Metaverse One

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...

The interest in wearable computing thanks to products like Google Glass and the Pebble smart watch has created a boom of Kickstarter projects for augmented reality hardware. Joining the crowdsource club is castAR  from Technical Illusions. Technical Illusions was founded by chip wizard Jeri Ellsworth and game programmer vet Rick Johnson. Jeri Ellsworth is best known for creating a Commodore 64 emulator within a joystick. It ran 30 video games from the early 1980s, and was very popular during the 2004 Christmas season, at peak selling over 70,000 units in a single day. Johnson most recent work was at Valve working on hit games like Left 4 Dead , Portal 2, and DOTA. The experienced duo combined forces upon leaving Valve to focus on developing the new augmented reality technology. “We believe that augmented reality is the future not only in gaming, but ultimately the new user interface in computer technology.” Information from their Kickstarter page: How does it work? ...

Here is a cool concept video from Meta , makers of SpaceGlasses. Meta comes out of research at Columbia University. The super klunky glasses you see in the video are the combination of Epson's Moverio glasses  and a 3D depth camera mounted on the top. While the glasses are real, the applications are just concepts. I saw there booth and setup at the AWE event a few months back and they had no application this polished. Meta does have a growing number of developers and a lot of potential given the overlaid display and interface to be really cool augmented reality glasses. I look forward to getting a pair of the streamlined version shipping next year.