The Creation Engine No. 2

AI is beginning to transform the world in ways that people are likening to a second industrial revolution.

I grew up going to a little 13th century church in Bushey.

After The Spirit of Gravity in February I ended up talking to Jason Hotchkiss and Jo Summers.

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.

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.

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.

The recording of my recent Stereopsia 2020 talk about the art of designing social VR experiences is now online.

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 years I’ve spent a lot of time helping people new to virtual worlds learn how they work.

Over the past few years I’ve spent a lot of time helping people new to virtual worlds understand how they work.

Over the last few years I’ve spent a lot of time helping people new to virtual worlds learn how they work.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Last year I hosted a panel on creating a safe environment for people in VR with Tony Sheng and Darshan Shankar at OC3.

Opening a couple of browser windows and clicking around was more than sufficient for testing the initial version of ReactVR pairs.

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 idempoten…

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 perspecti…

Several years ago when we were in 100 robots together, Max was celebrating his 40th birthday.

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.

I was very happy that Oculus found time at OC3 to host a panel on creating a safe environment for people in VR.

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…

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.

The early days of RESTful hypermedia API design tends to involve lots of homogeneous collections.

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.

A year ago I gave a talk at EVE Vegas about building RESTful CREST applications.

Modern software development is sometimes colourfully described as being similar to firing tracer bullets at a target.

Last year I was talking to an engineer at Droidcon London who was working on an Android app with 100% test coverage.

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.

There have been a number of blog posts recently about exciting new organisational structures.

EVE online is a remarkable game.

In mid-2004 I first started exploring Second Life.

A few weeks ago Facebook London hosted the Parse By The Sea hackathon at the Brighton Dome as part of the Brighton Digital Festival.

I’ve been a big fan of hackathons since one of the first Yahoo!

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 Festiv…

Using Reader on my HTC Wizard on the loo was probably responsible for my biggest increase in clue ever.

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.

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 for…

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.

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.

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.

Although Nginx supports proxy caching it doesn’t provide support for the HTTP Vary header out of the box.

The EVE online network architecture uses stateful proxy servers which manage sessions for players connected to the cluster via the EVE client.

A great video of the Brighton Mini Maker Faire last year by Andrew Sleigh showing the making of You’re The Boss 2.

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.

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 s…

Lots of exciting 100 robots news!