Social Icons

Experiments with Virtual Reality and MIT App Inventor

Submitted by hal on

Interest in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) applications is exploding. Last month's Pokemon Go craze barely hints at what's coming. Should we look forward to App Inventor creating apps with VR and AR?

I want to give a shout- out to Kseniia Shumelchyk , who worked with MIT App Inventor this summer in Google's Summer of Code program, creating App Inventor apps for Google's Cardboard viewer. You can see her paper about this here:

Experiments with Virtual Reality and MIT App Inventor

Kseniia's paper presents two demo apps -- one that shows a panorama view and one that shows a 3D object. You can run these demos, or build them for yourself and modify them. Kseniia's project uses an auxiliary Java app that provides interface for the App Inventor ActiviyStarter to call the Google VR libraries.

This work is only just starting: There's a lot to do to integrate mode VR and AR capabilities into App Inventor, and even more to do in creating great App Inventor apps that use these capabilities.

Thanks, Kseniia, for showing us how to get started!