Metaverse One

The AEC Hackathon 2.4 was this past weekend in London. Held at Future Cities Catapult's Urban Innovation Centre , the weekend long event brought together technology developers with professionals from the built environment to create technology solutions to industry problems. While I was unable to physically attend due to my work schedule, I was still able to remote MC on the big screen and keep things going thanks to great Internet connection.    The really exciting things about this AEC Hackathon for me are it was the first one outside of the United States and the first one supported and locally organized by a government entity. The local lead organizer was Simon Hart from Innovate UK . Innovate UK is the UK's innovation agency that works with people, companies and partner organizations to find and drive the science and technology innovations that will grow the UK economy. Simon and team did an amazing job with the help of AEC Hackathon board member Paul D...

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:  ...

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...

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...

  Here I show an application developed by the IDEAbuilder Tech Tools team. The team created an application using actual digital fabrication models (the same 3D computer aided manufacturing models that drive our CNC machines) combined with a 3D city model created with ESRI's City Engine tool  and viewed using the Oculus Rift head mounted display for an immersive virtual reality AEC (Architecture, Engineering, Construction) experience.

At the beginning of this month Long Beach, California based Oculus announced their Kickstarter project  to create a next gen VR HMD (Virtual Reality Head Mounted Display) called the Rift. Since putting this project on Kickstarter, Oculus has shot past their goal of $250,000 and raised over $2 million for creating the device. The Rift will work on PC and mobile (no mention of Mac), offer 110 degrees diagonal / 90 degrees horizontal field of view, 6 degrees of freedom head tracking, 1280x800 resolution (640x800 per eye), with a weight of only 0.22 kilograms. What makes the Rift so exciting is that there has yet to be another HMD out there that has great specs that is even close to affordable. HMDs that offer this resolution and field of vision are thousands of dollars. Rift will retail around $300. Check out their Kickstarter video with some big names in the gaming world giving their support. So I pledged my $300 to get the EARLY RIFT DEVELOPER KIT + DOOM 3 BF...

So a few days ago I posted the following about an online hands free home configurator developed from a partnership between IDEAbuilder Homes and SpiralConcepts. Here is the original post  and the repost  by sci-fi author Bruce Sterling on the Wired Blog. When out in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley tech scene it is not the AEC (Architecture, Engineering, Construction) industry I hear about leading the charge in technical innovation. It is the chatter of the millions given and insane evaluations of those either in the cloud, selling user data, social, gaming, or insert buzz word here. Yet more and more construction companies are incorporating technology to improve various areas of the building process. I observe all around SOMA how construction companies like Swinerton  and  Webcor  are using data from the BIM (Building Information Modeling) process to build better. I applaud Skanska 's  use of tablets  and  experiments with augmen...

Autodesk recently released Showcase , a real-time 3D presentation and rendering software for the AEC (Architecture, Engineering & Construction) Industry. Showcase allows architects, designers, engineers, and managers the ability to import 3D CAD data (mainly Autodesk formats) into an virtual environment for creating 2D image renderings, movies, and real-time navigation of the 3D model. Showcase has been in the Autodesk Labs for some time now (previously called Project Newport). I remember seeing this video from 2009 where they used a much cooler interface to show it off. Although I feel that Autodesk is a tad late to the real-time 3D party, Showcase will help those in the AEC Industry become more familiar with real-time 3D for architectural visualization. I would still recommend other tools and technologies to those that want interactive 3D environments, but this is a step in the right direction for Autodesk . I am sure my friend Jon Brouchoud at ARCH Virtual is happy to see...

As part of a presentation I have next week that focuses on mixed reality, I built an augmented reality application for viewing various 3D CAD models. For the time allotted to this project I kept it simple and sweet. I decided to use a traditional marker here as the scene had too much visual noise for image recognition with all the foot and car traffic. Markers on my iPod Touch load different levels of detail 3D models of this one building. Clicking on the model binds it to a viewpoint so the marker is no longer needed. The example in the video is built on a 'mixed reality' framework that allows interactive models to be accessed by virtual and augmented reality applications. I will be sharing more of my work, application examples, and videos about this framework in the coming months.

On the heels of an 'augmented' good time at the ARE2010, I headed to Denmark as a guest of Roskilde University to participate in the Making Sense of Virtual Worlds and User Driven Innovation workshop. Held at the lovely venue of Magleaas, just north of Copenhagen, this three day (June 7th - 9th) workshop, funded by the Danish Strategic Research Council KINO, brought together academics and a few industry players from all around to share with each other the research they have been doing in virtual worlds. 'SENSE-MAKING STRATEGIES AND USER-DRIVEN INNOVATION IN VIRTUAL WORLDS is a collaborative project, running from 2008-2011, that joins university researchers at two Danish universities, Roskilde University and Copenhagen Business School, and a range of different partners who work practically with virtual worlds in different organizational contexts (encompassing both public organizations and private business). The project has a practice-orientation both in the sense that the a...

With my recent blogs about digital worlds, I wanted to take some time to promote those people that are making a difference in our real one. Founded by Kate Stohr and Cameron Sinclair , Architecture For Humanity ( AFH ) is a non-profit charitable organization that seeks architectural solutions to humanitarian crisis and brings design services to communities in need. Cameron's outreach can be seen everywhere i ncluding interviews on CNN, TED , Sundance Channel (with Cameron Diaz ) and h is book Design Like You Give A Damn is a great read I highly recommend. Today seemed a great day to blog about this proactive organization as it is the launch week of their 2009 Open Architecture Challenge : Design the Classroom of the Future. We believe that where resources and expertise are scarce, innovative, sustainable and collaborative design can make a difference. By tapping a network of professionals willing to lend their time and their talents to helping those who would not otherwise...