Tag: 10 Questions

Online, he’s better known as El Bruno, the author of the Innovation Craftsman blog. He is a Spanish developer working as an Innovation Lead in Ontario, Canada for Avenade. Besides his great posts on the HoloLens, he’s also been writing about Kinect development for many years, hosts a Spanish language technology podcast, and is a Microsoft MVP. But what I’ve always admired most about Bruno is his infectious love for coding and making. He is a well I return to when I feel down and need inspiration. Here are his answers to the 10 Questions:

 

What movie has left the most lasting impression on you?
My all-time favorite movie is The Matrix. I still remember the day I went to the cinema to watch this movie and how it basically made me choose to do something related to technology. Before this, I wasn’t even close to a computer.

What is the earliest video game you remember playing?
I’m not a big “gamer”, I’ve got several consoles but just for casual and social fun mostly. However, when I was a kid, I spent a lot of time playing Double Dragon 2. And with “time”, I may say “coins”, I didn’t have access to a console or a computer, and Double Dragon was the only video game available in my zone. I still remember when we passed the “final boss” with a friend, how happy we were, until we saw … there was still one more to kill! It was an amazing winter for me.

Who is the person who has most influenced the way you think?
I’m 40, and I can probably pick a different one every couple of years. Some of my professors, my colleagues, my bosses, very influential people, tech gurus, and so on. Living in 3 different countries also made me switch environments a lot and meet a lot of people. If I must pick one, at the end, I’ll go for my father and mother. They both share with me a set of values, which I believe are the ones guiding me right now.

When was the last time you changed your mind about something?
Yesterday, I was almost going to quit a very hard trail race, and one runner had a T-shirt with the sentence: Any idiot can run. But it takes a special kind of idiot to run 42K.

You can guess the rest of the story.

What’s a programming skill people assume you have but that you are terrible at?
Maybe “Solution Architect from scratch”. I mean, I can pick up a system and do amazing things to improve the complete SA. However, starting this work from zero it’s very complicated for me. I’ve met amazing developers who can easily create a solid base foundation that can be used to create an amazing solution or App. This is a place where I need to improve my skills a lot today.

Bonus answer: I won’t add JavaScript here; I hope I will never be in a position where I need to improve my JS skills.

What inspires you to learn?
I get bored very easily, so I find that learning something new is an effective way to keep me focused. In the last 20 years, I’ve never spent more than 3 years focused on the same technology / platform. This is not an easy task; I need to unlearn tons of concepts and start again. But in the end, it’s very rewarding to learn something new and go from a simple “Hello World” prototype to a full inference reliability model in AI.

What do you need to believe in order to get through the day?
I don’t have a fixed schedule. I mean, yes kids need to go school, I need to prepare their lunch, they got extra activities, there are always some home improvement activities to perform, and I also need to work. My additional activities include running marathons, podcast recording / editing, writing my blog, collaborating with User Groups, and more.

So, since I don’t have a fixed schedule, I usually try to focus on what’s more important to me right now, and I focus all my efforts in that direction. Of course, the balance is always “family first” driven, so I find myself coaching soccer matches, or playing guitar at my kids’ school. These types of activities help me to think in new scenarios, in example: Hololens and kids are always an innovative idea; or to think on more business focused scenarios, in example: should we talk with a Soccer team to discover how Mixed Reality could help them into their daily basis?
At the end, I’m always looking to learn something new and to find some real scenario to apply these innovative technologies / ideas to.

What’s a view that you hold but can’t defend?
This one is easy: “Kinect was (and it’s still) an excellent product”. Most people always talk bad about kinect, and how poorly it was received in the gaming community. I still believe that Kinect was kind of the “starting point” of some of the cool AR / MR experiences we are using today. To have a 3D sensor with body tracking capabilities under $150 was a great experience, and it was the chance for plenty of people to start the “path to 3D apps”. But in the end, unfortunately, the prevailing idea is that Kinect was a failed product.

What will the future killer Mixed Reality app do?
When we have a very smooth and light device, very easy to use, and with a very massive group of people using it, every app will be a killer MR App. I mean, when everyone has a MR device, and people use these Apps without the word “Mixed Reality”, that will mean that people finally are used to the MR concept, so we will see a lot of data augmentation apps, a lot of collaboration or communications apps, and … games. The next big change here will be at the gaming level.

