Nate Otto

I am a full-stack developer with five years JavaScript experience, six years of 3D modelling and about a year of WebVR. I currently teach HTML and basic event-driven programming at my workplace, and am a newly-accepted member of the CVTC IT adjunct faculty pool.

Coding is a great job. And sometimes it’s boring. Very boring. That’s why I enjoy teaching it. When I’m not designing ASP.NET web applications, I spend a few hours a week teaching my non-coder work buddies computer programming. As they learn, they discover interesting things you can do with code. That makes me remember why I like coding to begin with, and those SQL connectionstrings don’t seem so bad after all. I’ve been a front-and back-end coder for five years and look forward to many more.

Outside of work, I enjoy designing and building full-sized wooden kayaks and sailboats (ottosboatyard.wordpress.com), running Eau Claire Marathon events with my friends, and raising two nutball kids.

Website

http://www.nate-otto.net

Sessions

WebVR: Make Virtual Reality in your Browser

My wife laughed. “Sure, you can build that!” She wanted a $2500 pre-made ‘real’ shed, but I had power tools. And a design. With Blender3D, Three.js and Cardboard Goggles, I put that design to life. When my wife walked inside our virtual shed, she was sold. So what is WebVR? How can it work for us?

Create your own virtual reality experience using your cell phone, open-source software and an inexpensive VR viewer. We will explore basic 3D modelling and the easy to learn A-Frame WebVR framework. In less than an hour, we will create a simple VR house. The discussion is aimed at hobbyists, coders and graphic designers.

Participants are encouraged to bring a laptop, a smartphone and a pair of VR goggles (I’ll bring a few to share). The technology used is HTML/CSS/JavaScript with the Three.js library. I’ll touch on Blender3D, but will have a .DAE house model available for download. Any text editor works. I’ll be demoing in Notepad++.