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Technical tutorials

When will mobile VR really land?

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Hema-VR-2-300x225There is a noticeable growth of VR taking place. The big masses are getting more and more familiar with the possibilities of virtual reality. In The Netherlands, where I live, there are obvious signs of this. HEMA, a large Dutch discount retail chain, started selling a variant of the Google Cardboard for €15,-  (https://www.facebook.com/hema/videos/890408424342498/). This  brings the VR experience to the ordinary guy or girl that owns a smartphone.

Although VR is slowly getting to the masses, in my opinion the VR market still lacks content. There are some cool apps available in the App stores, but we’re still waiting for the awesome apps that cause mobile VR to break through. I’m hopefully waiting for the first social VR community like Instagram or Vine to pop up.

Some cool VR apps I found:

  1. VRSE – awesome virtual reality clips
    1. Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shakingearthdigital.vrsecardboard
    2. IOS: https://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/vrse-virtual-reality/id959327054?mt=8
  2. Insidious VR – promotion campaign for the movie Insidious 3 in virtual reality
    1. Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.focus.insidiousCardboard&hl=nl
    2. IOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/insidious-vr/id989844820?mt=8

VRSE

So see growth of audience and we got some awesome apps, why is mobile VR not booming yet?

I think one of the reasons might be that VR app developers are still searching for the right way to do user interaction in VR. Are we going to use Bluetooth controllers? Will hand gestures become the way to interact? Clicking by focussing on objects or other ways of head tracking.

Another reason might be that it’s just not very practical and not yet socially accepted to put on VR glasses. This means that app developers must provide a real benefit in VR apps before users will overcome the obstacle of putting on glasses. Currently the immersive experience in apps like VRSE and Insidious VR are providing a good enough reason. But I’m very curious about how apps that have less focus on creating an immersive VR experience will pull their users into the virtual reality. Think of VR websites or apps like weather forecasting or an app providing information about traffic jams.. What benefit will VR create for these apps?

Augmented reality = Awesome!

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Augmented reality, simply stated, is adding or adjusting your vision of reality by using a computer element.
Last night Steven, a friend mine, came over and brought a little toy. The META1. So I had the opportunity to play around with these augmented reality glasses.

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META1 is able to track hand movement and identify some gestures. But I have to say, it felt a bit unnatural to make gestures in open space and it needed some tries before having my click gestures really recognized and processed. But chances are, a part of the problem was my stake here.

We also tried the META1 looking outside. I was really impressed by the view of the hologram screen in a colorful outside environment. It was still really sharp and good looking! Being able to take this thing outside or anywhere you go, would open up options and applications we can’t even start to imagine. Although applications are still few, I’m really excited about augmented reality and can’t wait to see it becoming adopted by the big crowd.

How to move a large MySQL database between servers?

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Migrating a large MySQL database from one server to another? One of these three options might fit your needs:

  1. Use rsync to synchronize the data folder of MySQL
  2. Use mysqldump and mysql commands
  3. Master-Slave replication (also with mysqldump and mysql)

In this article I will go over the characteristics of each approach, sum up the advantages and disadvantages and give a step-by-step example for tranfserring a MySQL database using the mysqldump and mysql commands approach.

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