What book have you recommended the most?
Technically I probably need to go for Clean Code, or something similar. But I don’t recommend technical books often. What I really recommend to the people is to read the complete Geralt of Rivia series of books by polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski. It’s an amazing journey of short stories and novels about the Witcher. (This is also the source story for the “The Witcher” games.)

I’ve been crossing paths with András for most of my career in emerging experiences. I first saw him speak about Windows Phone 7 design and his game SongArc at Microsoft’s classic MIX conference in Las Vegas. A few years later we bumped into each other in New York City where we were both assisting Microsoft at a Kinect hackathon. After that it’s been a whirlwind of new technologies and running into each other at conferences and MVP Summits, ending up where we are now with HoloLens and the new Mixed Reality headsets.

Needless to say, András has an insatiable appetite for the latest newest thing along with the stamina to drink directly from the Microsoft hose. He lives in Budapest, Hungary and is currently head of R&D at 360World. With his team at 360World, he’s won the 1st and the 5th HoloLens Challenge. The Red Pill, just one of many cool apps created by 360World, is frequently used around the world to demonstrate the HoloLens spatial mapping capability.

 

What movie has left the most lasting impression on you?
Contact. A somewhat underrated classic, which shows that “cold” science and spiritual experiences can coexist.

What is the earliest video game you remember playing?
On a real computer? It was actually a number guessing game that I written myself on a C64 after learning BASIC from a book – with no access to a computer.

Who is the person who has most influenced the way you think?
My mother. Even though I’m approaching the point in my life where I will have lived longer without her than with her, I can’t even start listing the myriad ways she still affects my way of thinking.

When was the last time you changed your mind about something?
Yesterday. If was a pretty big change, too, having to let go of something that’s been a big part of my life for a long time.

What’s a programming skill people assume you have but that you are terrible at?
I think people who know what programming languages are have a pretty good idea of what I’m good at.

What inspires you to learn?
We’re living in the sci-fi world of my childhood. To be able to create cool sh*t, participate in building this world, and making it a reality, you have to learn.

What do you need to believe in order to get through the day?
That there’s another day tomorrow.

What’s a view that you hold but can’t defend?
I don’t think I have any views that I can’t defend at least in front of myself. If you’re asking about defending with scientific proof – it is the idea that the way people use computing a decade from now will be radically different than the way we use it today. A perfect storm of AI, cloud, and novel computing interfaces (such as Mixed Reality) is coming.

What will the future killer Mixed Reality app do?
I don’t think there’s one killer MR app. I do think however, that in just a few years, MR will be a lightweight, everyday wearable at the price point of a high-end mobile phone. This will make MR the killer of smartphones the way smartphones “killed” desktop computing. Why use a 5” screen when the whole world can be your display?

What book have you recommended the most?
Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. Can history be scientifically predicted? How much power does one person have in the face of history? How does emotion affect judgement?

By day, Cameron is a straight-laced Azure architect. By night, he dons the cowl and cape and writes amazing HoloLens tutorials on his blog, Indubitable Development, to help the wider xR community. Several of these tutorials revolve around building a game that you can even download for your HoloLens called Western Town. Most people will know him best, however, for his tutorial on Spatial Understanding, one of the most difficult topics when developing for the HoloLens. Without further ado, I give you Cameron’s answers to the 10 Questions:

 

What movie has left the most lasting impression on you?
The Matrix because of the amazing technological concepts shown in the film combined with the implications of not having the proper safeguards on AI combined with the ethical implications of technology.

What is the earliest video game you remember playing?
Pick Axe Pete on the Odyssey 2. I was 6 years old and my parents had entered the world of video games, this machine was formative for me, especially because it had a keyboard making me more accepting of computers when I was exposed to the Commodore 64 2 years later.

Who is the person who has most influenced the way you think?
Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of Turbo Pascal and designer of C#, the two languages that have been most impactful on me and the way I think about logic and design patterns.

When was the last time you changed your mind about something?
30 seconds ago, I designed a web service interface, implemented it, decided it stunk, and redesigned it.

