March 16: Opting out of Qualcomm’s MWC invite (offer sans travel reimbursement), I showed my first ClayAR table/booth-ish demo at SVIGDA Game Tech Night. Free, of course. The deal as always with my startup’s is that I put in no initial financial investment other than my time. (Devices used direct from manufacturer or carrier. Even hitched a ride there!) Lots of interesting feedback for this indie dev to muse on and add to v003.

There was a good mix from different sectors of the games industry — from recruiters to in-game monetization people to graphics designers and even Unity developers(!). The first two might be interesting for ClayAR as a service. It’s fairly simple runofthemill backend work to setup a microeconomy where people can trade and sell their clayar sculpts, for others to expand upon, or even take into their existing pipelines (or print). Who knows, one day, recruiters might recruit people to sculpt clay. o.O

Graphics designers/developer provided some feedback def. to be incorporated in upcoming builds:

Known Bugs: Gotta fix the localScale bug in View mode that froze (perceptively!) the zoom out/in. AR Cam/toggle second toggle (from default gray cam to AR) crashes on Snapdragon devices.

UI finetuning for iPad and tablets and other interfaces – make sure sliders are more easily accessible. Especially accelerometer strength slider.

Sensor Extremes: adjustable and tunable per taste

Materials and Shaders – people seemed to like the toggle, but on the iOS devices, difference in GPU lighting made the nice-looking shiny shader on the Android look with alienscopic lights (think SL with facelight 5000). Lighting control and Materials lab to be added in v003 or v004 (actually rather easy, just need to figure out how to make such an interface intuitive, to keep ClayAR Lite accessible to casual users).

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March 17: At the ERT Dinner, Max Skibinsky and others suggested expanding the ClayAR marketplace so that people can take what they create and apply simple game “behaviors” to it, such as the ability to AR kick a weird ball they sculpted. Gamification to creation with a tutorial mode that teaches you where to press where to lathe a simple clay cup (similar to step-by-step drawing guides), with the idea being to let amateur artists feel like real artists. Using bump accelerometer as a way to easily transfer clay mesh from one device to another was also suggested. Bump accelerometer tag!