Metaverse One

Christian Perry has been a community organizer and collector of knowledge on the West Coast for some time. His SF Beta events are one of many that have helped educate the masses to high tech and take entrepreneurs from idea to funded startups. Christian's latest endeavor is the podcast Whale Con: The VR Pioneers. I had the opportunity to chat with Christian a couple weeks back about all things WebVR and then some.   Enjoy and share any feedback below!

On Friday April 28th I had the opportunity to join construction tech stardom with an interview by ConTechTrio. ConTechTrio is a podcast by construction technology gurus Rob Mckinney, James Benham, and Josh Bone. Every Friday the ConTechTrio review the current technology news and conduct an interview with a industry expert. They have interviewed some incredible people and it was an honor to be included in their lineup. (Here the guys interview Dirty Jobs host Mike Rowe) Enjoy the podcast! Listen to "ConTechTrio 65: Damon Hernandez from AEC Hackathon & Samsung on Hacking Workflows in Construction" on Spreaker. Thanks again James, Rob, and Josh for the fun time and great opportunity.

  It has been great to see the influx of fresh faces and new energy into the web3D space thanks to the popularity of virtual reality. In the Bay Area alone there are several meetup groups around the topic of VR and it was at the San Francisco VR Meetup that I met Cris Miranda.  Cris is the host of Enter VR , a podcast with some pretty amazing interviews with industry leaders about virtual reality at the intersection of gaming, technology, business and society. I recently sat down with Cris to chat about VR in an interview he named, ' Discussing the Internet of Things, Connected Cities, and Virtual Reality with Damon Hernandez '.  Thanks again to Cris for the fun opportunity and make sure to check out the Enter VR blog with his other podcast interviews. I am off now to listen to ' Rehabilitating the Mind with Virtual Reality, Using Big Data in VR and more with Dr. Mike Aratow '. Like the name says, Enter VR is a great resource for those that want to know the la...

 Have you seen the game trailers for Watch Dogs ? In the game, the player is a cyber-vigilante that explores a connected 'smart' city and accesses its 2D and 3D information like a high tech Batman. As an example of this, the game even has a website called We Are Data that shows real geo-located information about Paris, Berlin, and London from social media sites and public government datasets. The game seems like a glimpse into a distant future but believe it or not, we have the technology to make this notion of a 'smart' city happen now.   Unfortunately the building industry is currently very change-resistant and far behind almost every other industry in adopting new technologies, despite the fact that it has potentially the most to gain from interactive data visualization technologies and the  Internet of Things . The technologies also already exist to model our buildings and communities in extremely high levels of detail, including fabricati...

I feel it right to be upfront and say we are about to go on a journey. The matter at hand is something that has become very close to me and it directly affects anyone that lives and works in a house or building. In a few weeks there is going to be a first of its kind event called the AEC Hackathon . This event will break new ground in how we think about design, construction and communication about our built environment. But before we talk about this, lets step back and see how I got here. It all begins seven years back to when I was working in downtown San Francisco with one of the legends in my field. On a day like any other, I see our boss come into the office chatting with another guy that introduces himself as a home builder. This builder goes on to share how he is using game-like technology and robotic manufacturing to improve the home building process. Wait, did he say video games and robots to build houses? Before SF, I spent 15 years in Dallas, Texas. Here is where I got bomb...

I have embarked on a tech journey to a series of events worth sharing: - Digital Kung-Fu 2 - 2010 Workshop at the Centre for Digital Media (Canada) Bringing together experts and leaders from an array of sectors in digital media, this workshop offers a full day of interactive sessions to help inspire new ideas and develop them into realizable goals. Participants will be treated to insider techniques for the conceptualizing, visualizing, prototyping and pitching of ideas, as well as insights into current industry trends and technologies. This is your opportunity to get a crash course in digital martial arts! Part of Vancouver Interactive Digital Week, Digital Kung Fu 2 is a one-day intensive professional development seminar delivered by industry experts. Kick-start, augment and accelerate your digital ideas into realizable apps, services (or products) and start-ups. Proceeds of this workshop will be put towards scholarships for students in the Masters of Digital Media program. Click here...

This past week at Lat 37.329304, Lon -121.89051, I got the opportunity to attend my first Tim O'Reilly's Where2.0 Conference. 'Now in its sixth year, the Where 2.0 Conference is where the grassroots and leading edge developers building location-aware technology intersect with the businesses and entrepreneurs seeking out location apps, platforms, and hardware to gain a competitive edge. In the O'Reilly conference tradition, Where 2.0 presents leading trends rather than chasing them. At Where 2.0, you 'll find source mapping tools, reality mining, open standards for data and location web services, and sensors for obtaining location data. We'll learn how the established geo industry is reacting to the first businesses making money from their grassroots geospatial projects. There's no better place to meet the people behind the mashups , the people behind the platforms, and the people looking ahead to the future of geospatial . Join us at Where 2.0 to debate...

Learning about the 3D web open standard has never really been an easy thing in the past. Tutorials were scattered over the web, the Web3D Consortium website didn't offer much help to those new to programming, there were few books that covered the open standard such as Core Web3D, the VRML 2.0 Handbook (great books), and no books that covered the new standard X3D. If you were a 3D modeler looking to author web3D content there were few tools out there to help you do it and none of these had in depth tutorials. As someone wanting to learn X3D, this is what drove me to get active with the Consortium eight years ago. I found there were students everywhere that wanted to learn web3D technologies for credit but where and how? So in the past it was difficult for newbies, but now this is no longer the case. In 2007 X3D: 3D Graphics for Web Authors by Don Brutzman and Leonard Daly was published. This book is highly recommended resource for programmers that makes learning X3D undauntin...

Web3DStudents is a collaboration between students and professionals in the outreach, education, and development of the 3D web, web3D applications, and the mixed reality Metaverse. Our work is funded by various web3D projects we do for corporate and private clients. This money keeps us living and the computers running while we teach, learn, promote, develop, and help others in their migration to the 3D web. 2009 marks an important year for us as we start a series of Web3D Industry sponsored student projects with some of the biggest names around. These projects are 3D web mash-ups and mixed reality applications that will showcase the power of the web3D open standard, be available for all to use, and documented so other web3D students can learn the how-to for their own projects. To show our commitment to world change beyond those affiliated with the 3D web, Web3DStudents members are pledging that a decent portion of all our private work contracts this year will go toward humanitarian aid...

Some old news here as back to back holidays and projects have sidetracked me from posting this earlier. On Friday November 14, 2008 Stanford Open Source Lab had its first Open Source unConference . Hosted by Stanford's Metaverse man Henrik Bennetsen, it was an intimate turnout of those supporting open source tools and technologies. Pictures from WiseMarco The event grid had great topics and speakers for all the sessions. There were several sessions on Drupal (the open source content management platform) , I caught Vladimir Bacvanski's engaging session on Javascript and the Dojo Toolkit , and finished off with Gene Leybzon's session explaining and showcasing some cool applications he developed for Google's Android open free mobile platform. Gene Presentation For Android Only natural to have a session on the open standard for the 3D Web/Metaverse and cover its open source players. Thanks to Web3D Consortium Board member Dr. Michael Aratow for also participati...