What’s a programming skill people assume you have but that you are terrible at? Javascript / Web development, most non developers assume every developer creates web sites, I don’t and I can’t help you make your web site :slightly_smiling_face:

What inspires you to learn?
Learning for the sake of learning, I have a general thirst for knowledge at least associated with technology learning.  This has helped me stay on the cutting edge each time the tech world makes a major shift.

What do you need to believe in order to get through the day?
That although I will never keep up with technology, design patterns, languages, and everything else that goes with our field, I have the ability to learn these items as needed when the time comes and can’t be obsessed with trying to keep up.

What’s a view that you hold but can’t defend?
IOC is the most abused design pattern in software development, it is used where D/I is all that is really needed, or nothing at all.  The hotness of the pattern adds unneeded complexity, maintainability problems, performance issues, and unnecessary resource use.

What will the future killer Mixed Reality app do?
The “killer app” for mixed reality isn’t an app at all, it’s an operating system where everyone is in the same Mixed Reality world overlaid on the entire world at the O/S, level and all of the apps are running and influencing that world simultaneously as well as interacting with each other.

What book have you recommended the most?
There are so many I recommend a lot, but the most fitting for this group is Ready Player One, a must read for anyone in the MR or VR space.

Aileen is a marketing manager for the HoloLens and Mixed Reality Marketing team at Microsoft, and was named one of Next Reality’s Top 50 Influencers in the xR space. For many mixed reality devs, Aileen is the public face of Microsoft—she’s the person who answers your emails and always has a kind word to say when everyone else may be too busy to do so. She is also one of the chief storytellers on the team, charged with answering a deceptively simple question on a daily basis: why HoloLens? Here are her answers to the 10 Questions:

 

What movie has left the most lasting impression on you?
I’ll narrow it down to three! The Iron Giant introduced me to wit, how to embrace uncertainty, and just how beautiful animation can be. Ugh, I love it. Also, brilliant poster design and fan art. James Dean unleashes AMAZING emotional freedom in Rebel Without A Cause. I can hear him now: “You’re tearing me apart!” And that red jacket…aesthetic intoxication, and quite a legacy. Moonlight is beautiful – like HoloLens and spatial sound, it shows the power that audio can have on one’s experience, especially in relation to space and memory. All three movies made intense impressions on me because they exposed just how personal history is. And just how difficult but amazing authoring the truth is.

What is the earliest video game you remember playing?
Oh my goodness, Bugdom was my catnip growing up. My twin sister and I would play it on our laptop (in the Apple clamshell days) for hours on end. When we’d get stuck (almost literally, because as the game’s leading roly poly, we waded in honey to free ladybugs from angsty bees), we’d phone home (or Iowa) for help from our cousin. It would make a STELLAR mixed reality game.

Who is the person who has most influenced the way you think?
My twin sister Keara is a core creative inspiration in my life. Her illustration and burgeoning tattoo portfolio inspire me to always push my practice, rethink what I love, or what I think I’ve mastered. We give each other hell, but as we grow older and geographically farther (she’s in Chicago, I’m in Seattle), we build one and other up. I love collaborating with her. Recently, this manifests as she encourages me to champion stories beyond words. Yes, I’m a writer and a word nerd, but what I love is more than words: It’s the work that words do. And she inspires me to braid diverse mediums and communities together. That’s how you create something bold. Her passion for peanut butter almost eclipses mine, to which I say “challenge accepted” – just one example of the competitive spirit she sparks within me.

When was the last time you changed your mind about something?
I’ll echo everyone in this series: just this morning (if not a few seconds ago). That said, I’m all about proof. You’ll change my mind if you champion something real, in real-time. And the same goes for me: I’m always on a journey to create something contagious, and I love the challenge to explain, unpack, or – even better – simplify my ideas.

What’s a programming skill people assume you have but that you are terrible at?
Wonderful question – I hope it’s obvious that I’m a writer and storyteller by trade! I’ve done Unity workshops (shout out to Marianna Budnikova for her awesome HoloLens app workshop with VR/AR Collective) and love diving into technical successes and stresses. My language and syntax differ from programming, though. 😉

What inspires you to learn?
The people who build and use mixed reality, and the folks who’ve guided me towards where I am today. I’m also inspired to learn because of a question that’s been pounding in my mind since studying creative writing: So what? I love finding and defining why things matter. It’s a drumbeat almost as constant as Seattle rain: So what? So what? So what? Answering this is always a social journey – I meet incredible people along the way.

