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...

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...

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...

I just wrapped up presenting at the Internet of Things World Event  and being the Master of Ceremony for the event's hackathon here in San Francisco. For those that don't know, the Internet of Things (IoT) describes the network of physical objects or "things" embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and connectivity to enable it to achieve greater value and service by exchanging data with the manufacturer, operator and/or other connected devices. Each thing is uniquely identifiable through its embedded computing system but is able to interoperate within the existing Internet infrastructure. Watch this video from Mashable below for a very basic explanation. More about the event can be found at the event's webpage and while I did get a chance to walk to the expo floor, most of my time was spent in the hackathon area. The IoT hackers were going after two categories, Best Consumer IoT Project and Best Industrial IoT Project. Participants w...

Here is a quick post to share some cool  VR Hackathon  news and info on upcoming events. 360° video of the Oct. 2014 event The MindVR team was cool enough to shoot the October 2014 event in 360° video and then post it on Vrideo , an immersive video platform. I need to dive deeper into Vrideo and its features, but at a glance it seems to be a platform for hosting and viewing 360° video that is also VR enabled. Once you start the video below, left click and hold to grab the video and move your mouse to look around. This video on mobile devices requires you turn with the device to look around. *if the above embed doesn't work  here is a link to the video . The Growing Community  With the success of the last event here in San Francisco and the growing interest by developers and designers of immersive technologies to have a weekend of creating and building, the VR Hackathon is expanding to new locations and age groups. There are events t...

It's a wrap, the AEC Hackathon 1.2 just concluded! Held in Seattle, Washington at University of Washington's Pacific Northwest Center for Construction Research and Education, it was a fun weekend of hacking to improve the built environment with plenty of high-tech and innovative solutions in the house. As always, I was amazed at what the AEC Hackers made over the course of the weekend. In addition to the projects created, some of my more memorable highlights from the event include: 1. Drones for architecture and climbing a tree to get the drone for team Revit My Drone . 2. An awesome smart table  touch screen device thanks to SmartUse . 3. Plenty of Virtual Reality for AEC represented including a full immersive VR setup thanks to the team at VRcade . 4. Multiple  Web3D applications that used WebGL and more. 5. FTW (For The Win): seeing alumni that have started companies from projects started at past AEC Hackathons. Video of the team p...

If you read my blog, I am sure you are very familiar with a hackathon and have probably even participated in a few. For those that have not (hi mom), this post is going to share what a hackathon is and the experience I have had with the ones I have recently organized and been involved with. It won't cover the events themselves, but more how it has affected me and my view on how to help facilitate the innovation I want to see in the world. What is a hackathon? Hackathon (also known as a hack day, hackfest or codefest) is an event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers and project managers, collaborate intensively on software projects. Occasionally, there is a hardware component as well. Hackathons typically last between a day and a week.  Some hackathons are intended simply for educational or social purposes, although in many cases the goal is to create usable software. Hackathons tend to...

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...

 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...