In the past year I’ve had the opportunity to participate in two visionOS hackathons and two XR conferences – indications that mixed reality is still going strong in 2024.
VisionDevCamp happened at the end of March in Santa Clara, CA and was my favorite for a variety of reasons including that it was a chance to reconnect with my friend Raven Zachery who ran the event with Dom Sagolla. I also got to meet a ton of Unity and iOS developers from around the country who are now the foundation of the visionOS community.
Coming out of that, Raven was asked to organize a workshop around visionOS for AWE in mid-June in Long Beach, CA. I had lots of plans about various rabbit holes I could go down about visionOS development but Raven encouraged me to keep things high level and strategic and I’m glad he did.
In September I had my second hackathon of the year at Vision Hack, an online event around visionOS organized by Matt Hoerl, Cosmo Scharf and Brian Boyd, jr. I basically spent three days online mentoring and helping anyone I could. That was a blast and I really loved all the skills and enthusiasm everyone brought to the event.
Then this past week I participated in the Augmented Enterprise Summit in Dallas, TX. I was on a panel there with Mitch Harvey, Andy Hung, Lorna Jean Marcuzzo and Mark Sage.
In that time, I also did a short course for XR Bootcamp to help Unity developers become familiar with Xcode and visionOS and participated in putting together a couple of proposals for the Meta Quest Lifestyle accelerator program.
It’s been a busier year than I really expected. I’m very happy to be closing in on almost a decade of AR headset development.