What do you need to believe in order to get through the day?
I need to believe that creativity matters and that people are willing to be uncomfortable in order to create something equitable and true.

What’s a view that you hold but can’t defend?
There’s no such thing as too spicy. Though I’m always happy to try and defend this…please send your hot sauce recos my way.

What will the future killer Mixed Reality app do?
Remove barriers. Personally, I think mixed reality dissolves the definitions we tolerate today – human, computer, physical, digital – so that people can create, remember, heal, and teach beyond boundaries (my list goes on). You can be a graffiti artist improving your tactile work or you can be a surgeon planning your next procedure, or you could be tomorrow’s version of today’s social media addict. But I think that no matter who you are, with the killer mixed reality experience, you’ll braid together the things that matter, defying space and time.

What book have you recommended the most?
Hmmm. Most recently, Sherman Alexie’s You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me. It’s a beautiful, biting memoir that shares a searing look at motherhood through prose and poetry – makes my heart sing and cry and question. If you want to shake up your idea of sanity, read The Vegetarian by Han Kang. As a vegan, it rattled me (in the best way?). I am in awe of the way Ruth Ozeki fused research and her own life into A Tale for the Time Being. Read that!

I first became aware of Rick because of his remarkable work as a Silverlight MVP with fluid dynamics algorithms. As the technology winds changed, he next became a Surface Table MVP and brought a designer’s perspective to Microsoft’s Natural User Interface initiatives. To everyone’s surprise, he left his comfortable position as Creative Director at Cynergy Systems a few years later to join Microsoft at a time when Microsoft wasn’t known to be particularly friendly toward designers. There he made a niche for himself as a liaison between Microsoft and the creative coding community.

I hadn’t realized how successful he was at this until I attended the Art & Code Conference in 2016 and had creative technologist after creative technologist come up and ask me if I knew Rick. He was applying his corporate resources and contacts toward helping digital artists complete projects such as virtual reality films, winning hearts and minds for Microsoft in the process. At the same time he was also using his talents to teach creative coding skills to the traditional Microsoft developer community in a popular series of Unity tutorials. In his mercurial way, he has now moved on from HoloLens and mixed reality devices to working with artificial intelligence algorithms, discovering new connections between AI and human creativity. If you ever get a chance to catch Rick speaking at a conference or—even better—glimpse him in the hotel lounge and have an opportunity to buy him a drink in exchange for stories, do it. He can spin a tale about technology that will make your head spin.

 

What movie has left the most lasting impression on you?
It would be a four way tie between 2001, Blade Runner, Amadeus and Dune. Growing up in the late 70’s and 80’s, all the Spielberg / Lucas fare is, by definition, highly influential so it’s not even fair to bring them up. But these four supplemental movies impressed upon me, at a very young age, topics of explosive consciousness, exponential human potential, and evolutionary humanity. Those are themes that continue to weave through all my personal and professional art and work.

What is the earliest video game you remember playing?
So, I’m of a particular age where some of my earliest memories were also the emergence of the very first arcade games. At a Marie Calendar’s down in San Diego, I remember playing “TANK!” on a cocktail table top, head to head with my older brother sitting across from me. The form factors were flawless, and this was late 70’s?! It had two joystick controllers, where you would have to push both forward to go forward, both backward to go backward, and then split to turn left or right. Even as a young child, this interface was amazing and natural and felt more ‘right’ then later video games that would impose a joystick / button interface. I didn’t have the vocabulary or training to explain why it felt so superior, I just knew that it did and the experience was better than anything else I had played. It rocked my world and showed me a different way to play arcade games. Subsequently, Space Invaders and Miss Pac-Man ended up devouring most of my hard earned quarters for the next several years.

Who is the person who has most influenced the way you think?
You have to realize in the 80’s, we were still deep in ‘Revenge of the Nerds’ social territory, where there was a strong demarcation between jocks, nerds, artists, etc. So as someone who felt drawn to both design and math, creativity and computation, my hero was obviously Leonardo Da Vinci. Before the internet, before finding communities of like-minded creatives, before finding others of my tribe and when the only access to external knowledge was physically being driven to a library, I would be this introverted, weird artist kid who spent all summer coding on his Timex Sinclair and devouring everything he could find on Leonardo Da Vinci. Between Paul Atreides (Dune), Valentine Michael Smith (Stranger in a Strange Land), and Leonardo Da Vinci, I felt I had my mentors and heroes as companions. People who wouldn’t force me to pick – artist or nerd? People who would encourage me, “why not both!”

