The digest of interesting materials for the mobile developer # 151 (April 25-May 3)

In the holiday digest - drop drops rendering and virtual reality, the first Apple recession and Xamarin news, color psychology and auto insurance. All this and more in the regular collection!

Rendering drops with transparency and reflections on OpenGL

In this article we will look at how to render drops on OpenGL and calculate the normal for reflection and transparency on the fly. As well as Metaballs, graphics chipset bugs and optimization tricks you can apply for 60 FPS on mobile devices.

1 developer. 2 applications. 3 years

For a long time already was going to write history of the project on Habr, moreover, even promised. And nevertheless, this moment was postponed until later: when the new release comes out, when the design update ends, when everything works as intended. The reason is one - laziness, hiding behind the lack of time.

How GearVR differs from a cardboard box, or the pursuit of latency

The main term you need to know about VR is motion-to-photon latency. In other words, the delay between the turn of the head and the last photon of the image (drawn from the perspective of the new head position) left the screen. It is empirically deduced that motion-to-photon latency is 20 msec and below allows to reach presence - i.e. feeling that you move your head in the virtual world. Whether the values are less than 20 ms or not is not clear, but in general, the goal is to reach 20. GearVR by hook and crook reaches, and I will tell you how.

Xamarin SDK in Open Source and more at Xamarin Evolve 2016

Xamarin SDK, as promised, today has officially become an open source project, and everyone has the opportunity to make their own efforts to develop this technology. Open bindings API for iOS, Android and Mac, command line tools, Xamarin.Forms, etc.
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