Metaverse One

The AEC Hackathon 2.3 in Southern California was this past weekend in Los Angeles. Held at UCLA's Department of Architecture and Urban Design, the weekend long event brought together technology developers with professionals from the built environment to create technology solutions to industry problems. This AEC Hackathon set new records. While we always have folks at the events from all around the country and in some cases the world, 70% of the people in attendance were not from the SoCal area. A decent amount of us came down from the SF/Bay area and some from as far as the East Coast. We also had the highest ratio of tech engineer to industry personal with over 75% of the folks there having a technical background.  To be expected, the teams developed some pretty amazing hacks. Watch the team presentations in the video below. Winners Best Overall Project:  Team Rhumbix Best Open Source:  Team Holy Donut Best Use of Experimental Tech:  ...

Leap Motion CTO David Holz recently announced on their blog the launch of a Virtual Reality Headset Mount for their hand-tracking controller that works with Oculus VR's Developer Kit 2 . For those not familiar with the Leap Motion controller, see one of my earlier posts about it or visit the Leap Motion website . As one sees in the video, the controller mounted to the front of the Oculus will allow immersive applications and games to track the hands and fingers. Now I have seen this setup before where a developer took a Leap Motion controller, an Oculus Rift Dev Kit, and some 'Arkansas chrome' aka duct tape to create this same type of experience, but it is great to see Leap Motion give some design to the mount and software support in their V2 SDK for head units. This is a huge win for bumping up the levels of immersion for a relatively low cost. The VR mount costs $19.99, requires Leap Motion’s $80 controller, and of course a $350 Oculus Rift Developer...

November 8-10, 2013 was the very first AEC Hacktahon held at Facebook's Menlo Park campus. A first for the Architecture, Engineering, Construction Industry, the AEC Hackathon is a non-profit event that creates on-the-spot teams of technologists and industry stakeholders to shape the future of our built environment. My goal of the event was to help the Architecture, Engineering, & Construction Industry go 'Tony Stark' for a weekend and the attendees of the event did just that. For my motives and thoughts pre-hackathon, see these earlier posts titled  AEC Hackathon – Where Techies and Builders Change the World  and  Hacking a Building a Techies way . The event turned out better than I could have ever hoped for. The 130+ people that attended came from all over the U.S. and represented firms of all sizes with a few coming from as far as Asia and Europe. I was blown away by the caliber of attendee, tech gadgets (Oculus Rifts, 3D printers, scanners, Google Glass...

So the developer kits for the Leap Motion gesture control device shipped a few months back and now we are starting to see a variety of Leap developer videos make it on the web. AirHarp   Block 54   Leap Motion and Unity3D experiment

So earlier this week San Francisco based Leap Motion , formally Ocuspec, released their Leap hands free controller. I got a personal demo of the device last week at their office in SOMA district and "Wow"! Developed over the past 4 years, Leap Motion moves far beyond the current technologies designed for hands free control. Leap is an entirely new way to interact with computers that lets you control a computer in three dimensions with your natural hand and finger movements. It's more accurate than a mouse, as reliable as a keyboard, and more sensitive than a touchscreen. The Leap is a small iPod sized USB peripheral that creates a 3D interaction space of 8 cubic feet to precisely interact with and control software on your laptop or desktop computer. It senses your individual hand and finger movements independently, as well as items like a pen. The Leap can distinguish your individual fingers and track your movements down to a 1/100th of a millimeter. The compan...