Metaverse One

Since starting the first VR & AR hackathon in San Francisco back in 2014, I have assisted various teams and communities organizing immersive tech (VR,AR, etc.) focused hackathons. Our VR Hackathon ( www.vrhackathon.com ) community went international this year and 2017 will see more events planned in Europe, Asia, and Africa. While keeping things under one umbrella is a great way to keep the global immersive tech community connected, I have happily assisted others planning these types of hackathons to help grow the community and the industry. One team I was honored to  assist is the team behind MIT's Reality, Virtually, Hackathon.  This hackathon is by far the largest one dedicated to these technologies and brought people from several different countries to the MIT campus. From their website, "The Reality, Virtually, Hackathon brings together interdisciplinary minds to explore the application of virtual reality and augmented reality technologies for building new...

  Over my career I have had the chance to meet all kinds of people doing amazing work with cutting edge technology. On my list of kick-ass innovators are a couple of guys I have known for several years now at Capitola , a Dutch digital creative agency based in Amsterdam. David, Simon, and team have been designing and building cool digital experiences using tech like virtual reality and augmented reality for years. Some of their projects include: Pokemon Go HoloLens version  See a full interview with David about the HoloLens Pokemon Go project here . Virtual Reality DuckHunt Ford VR Experience And this one at their previous firm: Pretty cool projects huh? More of their work can be seen at their website and I highly recommend giving it a visit. For those that are looking for a digital creative agency that really knows how to make immersive technologies shine, give Simon and David a call. A great group of guys doing cutting edge work that definitely deserves a ...

I just left Seattle where I attended the first hackathon for virtual reality in that region. Hosted at the University of Washington's Center for Education and Research in Construction (CERC), the Seattle VR Hackathon brought together virtual reality developers and enthusiasts for a weekend of hacking and a whole lot of fun. There was a nice turnout of folks from the local VR community present including people from Samsung, the Microsoft HoloLens team, Unity3D, and Epic to name a few. Here is a nice writeup by one of the VR hacker teams that came from building firm Mortenson Construction (an AEC Hackathon alumni also).  In addition to a weekend of building cool VR demos, there were informative VR related presentations from Unity3D's Pete Moss, Epic's Nick Whiting, and Matt McIlwain from Madrona Venture Group.   A big thanks to Greg Howes, Trond Nilsen, Michael Lenzi, and Lucky Agung Pratama from Seattle's VR community for putting on this great event...

 At its Build Developer Conference in San Francisco today, Microsoft provided some new details on its HoloLens virtual reality device it announced back in January. HoloLens is a head-mounted, holographic computer with a depth camera that provides a mixed-reality experience for a range of applications. I briefly covered the HoloLens in a previous post  and was hoping Microsoft would share more about the unit today. It seems someone in Redmond was listening to my geek prayers. Today Microsoft showed off various HoloLens applications that work with Windows 10 and even one that controls a Raspberry Pi robot. They also announced support of HoloLens by the Unity3D game engine. The Verge has a great recap of the day's announcements and HoloLens in the video below. Another demonstration today during the Build Conference keynote session showed the integration of HoloLens with Trimble’s SketchUp 3D modeling software and the Trimble Connect collaboration platform. While...

 The idea of immersing ourselves deeper into an augmented and or virtual reality has captivated many of us thanks to sci-fi books like Snow Crash and Rainbows End . It has also created an explosion in growth the past few years of Head Mounted Displays (HMD) and augmented reality glasses projects. AR glasses and HMDs have been around for some time but people really started to get excited about augmented reality headwear when Google announced Glass back in 2012. So let's start the review here. Google Glass : Before the recent announcement of it being discontinued  but now "graduating" from the Google X experimental projects incubator to become its own independent division (that will report to Nest's Tony Fadell), Google Glass was a $1,500 type of wearable technology with an optical head-mounted display (OHMD). It was developed by Google with the mission of producing a mass-market ubiquitous computer. Tailored mainly to work with Google products, Google Glass disp...