When was the last time you changed your mind about something?
Diving into Deep Learning this past year and truly understanding where we are with A.I., the math involved, and where we’re going at an exponential rate has fundamentally changed me as a person at a deep, deep level. I have to explain to people that it has also changed me as an artist and creative, though it is still very hard for me to explain well in words. I’ll try. Up until last year, most of my persona was tied into this Renaissance style, “math behind the art, and the art behind the math” view of life. That’s kind of what I’m known for, and it requires a lot of mastery of color, composition, code, technique, etc. – high skill & high realism. This was great for creative coders as well, as creative coding tends to draw artists that are comfortable with mechanical systems. This was evident in the he type of art I would create (photorealistic and high resolution), the music I would play (Bach, Mozart, lots of math and fugues), etc. I never felt a kinship to Impressionism. It seemed sloppy and lacking. However, since this personal transformation around AI and deep learning, I have shifted from an affinity toward creative mechanical systems, to growing computationally organic systems, and this has changed my views and artistic sensibilities across the board. I’ve expanded as an artist and am absolutely obsessed now with Impressionists like Monet and musically, Debussy and Erik Satie. It is far closer to how these young A.I.s I’m growing process creativity, and this is taking up most of my mental and creative energies – exploring synthetic creativity and non-human, computational systems of creativity. I’m not sure if that answer even makes sense to anyone living outside my head. It will probably require a series of blog posts or YouTube videos to explain it properly, but I’m not there just yet. In short, I was never an impressionist before, but through A.I. and synthetic creativity, I’m finally starting to see what they were getting at and I completely love it. It’s how A.I. are becoming creative as well.

What’s a programming skill people assume you have but that you are terrible at?
Just about everything. I got my start decades ago from early Flash and design agency work, where the focus is on being experience optimized, not scale or production optimized. So I learned to code the way I sketch, a ton of spaghetti code with magic numbers all over the place. I code very personally and iteratively. As a creative process, I tended to work in isolation (before this year’s shift into A.I. collaboration). So many times, production engineers approach me thinking I naturally practice MVC or MVVM, or speak to me as someone who regularly works in SCRUM, etc., and we just come from two different planets. I think I can fuse and prototype very quickly design and emerging technology, plus being able to throw obscure math at the problem always helps, but I am 100% an exploratory and expressive engineer, not a production engineer at all. I think these are two different cultures, and I’m totally ok with that, but a lot of production engineers don’t seem to recognize exploratory engineering as its own discipline and culture.

What inspires you to learn?
Biological systems inspire me. At a formative age, and in my more esoteric readings, I came across this quote from a 19^th century author Alexander Hislop that really left a mark on my young self:

“There is this great difference between the works of men and the works of God, that the same minute and searching investigation, which displays the defects and imperfections of the one, brings out also the beauties of the other. If the most finely polished needle on which the art of man has been expended be subjected to a microscope, many inequalities, much roughness and clumsiness, will be seen. But if the microscope be brought to bear on the flowers of the field, no such result appears. Instead of their beauty diminishing, new beauties and still more delicate, that have escaped the naked eye, are forthwith discovered.”

This nature of biological systems, where majesty and intelligence are fractally nested upon themselves, from the microscopic to the macroscopic, fill me with wonder every day. I feel it is our duty as a species to throw ourselves into the endless tapestry, learn from it, imitate it and defend it. Not continuously learning and sharing has never been a lifestyle option. That’s what drives me and inspires me.

What do you need to believe in order to get through the day?
I believe in the beginning of our anthropic Universe, there was math. This math was manifest in the ratios of the four fundamental forces, the up and down calibrations of the quarks, and the bosons and electrons. The perfect tuning of this math birthed Physics. Physics, in turn, birthed Chemistry and Chemistry birthed Biology. Biology birthed diversity. I need to believe as conscious entities, we have a birthright, duty and responsibility to explore, discover and expand this endless progression. That gets me up and through the day.

