This ain’t one body’s Tell. It’s the Tell of us all, and you got to listen it and ‘member, ’cause what you hears today, you got to tell the newborn tomorrow. I’s looking behind us now, down the long halls of history back. I sees those of us that got the luck and started the quest for building interesting 3D environments.

What Dreams May Come

I loved that movie. I thought it would be nice to ‘be’ in a Serat or a Monet painting. I used stock parts from Unity, their Asset Store, and some online 3D repo long forgotten to assemble this Thomas Kinkade world. I used a screen-space post effect to make it look like an impressionistic painting. This was running off a mid-range laptop in 2014 into a DK1, and it worked pretty well if I do say so myself. I added smoke and waterfalls and ambient audio to help bring it to life

TCHO Chocolate Factory

For FX-Pal (Fuji / Xerox Palo Alto), I did a digital twin of the Tcho Chocolate factory at Pier 15 (what is now the Exploratorium). It included working animations of all the machines and assembly line, as well as access to the actual pan/tilt/zoom cameras, and even ability to turn a light on and off.

The Great Dickens Christmas Fair

This has been an ongoing passion. In 2013 it was about using a PDF of the floor plan to build the major walls and structures, and stock objects to populate the world. This was clearly going to very labor intensive, and I imagined crowd-sourcing it, making a multi-user collaborative platform, where folks sharing my vision would contribute models and images to populate it out. But I also knew that future tech would make this approach a waste of time.

Castle Falkenstein

Ten years earlier, I’d coded up an Unreal-To-VRML (X3D) program. This was the original old-school Unreal Editor stuff. I’d found this lovely castle someone had built. I converted it to X3D and had fun using various VRML players to show it off on the web. After collecting dust, and writing an X3D-to-Unity converter, I was able to import this to Unity and run it in the DK1. I do sometimes revisit this and have it in Quest 3 standalone, it was on Altspace, and maybe going to VRChat or some such some day.

Vivaty

In 2006 I joined Vivaty, nee Media Machines. One of my favorite parts of building this web-based platform was giving life to smart objects. Here we see 4 puppies, each with its own personality. I made a system where you could dial in the probability of various animations, like ‘bark’, ‘play’, ‘sleep’, ‘beg’ etc. Other objects seen here: picture gallery (populated from FB, Google, MySpace, etc.), and a mirror.