AI is beginning to transform the world in ways that people are likening to a second industrial revolution. The production of software has already been profoundly changed, just as the manufacture of textiles was transformed hundreds of years ago. What is different this time is that virtual worlds exist, so …
I grew up going to a little 13th century church in Bushey. There was a lot of talking and listening. I enjoyed listening to testimonies the most: ordinary people talking about how Christian ideas had helped them to live their lives. The stories helped the big ideas feel more personal …
After The Spirit of Gravity in February I ended up talking to Jason Hotchkiss and Jo Summers . I knew Jason from a Build Brighton guitar pedal workshop years ago and as a sound artist from Sound Plotting , but Jo knew Jason as the game developer who made 1D Pong . After …
Earlier in the year I helped Josh Sanburn and his team put together a podcast series on building Second Life for the Wall Street Journal called “How To Build a Metaverse” which I’m now really enjoying. It’s great to hear all of the amazing stories about the origin …
Last week I gave a lab talk to my former research colleagues at the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham about the work I ve been doing since leaving the lab over 20 years ago. Rather than talk about technology I focussed on the lessons that todays efforts …
Now that Horizon Workrooms has launched I’m very happy to be able to write about the functionality that I found most exciting while building the experience: the mapping of virtual objects to their real world counterparts. Typically augmented and mixed reality experiences overlay real world objects with virtual annotations …
The recording of my recent Stereopsia 2020 talk about the art of designing social VR experiences is now online . The talk summarises a lot of material covered in more depth in my posts on The Conversation Around Content , A Tall Dark Stranger and Small Places Loosely Joined , so if please …
Over the last few years I’ve spent a lot of time helping people new to virtual worlds learn how they work. Over the last few weeks I’ve been sharing a series of short posts on some of the high level concepts I covered which will hopefully be useful …
Over the last few years I’ve spent a lot of time helping people new to virtual worlds learn how they work. Over the next few weeks I’m sharing a series of short posts on some of the high level concepts I covered which will hopefully be useful to …
Over the past few years I’ve spent a lot of time helping people new to virtual worlds understand how they work. Over the next few weeks I’m going to share a series of short posts on some of the high level concepts I covered which will hopefully be …
Over the last few years I’ve spent a lot of time helping people new to virtual worlds learn how they work. Over the next few weeks I’m going to share a series of short posts on some of the high level concepts I covered which will hopefully be …
Before my recent post about leaving Facebook , it had been a while since I’d updated The Creation Engine and it turned out I had some housekeeping to do. After pushing the Pelican output to https://github.com/jimpurbrick/jimpurbrick.github.com I got a mail from GitHub saying that …
8 years ago London was hosting the Olympics and I met Philip Su for the first time at Browns in Covent Garden to talk about the engineering office Facebook was planning to open in London. By the end of this year Facebook London will have thousands of people working in …
Just over ten years ago I set up The Creation Engine No. 2 after previously blogging on the original Linden Lab hosted Creation Engine and before that on Terra Nova . So, while I ve been blogging for almost 14 years, 10 years of The Creation Engine No. 2 seems like …
The recording of my recent React Europe talk about Replicated Redux is now online and I ve written several other posts describing designing , testing and generalising the library if you would like to know more about the details. If you’d like to play the web version of pairs or …
While property based tests proved to be a powerful tool for finding and fixing problems with ReactVR pairs , the limitations of the simplistic clientPredictionConstistenty mechanism remained. It s easy to think of applications where one order of a sequence of actions is valid, but another order is invalid. Imagine an …
Last year I hosted a panel on creating a safe environment for people in VR with Tony Sheng and Darshan Shankar at OC3 . I commented at the time that the discussion reminded me of the story of LambdaMOO becoming a self-governing community told by Julian Dibbell in My Tiny Life …
Opening a couple of browser windows and clicking around was more than sufficient for testing the initial version of ReactVR pairs . Implementing a simple middleware to log actions took advantage of the Redux approach of reifying events to allow a glance at the console to reveal precisely which sequence of …
There were a couple of aspects of my previous experiments building networked ReactVR experiences with Redux that were unsatisfactory: there wasn t a clean separation between the application logic and network code and, while the example exploited idempotency to reduce latency for some actions, actions which could generate conflicts used …
I ve just got back from Kaş where I spent a lovely few days celebrating Pinar and Simon s wedding and while there spent a few hours reading Now We Are 40 : a thoughtful and entertaining look at everything from house music to house prices from the perspective of Generation …
Several years ago when we were in 100 robots together, Max was celebrating his 40th birthday. When I said that mine would be in 2017, it felt like an impossibly far future date, but, after what feels like the blink of an eye, here we are. Along with many other …
Mike and I have been talking about how to easily build simple networked social applications with ReactVR for a while, so I spent some time hacking over the Christmas break to see if I could build a ReactVR version of the pairs game in Oculus Rooms . Pairs is simple and …
I was very happy that Oculus found time at OC3 to host a panel on creating a safe environment for people in VR . As social VR becomes more popular over the next few years it will quickly have to learn how to keep people safe together in shared environments. Some …
At the 3rd Party Dev State of the Union at EVE Fanfest 2016 earlier this year, CCP FoxFour drew my attention to a limitation of the current approach used by crestmatic to generate CREST documentation: it only discovers resources always reachable from the API root from the perspective of the …
At the end of last year, Michael Brunton-Spall and Jon Topper asked me if I would like to give the opening keynote at Scale Summit as I had lots of experience scaling weird things , by which they meant Second Life and EVE Online. I immediately thought of The Corn Field …