What’s a view that you hold but can’t defend?
That everything I just said didn’t happen by chance.

What will the future killer Mixed Reality app do?
I don’t think it is a killer app, to be honest. I think it will be a killer form factor. We need it on our glasses, or on contacts. The form factor has to disappear, or get significantly smaller than what we currently have. Once the interface is transparent, than assuming it has fast bandwidth to cloud based A.I., decent volumetric awareness of one’s surroundings and solid, stereoscopic rendering – all the parts will be in place. Anything before that is still baby steps to get to that, so that’s what I’m both pushing and waiting for.

What book have you recommended the most?
Recently, I’ve been recommending a great new novel that came out this year called Void Star. It is one of the very first books I’ve read that tackles the subject of A.I.s from a post “Deep Learning” awareness and perspective. As such, I think it is going to be the Neuromancer or Snow Crash of this decade. As the saying goes, science fiction writes about the present day through a veil of technology and speculation. It tells us much more about today’s hopes and dreams then about future worlds. As such, most A.I. in science fiction have usually been written as stand-ins for social issues of the day, from Metropolis’ Maria to Hal 9000 to the T-800 to Jarvis. They all slavishly follow the “Turing Test” model of self-obsession with our own humanity. However, Void Star presents computational systems that are the closest I’ve seen to matching the vector of innovation now underway with real systems of artificial intelligence coming online. The strength of true A.I. these days is that they are fundamentally NOT human in their calculations, and so issues of humanity and self-awareness don’t even apply with truly alien computational systems of thought. Plus, it’s just such a great weaving of stories and characters. I loved it and recommend it broadly to anyone working in A.I. or mixed reality.

 

It’s hard to think of someone in the HoloLens developer community more prolific than Jason Odom. Besides working regularly as a HoloLens freelance developer, he also writes for the Next Reality  news site about mixed reality, authored the HoloLens Beginner’s Guide, was technical reviewer for Dennis Vroegop’s Microsoft HoloLens Developer’s Guide, won the third HoloLens Challenge (Wizard Battle), won the Atlanta HoloHack, and manages to be an all around decent human being. (He’ll also be appearing with me on a HoloLens + Mixed Reality panel in September at Dragon*Con 2017.)

 

What movie has left the most lasting impression on you?
I was a television and movie buff for most of my life until the last few years I have completely lost interest in them. There are many films that could be said to have had a lasting impression on me, but the most recent one that left me dazed and mentally energized was Exit Through The Gift Shop. A layered documentary/film that leaves you wondering if any of it is real or a complete work of fiction.

What is the earliest video game you remember playing?
Combat on the Atari 2600—my uncle got one when I was 7 or 8 and that was the beginning of the end.

Who is the person who has most influenced the way you think?
For all of the good and bad, I think it would be disingenuous to blame anyone other than my parents for the person I am today. Though there is a series of musicians, authors, and directors that get to take some blame as well.

When was the last time you changed your mind about something?
About 15 seconds ago … no it was definitely 24 seconds ago.

What’s a programming skill people assume you have but that you are terrible at?
That because I can program one thing, I understand what it all means. I am a very focused developer and do not step far out of the augmented and mixed reality space. My game development days had a little scripting, but I was a level designer and project director, not a programmer. Every single day I learn something new and welcome it gladly.

What inspires you to learn?
The excitement of being better tomorrow than I am today. The idea that maybe I will eventually be to the point that I can create whatever I imagine, be it a mixed reality experience, music, or art, with little effort, time and possibly even minimal planning. Being able to use my various skills together in an improvisational form really pushes me.

What do you need to believe in order to get through the day?
That what I am doing, with the time I am putting in, and the friends and family I am putting off, in order to work and learn more will lead to the explosion I expect and that I will be standing at ground zero. That I can make the experiences that excite people into being part of that explosion.

What’s a view that you hold but can’t defend?
I would not say I can’t defend, but really don’t want to defend would be more accurate. With so many in the mixed reality world, focused on enterprise software and minimal effort being put into quality entertainment and consumer uses (use-case demos aside) there is a chance that consumers never buy into MR, until actual holograms float around them. Of course with what it brings to the workplace, we will be working with MR for the rest of human existence.

