Labs, Sessions, and Meetups (Oh my!)
by Ethan Saadia
Today was a busy Day 3 at WWDC 2021! I began the morning by watching a session detailing advanced graphics and rendering with RealityKit 2, including custom shaders, full control over meshes, and the ability to customise post-processing events. To prepare for my RealityKit Lab at the end of the day, I began trying out as many on the new features as I could in my previous projects and sample apps. As I prepared for my Object Capture Lab to learn more about best practices for scanning, I decided to test out the quality of the scanned meshes by 3D printing the koala I scanned yesterday. Although I reduced the size to speed up printing time, I was impressed at the level of detail I captured with just 64 photos.
At the Object Capture Lab I learned some great and useful tips for improving scans that I will share in a later post. As I worked through trying out more RealityKit features, I joined the Demystify SwiftUI session watch-party at the WWDC Lounges, where Apple Engineers answered questions live as we watched the video. Throughout the day I accumulated an entire list of RealityKit questions across multiple Xcode projects, and the engineers who talked with me were extremely helpful and made the most of our short appointment by going through all of my questions. I have four ‼️ Lab appointments tomorrow, and I can't wait to experiment some more with the new frameworks and learn more from the Apple engineers who built them.
AR Roundtable Meetup
In the virtual Augmented Reality Lab that I built for WWDC Community Week, I gathered a group of developers to discuss augmented reality. I met several people with exciting AR projects, gave an interactive presentation about RealityKit, answered all their questions, and led a conversation about AR on Apple platforms and beyond.
It was especially wonderful to interact with people who have benefitted from my online tutorials and hear about the apps they have built. My favorite part of being a developer is giving back to the community that helped me get started, so hosting this meetup and meeting my readers was an extremely rewarding experience!
I’m compiling a set of short RealityKit code examples that help you accomplish specific tasks in Apple’s new AR framework.