• The Premise
• The Website
• The Hacks
• A wall of gifs of some of the hacks
• The Takeaways

The Premise

Every day in October 2016, I created VR content for Google Cardboard using JavaScript/WebGL/HTML5 WebAPIs and blogged about it. I built a website to showcase the contributions and then wrote and presented a talk about doing Cardboctober a week after I had finished.

The Website

I designed and built a website to collate and showcase the contributions of all Cardboctober participants. I used Jekyll with GitHub pages for this.

The design features a timeline layout, with each contribution branching off of the timeline.

The Hacks

Each day I created a VR project with a particular focus and then wrote about it.

• 01: Basic VR
• 02: Raycaster based look interaction
• 03: Even better gazed based look interaction
• 04: Skyboxes and generating meshes
• 05: Loading external models
• 06: VR Pairs Game
• 07: Cardboard hardware (cardware?)
• 08: Playing sounds
• 09: Speech recognition
• 10: HTML5 Video
• 11: Webaudio Beat Sequencer
• 12: AAAAH! Zombies
• 13: AAAAH! More Zombies
• 14: Debugging your Cardboard with Chrome
• 15: The Hierarchy of Needs in Quick Google Cardboard Hacks
• 16: Getting in and out of Fullscreen
• 17: Displaying Pertinent Information
• 18: Moving around in VR
• 19: Which way is North? Part 1
• 20: Which way is North? Part 2
• 21: One size doesn’t fit all
• 22: Putting it all together
• 23: Planning Tetrominoes in VR
• 24: Basic Game Board
• 25: Creating and Moving Pieces
• 26: Rotating Pieces
• 27: Moving with gaze
• 28: Planning Revisited
• 29: Blocks out of the pram
• 30: Github Contributions
• 31: Something in the Shadows

A wall of gifs of some of the hacks

The Takeaways

I was doing this off the cuff for the first week before realizing I should probably plan the rest of the month, so I created a spreadsheet full of ideas, factored out standard code for my hacks to a boilerplate framework that I could use each day and then tried my best to stick to the plan.

I was on holiday during the third week of Cardboctober, so I spent that week only writing VR UX articles rather than working on hacks. This was helpful as it meant I could write these ahead of their corresponding days.

Following the end of Cardboctober I had the insane idea to give a talk about doing Cardboctober. This meant no rest for a few more evenings. However, it was an excellent opportunity to reflect on the month of VR hacks.

Here are some of my takeaways:

• Doing something every day for a month is hard
• I’ve learned lots about VR and 3D
• Save time/sanity by factoring out common code.
• Test your ideas often and on other people
• Don’t worry about making it perfect
• If you’re learning from it then others can learn too