What will the future killer Mixed Reality app do?
As I have said many times on Next Reality, it wont be a single app. I will be a collection of apps or the underlying system, bringing various forms of data and control at once from multiple sources.  Once you can play a holographic game in your living room with the kids and the holographic virtual house management system Fredrick, walks into the room to let you know the pizza delivery vehicle just pulled up, we will be getting close. The key is that everyone can see most or all of these various holograms. The shared element is what will push it over the top eventually.

What book have you recommended the most?
A series by Daniel Suarez – Daemon and Freedom(TM). My two favorite books. 10 years or so ago they opened my eyes to what augmented reality could possibly be one day. At which point I began my very impassioned journey to this point. Of course the works of William Gibson and Neil Stephenson are pretty close behind.

While most HoloLens developers come to mixed reality either from line-of-business development or game development, Julie’s background is much more interesting. She is an IT project manager with a scientific background who is learning the technology as an enthusiast, taking courses on Unity and using the HoloDevelopers Slack group as a way to build her knowledge and relationships. Having received support through this community, she also gives back through her online museum, ARtefactVR, and by leading community HoloLens projects like myxd3D – which supports 3D chat on the HoloLens. Julie brings skills and perspectives to the MR community that broaden it and make it richer.

 

What movie has left the most lasting impression on you?
A documentary called Baraka.

What is the earliest video game you remember playing?
Pong.

Who is the person who has most influenced the way you think?
I learn something from every person I interact with, so every moment is different. I can’t think of a person that has influenced me more than another.

When was the last time you changed your mind about something?
This morning.

What’s a programming skill people assume you have but that you are terrible at?
Syntax.

What inspires you to learn?
Curiosity.

What do you need to believe in order to get through the day?
I don’t think about it, I just do it.

What’s a view that you hold but can’t defend?
Life is short.

What will the future killer Mixed Reality app do?
Bring peace to all creatures.

What book have you recommended the most?
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Olivier is a HoloLens developer out of Belgium and one of the organizers of Mobile Dev Day there. His blog, Guruumeditation.net, has lots of good info on mobile development and, of course, mixed reality development.

 

What movie has left the most lasting impression on you?
Too many to mention. Blade Runner, Star Wars, C’est arrivé près de chez vous,…

What is the earliest video game you remember playing?
Pong. 🙂

Who is the person who has most influenced the way you think?
William of Ockham.

When was the last time you changed your mind about something?
This morning, I decided not to refactor this thing.

What’s a programming skill people assume you have but that you are terrible at?
That I am still good at assembly language 🙂

What inspires you to learn?
I have respect for knowledge and curious by nature, so it is just my natural state.

What do you need to believe in order to get through the day?
The best is yet to come.

What’s a view that you hold but can’t defend?
There is nothing after death.

What will the future killer Mixed Reality app do?
Help is in lot of aspect of everyday life be unnoticeable to us in the sense it will be so natural we don’t event realize it is there.

What book have you recommended the most?
Hyperion.

René is officially the Director of Global Innovation at Valorem – unofficially he runs their mixed reality practice, has done an amazing job of attracting top HoloLens talent to Valorem (like Stephen Hodgson), and acts as an ambassador between the Unity world and the Microsoft world. In the past year he’s spoken about mixed reality at leading conferences such as //build, Unite and the Vision VR/AR Summit. He also has serious coding chops, having created and maintained the open source projects WriteableBitmapEx and SLARToolkit. He has been a Microsoft MVP since the Silverlight days.

 

What movie has left the most lasting impression on you?
David Lynch’s take on Dune. I love how the story is told as this surreal, dystopian future, as well as the visual style and the FX back then.

What is the earliest video game you remember playing?
The Great Giana Sisters on the Commodore C64. Of course I loved Cryo’s Dune game on the machine. In general all the games on the A500 were amazing but I enjoyed the Lucas Arts adventures the most back then, especially Monkey Island I + II.

Who is the person who has most influenced the way you think?
My wife! She helped me to get my life right and well, she is just an awesome person. How she plans, organizes everything, the love she shares and hard work is really the key to everything in our life.

When was the last time you changed your mind about something?
Well, just before writing that sentence. I think it is crucial to reflect on your thoughts and be able to change your mind and not be stuck. Be open minded. Say no to dogmatic thinking.

