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...

  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...

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...