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// widgets

Hey everyone! As part of our global tour for the Leap Motion 3D Jam, we’re at Berlin’s Game Science Centre to take developers through our SDK and building with the latest VR tools. Registrations for the workshops and meetup are still open. The livestream is happening today from 9am–2pm PT (5–10pm CET) at the top of this post – jump into our Twitch channel to join the chat session!

Ahead of the event, we thought we’d give you a quick overview of what to expect. Let’s take a light-speed look at VR development with Leap Motion in Unity and JavaScript.

This week, we’re happy to announce that the source code for Planetarium is now available on GitHub. It’s been an incredible project so far, and our team is excited to continue developing our core Widgets for VR experiences.

The latest version of Widgets is now available through our Unity Core Assets! Version 2.1.0 introduces the Dial Picker Widget and data binding model, along with several performance optimizations.

After you download the latest demo and experiment with Widgets in your own projects, we’d like to get your thoughts as we forge ahead towards a full release. More on that later, but first, here’s what you’ll find in 2.1.0.

Hi, I’m Wilbur Yu! You might remember me from such webcasts as Let’s Play! Soon You Will Fly and Getting Started with VR. In this post, we’ll look at how we structured Widgets to be as accessible and comprehensive as possible.

Daniel here again! This time around, I’ll talk a bit about how we handled integrating the UI Widgets into the data model for Planetarium, and what this means for you.

The first iteration of Widgets we released to developers was cut almost directly from a set of internal interaction design experiments. They’re useful for quickly setting up a virtual reality interface, but they’re missing some pieces to make them useable in a robust production application. When we sat down to build Planetarium, the need for an explicit event messaging and data-binding layer became obvious.

One of the major features of Planetarium is the ability to travel around the globe using motion controls. While this approach is still rough and experimental, we learned a lot from its development that we’d like to share. Later on in the post, we’ll even take a look under the hood at the code involved with the movement and spinning physics that tie everything together.

At Leap Motion, we’ve been working on new resources to make developing VR/AR applications easier, including Widgets – fundamental UI building blocks for Unity. In part 3, Barrett talks about the strange physics bugs we encountered with Time Dial.

One of our new VR Widgets, the Time Dial, surprised (and indeed amused!) us at several special moments during our intense production push. The Time Dial Widget is our hand-enabled VR interpretation of a typical touch interface’s Date Picker. We built it with a combination of Wilbur Yu’s Widget interaction base, Daniel’s data-binding framework (more on those two later), and a graphic front-end that I coded and built – again using Unity’s new 3D GUI.

In the lead-up to IndieCade East, we’re spotlighting the top 20 3D Jam experiences chosen by the jury and community votes – with a special focus on game design, interaction design, and the big ideas driving our community forward.

Martin Schubert’s Weightless won second place for its breathtaking atmosphere and fluid interaction mechanics. It’s available free for the Oculus Rift on the Leap Motion App Store.

It’s been five months since we launched the VR tracking beta, and since then we’ve made massive strides. In 2015, we’re building on this momentum with new resources for developers, while advancing support for several key VR platforms. In this post, I’d like to reflect on the year that we just left behind, and what’s coming in 2015. Here are just a few snapshots of the year ahead.

Who said Unity developers have all the fun? From building virtual hands in Three.js to browser-based virtual reality, we’re also developing new tools to enable truly 3D interaction on the web. This week, we’re happy to announce LeapJS Widgets – basic UI elements can be used in a wide variety of experiences. It’s a brand new library, simple enough to be used with just a few lines of code, but with near-infinite possibilities for experimentation and customization.