What’s a programming skill people assume you have but that you are terrible at?
JavaScript. But in the end, every developer should be able to pick up a new language and skill within a reasonable amount of time. They all share the same core principles.

What inspires you to learn?
Exploring innovative technologies and helping to change how people will interact with computers. All the innovations with VR/AR/MR (xR?) and AI will make a huge impact when it all comes together. It’s an amazing time to be a developer.

What do you need to believe in order to get through the day?
That our bet on the technology is going to really help us in the future.

What’s a view that you hold but can’t defend?
That AI won’t kill us. Super intelligent AI that outperforms any human intelligence in the not too far future won’t be interested in humans but rather will explore the universe, spread itself and spend time with each other. Humans will also talk with each other and not with apes right? 🙂

What will the future killer Mixed Reality app do?
Cover the full Mixed Reality spectrum and understand the real-world. Augmenting your real-world with virtual holograms using real-world reference points leveraging computer vision but also being able to transport you into another virtual world.

What book have you recommended the most?
Computer Graphics by Foley and van Dam. But it’s been a while.

Jesse founded and moderates the HoloLens Developers Slack group (signing up is easy), which currently has close to a thousand members. It is hard to overstate the importance of this community in fostering a sense of shared vision among mixed reality devs. While Microsoft’s official forums are a great place to go to get your technical questions answered, Jesse’s Slack Team is the place to find camaraderie, mentoring, and the occasional pat on the back when you really need it.

Jesse is also a fulltime mixed reality consultant (Roarke Software) and has a Patreon page where you can follow and sponsor his MR endeavors.

 

What movie has left the most lasting impression on you?
Les Miserables is one of the movies that I go back to over and over for the story and for the different stages of life, changes, and redemption shown.

What is the earliest video game you remember playing?
The Legend of Zelda – I remember play this as a kid when we first got our Nintendo.  At the time the puzzles and the amount of time it took to win the game felt like such a feat.  I remember my mom playing it, and drawing a pretty detailed map of the world so that she understood it better.  Thinking back on that memory, it shows how she approached solving a large problem with a fairly simple yet effective solution.

 

Who is the person who has most influenced the way you think?
I would definitely say my parents on this one.  They both have unique ways of looking at the world, and I talk to them often to get advice and work through my own thought processes.  I often call them to gut check what I am thinking before I react or move on a decision, and I am sure I have managed to avoid some painful situations because of that.

When was the last time you changed your mind about something?
I try not to be so static in my thoughts and opinions that changing my mind is a rare occurrence. I tend to be an optimist, so if anything, I dislike changing my mind to a more negative thought…

What’s a programming skill people assume you have but that you are terrible at?
Programming – People assume I’m good at it, but I feel like I’m not.  That may be the impostor syndrome talking though.  In all seriousness, I think I am terrible at some of the soft skills. Time Management, Focus, Organization – Those are definitely things I struggle with daily.
What inspires you to learn?
I have a very natural desire and curiosity to learn new things and how they work in general.  This has served me well in being a self-taught developer because I just want to learn all these new things that I come across.  If anything, I have a harder time with deciding which things I don’t need to learn right now!

What do you need to believe in order to get through the day?
More than anything I need to remember that I have accomplished much in my life, and that I have more ahead of me.

What’s a view that you hold but can’t defend?

I still rock at Windows Phone… 🙂

 

What will the future killer Mixed Reality app do?
I actually think that with Mixed Reality we will still use apps, but they will be less effort to use, because they won’t seem like apps.  Right now, I have to consciously open my To-Do app to see what is on my plate. 

However, as the platform emerges and all of this technology starts to really integrate (AI/Bots, IOT, Mixed Reality) then we start to see apps that behave more naturally in our world and take less effort to use.  My To-Do list app will just look like a To-Do list on my wall, or even just be me conversing with my AI assistant, who can even notice when I am getting off task and remind me what my real priorities of the day should be.

What book have you recommended the most?
I actually recommend The Count of Monte Cristo to everyone.  It’s a HUGE book, with so many layers of story and character development that it takes reading it multiple times to even come close to noticing all of the different ways everything is tied together.  When you look at the fact that it was written in 1844 is really impressive.  How did Alexander Dumas even keep track of such a large and complicated story in his head?