Well, I mentioned 3D/VR audio in a previous post and now I want to introduce you to 3D/VR Photos and video. You may have wondered how they were able to create characters for movies based on real people that look so much like them. Well, this explains how. You may also have seen cameras that take a picture and allow you, after the picture was taken, to change the depth of field or focus of the lens. 
This video, one of a series, explains the concepts and technology that is coming soon. Imagine not needing green screen in video. Imagine taking a video and in VR walking a meter back and forth, front to back like in the real world. This technology already exists and is being used by Hollywood and will soon be n your smart phone. 
Technology is advancing so rapidly that I was told that in ten years VR will be indistinguishable from reality. In five years speech recognition will be 100% accurate.  
Imagine now, two drones hovering with these light field cameras and software that will stitch and remove unwanted items (like the drones). We could even have real time VR that you can walk around in, including real time items or objects, scoreboards added. 
I think you can start to see the exponential technological curve. 

I am venturing into building websites and interactive exhibits with Unity 3D using it's WebGL export feature. 

I dabbled in WebGL last year and created our Holiday Card using this but working in code and trying to visualize what I was doing was as always painful at best. I waited four years for Adobe to create a Edge Animate 3D program based on WebGL but that has never happened. 

They listened to me when I asked them to put a programming language into Flash in 1998 but ignored me when I asked for a 3D version in 2000. I imagined it as vector and like SketchUp on steroids. 

I see online comments about what an idiot a person would be to even consider this but I heard that before about animation for the web many years ago too. 

The logic to me is that WebGL is fragmented. You have Toni Parisi of VRML fame writing yet another programming language and a WebGL group that refuses to build a program that lets a person build in it without using code. I feel like I'm living in the IBM era before Apple came out with MacPaint.

As a Web person I need a program that will create WebGL from a visual format and Unity does this now with the WebGL export. Yes, I need to know C# but oh well. A simpler Flash like, Sketchup like program will come along for Web building at some point. But, Unity also can export to almost every major platform from the same file AND export as VR for Oculus with one click! 

I suppose I could go back to coding by hand and I could also shoot myself in the foot but why would I? 

Life is good and easier with Unity 5.

I would say my experience was a 2 stars out of 5. I give Microsoft one star for trying to even do this.

I am a Web Designer slash developer. So, this means I am an artist that wandered into programming in order to make things look better and function better. 

So, when I heard about Azure I thought that it looked so easy to use. Cute icons. Hey! Create a Web App for Joomla! Look it creates it's own mySQL database! WOW. 

Reality. You can create a Web App but your free mySQL database is limited to 20MB. Any website worth visiting is 70MB. 70MB in Joomla is a site with maybe twenty pages. So, you have to upgrade and pay another $10.00 a month. Also, your mySQL database isn't hosted on the same servers that your website is. RIGHT! Your mySQL database is possibly in another State! So, my tests made my normally half a second page load three seconds, shades of modem like speeds. 
The company is clearDB.com and they promise faster "throughput" for get this... one hundred dollars a month.

This is similar to being held hostage at gunpoint in my mind. 

Did I mention that the FTP information isn't the actual ftp information? The username and password in your admin system is your username and password for Azure not your actual site.
So, I had to Google how to get that info since Microsoft Azure didn't offer it. I found that information in a different area as a PDF file that you download. It was almost as if they were trying to hide that information on purpose. 

So, then I thought, OK I can't get fast speeds using this approach. Maybe I should just create what looks like a one click installation of a Webuzo server installation like I have now. Well, it appeared in the admin system that the server was created but I can't actually get to it. I once again can't find any documentation in how to use it, configure it or anything and not even on the web. 

So, one week in and I have no idea what to do. What a joke. Did they have anyone even user test this thing? 

On a positive note, with some work the Web App could be pretty cool. But, this third party clearDB either needs to be integrated into Azure or Azure needs to auto create a mySQL database that sits on the same location that the hosted site does and not use this clearDB.com at all. Many people have complained about the lack of speed and of course none of the engineers that respond can see the forest for the trees and see that you simply don't host a database a State away from your server. They may have fast connections but the rest of the World, especially if you're with CenturyLink here in Colorado. I don't even want to talk about how they lied to me about the INternet speeds I would get or how they throttled me down to ten MB download speeds from a measly 18MB and raised my monthly charge to $60.00 a month. This forces me back to the only competitor, ComCast. 

Getting Internet only through Comcast is like horse trading in 18th century Europe or bartering in a market in Tangiers. And God forbid I want only Internet and not the "bundle." Like I need a landline phone. Why don't I? I mean I'm not even a Millennial. They seem to think only people under twenty five want Internet only services... *sigh*. 

But I digress, the final take away with Azure is that it is like online dating. Her picture looked great but it wasn't really hers.