Internship, thesis, and FossXR

Key moments

In July 2021 I started working on an internship for Collabora and got introduced to the world of XR while working on Monado. More specifically, I got introduced to the SLAM/VIO research area to develop a component that would provide inside-out visual-inertial tracking capabilities to Monado. Step by step I started to grasp the concepts and methods of the area, the names, the key publications and so on. I ended up integrating three systems into Monado with one, Basalt, being the key underlying system that would make the component useful enough. I wrote a (lengthy and a bit boring) blogpost talking about my internship in Collabora’s blog.

After finishing the internship I took a couple of months to write down my thesis for my Computer Science degree at FaMAF. Unfortunately, the thesis is written in Spanish due to university rules but, in case that’s not a problem for you, you can find it online in this weirdly named repository and a link to the pdf version here. I’m quite proud of how it came out; specially of Figures 2.3 and 2.4, yes those were rendered in Blender, and yes those took three days to figure out how to make.

Lastly and the more recent event that got me to write this blogpost, I gave a talk at FossXR in Minneapolis. Enough to say that this was my first time traveling internationally ¹. Besides that being nice, I feel the need to mention how cool the experience was. Imagine being working with people that you only know through chat on Discord, and also a bunch of other people you can only see in video meetings. And then you are working on this very specific component, of a very specific technology, on a very specific open source project. You have so many problems describing what you even work on to people. This very thing of XR?, with… Open? Source?, and there is some kind of community effort? Licenses? Windowing systems? Eigen crashes? How abstract!

But then, you get together in Minneapolis, you see some of these Discord avatars and some of your remote coworkers giving a talk in person, some of them giving one virtually. And you can interact with them, and they exist. And there is hardware! A lot of hardware! And some of these devices are running this very abstract thing you’ve been working on for the past year. And you know how that works, and you try to see how that very little bug you’ve been dragging affects this very real thing. You see headsets you’ve never seen before running this SLAM/VIO tracking component, and people using it in their work. And then, you realize, how cool really is what you are working on. I knew it was cool, but seeing how cool it is, was different.

Now, a photo of a squirrel from Minneapolis. We don’t have squirrels in my city!

Footnotes