Our David is cute. While testing today that the material editor was working, he captured the display material of the Python timer application running on the display stand, and then applied the material to the floor. The floor, the running application, and the material editor's texture card and teapot sampler are all counting down.

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I was able to go to the 40th Anniversary celebration of “The Mother of All Demos.” The 1968 live demo is most famous for introducing its hardware, including the mouse, but it was quite a bit more than that...


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I was out of town and I FORGOT MY LAPTOP'S CHARGER. On reaching the hotel, I had only enough juice to check my mail and maybe make one reply. Scanning my inbox, there seemed to be one message I could send that might plausibly be useful. It turned out to have a huge impact for some of our users. What was this wisdom?.... [Read More!]

I've bumped into a series of issues related to publishing recently. I don't know that they ever will or should combine to form a coherent idea, but it feels like I should record them as though in a design notebook… [Read More!]

This summer we added an exit survey to Qwaq Forums, which was presented a percentage of the time when you quit the application. I and other engineers hated the idea of popping up a survey when the user doesn't want it. We preferred a feedback box that the users could launch themselves under the Help menu. Anyway, the board of directors were quite clear, so I implemented the survey pop-up as asked, and then in the next release I added the user-launched Help->Feedback box. I thought the exit survey would always be left blank, and that the feedback box would take over.

I was wrong…

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Musing: While Google's business model is based on advertising, it seems to me that the essence of their business is that they are all about meta-data. They don't own or deliver data, but rather they keep subject, ranking, tagging, and other data about the data. In an information world, if you can't own the info, owning or at least organizing the metadata about it is pretty good.

In this way, I think my professional activity is all about context. I don't create or control collaborators nor the artifacts they collaborate on, but I do try to provide a means for people to organize and recognize the contexts in which these act. When we can access everything that anyone in history has ever done, plagiary becomes meaningless, and content is no longer king.

Travel for meetings is so last year. This management article in silicon.com describes five alternatives technologies to meetings: instant messaging, virtual worlds, telepresence, Wikis, and social networking. But do these really have to be separate? Let's take a look at what each of these offers, and what it means for 3D virtual worlds to incorporate the other alternative meeting technologies.

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A neighbor and I were introducing ourselves to a third at a block party. The first made designer genes, while I made designer worlds. Everyone knew what we were talking about. [Read More!]

I missed this when it came out at the Consumer Electronics Show this year. Hilarious.

What can you do in a virtual world? Quite a bit, although we're still quite far from the answer being, “Anything you can do in the real world.” Here's a baseline list of today's raw capabilities, in the language of virtual worlds. (The higher level activity one does with these capabilities is another story.) [Read More!]