work environment to virtual reality headsets: https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/21/17376422/microsoft-sharepoint-spaces-mixed-reality-virtual-reality-features
BabylonJS on Twitter: https://twitter.com/babylonjs
Google Cardboard: https://vr.google.com/cardboard/get-cardboard/

Past Wednesday Evening Trainings

You'll find post of previous sessions here: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?keywords=%23wednesdayeveningtraining

Next week

In next week's Wednesday Evening Training, we'll be having a "klusavond" (translated into English as "a typical Dutch evening of doing, learning and a lot of fun". There will be plenty of room for all the technologies we have learned so far. This kind of session form an excellent opportunity for mixing technologies, creating applications using multiple technologies.
In my opinion, a good way to create new idea's and innovate and having a lot of fun in the meantime!


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