The early days of RESTful hypermedia API design tends to involve lots of homogeneous collections. In the case of CREST vnd.ccp.eve.Api-v1 pointed to the logged in vnd.ccp.eve.ccp.Capsuleer-v1 which pointed to a vnd.eve.ccp.CharacterCollection-v1 of contacts which pointed to many vnd.ccp …
3 weeks ago I spent a few hours with photoshop working on the Story Bird logo that Linda made a while ago to make it suitable for print. 2 weeks ago I spent a few hours researching the best way to convert the 24 bit 48 Khz Story Bird mixes …
I love record shops. Whenever I had pocket money it would go on Metallica and Nirvana CDs bought from Our Price or black t-shirts to match. When I lived in Nottingham I bought Boards Of Canada CDs from the same Selectadisc that my Dad bought a rare Fairport Convention single …
A year ago I gave a talk at EVE Vegas about building RESTful CREST applications. My #1 recommendation was to specify representations in requests, but that s hard to do when there is little documentation on which representations are available and what they contain. Fortunately CREST is self describing : send …
Modern software development is sometimes colourfully described as being similar to firing tracer bullets at a target. Rather than spending time doing a lot of research, design and specification up front, the smallest, simplest version of the software is built and the feedback gathered from its use is used to …
Last year I was talking to an engineer at Droidcon London who was working on an Android app with 100% test coverage. I immediately asked whether he thought 100% test coverage was worthwhile: many software engineering teams strive to achieve 100% test coverage, but few succeed because it s an …
One of the things I’ve been working on since joining Facebook is Buck , an open source Android & Java build tool which is significantly faster than many other Java build tools for a number of reasons . As well as being fast, Buck gains a lot of power and flexibility by …
There have been a number of blog posts recently about exciting new organisational structures. As Cory points out Every early stage company thinks it has reinvented management : a very dangerous belief when betting on a new organisational structure can be much riskier than betting on the wrong product. It starts …
EVE online is a remarkable game . On Monday over 2000 people spent over 20 hours destroying virtual spaceships worth 200,000 USD in real money in what was the likely the largest battle in a video game ever. That EVE is capaple of supporting such large engagements is an amazing …
In mid-2004 I first started exploring Second Life. Version 1.4 had just been released and Philip Rosedale had said in the press release My fantasy is to be Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, and now I can. I d pay $10 for her yellow jumpsuit and sword moves and …
A few weeks ago Facebook London hosted the Parse By The Sea hackathon at the Brighton Dome as part of the Brighton Digital Festival . The idea was to take one of our internal hackathons on the road and invite members of the public to join us, turning a hackathon in …
I ve been a big fan of hackathons since one of the first Yahoo! Hack Days I attended at Alexandra Palace was struck by lightning . The lightning caused the fire alarms to go off which opened the roof to let the torrential rain pour on to hundreds of geeks and …
The Brighton Digital Festival starts this week and I m very happy to be helping out with Facebook London s contributions: Parse By The Sea , a mobile app Hackathon featuring Parse on the 26th of September, and helping to Connect The Brighton Digital Festival by sponsoring Metranet to provide high …
Using Reader on my HTC Wizard on the loo was probably responsible for my biggest increase in clue ever. Goodbye Reader , you ll be missed.
Almost exactly 5 years ago I set up The Creation Engine No. 2 as a Byteflow blog running on Django when the original Creation Engine blog hosted by Linden Lab stopped being a suitable place for my thoughts on technology as a platform for creativity. Byteflow and Django served me …
One epic meta-game design I first remember talking about a decade ago while working on Warhammer Online is the multi-scale online game: a system of interconnected games in which you choose to be a solo operative, work in a small group, or command epic forces or huge space fleets and …
cc image by vdu , j4mie One of the things I’ve been tinkering with since leaving Linden Lab is Creatarr: a creative, collaborative social game. Creatarr’s goal is to bring some of the magical collaborative creation found in Second Life to a wider audience and to push creativity in …
From 2 years before I was born, until just before I started working on Second Life at Linden Lab, my Dad worked at an innovative technology company with a large consumer photography business: Kodak . From January next year I’ll be working at an innovative technology company with a large …
As with many other social services, a large amount of the data in EVE Online and Dust 514 ‘s New Eden universe is shared between subsets of users. Some corporation data should only be accessible to the corporation’s members, market prices should only be accessible to capsuleers and infantry …
Although Nginx supports proxy caching it doesn t provide support for the HTTP Vary header out of the box. This is a problem if you want to use Nginx to proxy different versions of the same URI which Vary on Content-Language or proxy different representations of a RESTful resource specified …
The EVE online network architecture uses stateful proxy servers which manage sessions for players connected to the cluster via the EVE client. The client sends requests to the proxy which are forwarded on to sol servers maintaining the game state and the sols send notifications to the proxy which are …
A great video of the Brighton Mini Maker Faire last year by Andrew Sleigh showing the making of You’re The Boss 2 . Applications for this year’s Maker Faire are now open and I can’t wait to see what everyone comes up with this year!
A few years ago nearly all the code I wrote was in C++, but increasingly I’m finding myself writing in a variety of mostly C-style languages and having to perform crunching mental gear changes as I switch between them. In the interests of making these language switches less painful …
A couple of years ago I had great fun putting together the London Geek Community iPhone OSCestra at Open Hack London and I’ve been controlling Ableton Live with iPhone tapped to my guitar as part of 100 robots for a couple of years now so when @andybudd suggested I …
Lots of exciting 100 robots news! Our debut album, Attack!, has been professionally mastered by Chris at Melograf Mastering who has done an amazing job and made the album sound incredible. The new version is already available at bandcamp and will be available on itunes, amazon and many other download …