Metaverse One

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...

So much has happened since my last post. The end of 2011 saw many tech developments, announcements, events, passing of giants , IPOs, and the list goes on. Definitely I owe back coverage to the many wonderful things I have seen in recent travels that took me from the land of the vikings, to the mountains of Mordor (New Zealand), and parts in between. But now, happy 2012. It is year of the Dragon, apocalypse, alien contact, revelations, a cycle change on the .obj calendar (okay only certain people will get that, Maya for everyone else), and many other scenarios. *maniacal laugh I don't know about the world ending this year, but I feel very comfortable saying it will be the end of the world as I've known it. Beyond weak economies, revolutions, international movements, nature (weather, earthquakes, floods, etc.), and a growing number of other variables that are causing a global evolution, I get to experience firsthand how certain technologies are augmenting our reality and enh...

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.