I’ve been meaning to try out the very cool StereoKit on my Oculus device for a while now. As of yet there isn’t a ready made Visual Studio Template for creating and deploying to Android devices like there is for Hololens and UWP devices. I could just be patient and wait for Nick and the team to release the Android template or…….. I could try build the source code and example android project there in :). Ok, here we go:

1. First off Ensure you have the Xamarin workload from Visual Studio 2019 installed:
   • Open the Visual Studio Installer and click modify on your Visual Studio 2019 installation.
   • Select the “Mobile development with .Net” workload and “Mobile development with c++”.

2. Since I’m going to try and build the stereokit example from scratch I need to have a few additional tools installed and configured:

   • The android NDK
     • Once downloaded you can extract the folder to a convenient location.
   • xmake installed on my windows machine.
     • You can either install via powershell

           Invoke-Expression (Invoke-Webrequest 'https://xmake.io/psget.text' -UseBasicParsing).Content
     

     • Or install using the windows exe from the xmake release page

     ---

     Credit to Nick, the author of Stereokit, for the info on configuring the android NDK

     • You’ll next need to set up your Android NDK directories

     On Windows:

           xmake global --ndk=C:/Microsoft/AndroidNDK64/android-ndk-r16b or
           xmake global --ndk=C:/Users/progr/AppData/Local/Android/Sdk/ndk/21.3.6528147
           xmake global --android_sdk=C:/Microsoft/AndroidSDK or
           xmake global --android_sdk=C:/Users/progr/AppData/Local/Android/Sdk
     

     Then configure xmake to build for android:

           xmake f -p android -a arm64-v8a --ndk_cxxstl=c++_static
     

     or all combined

           xmake f -p android -a arm64-v8a --ndk_cxxstl=c++_static --android_sdk=C:/Users/progr/AppData/Local/Android/Sdk --ndk=C:/Users/progr/AppData/Local/Android/Sdk/ndk/21.3.6528147
     

     And then build xmake —

     • Install make using chocolatey (chocolatey is optional really it’s just my preferred tool for installing applications)

         choco install make
       

     • Go to %programdata%\chocolatey\bin and copy the make.exe into the folder where you extracted the android NDK.

3. Open the Stereokit solution (located at the root of the sterokit repository)

4. Build the c# stereokit project.

5. Build the StereoKitTest_Android project.

6. Connect your Oculus device (ensure developer mode is enabled on your Oculus)

7. In Visual Studio click the play button to deploy and run the StereoKitTest_Android app on your Oculus (you should see the Oculus device name on the play button prior to clicking it).

And that’s it. A little bit fiddly but sure to get easier once the visual studio template and nuget packages are released.