The Virtual Office

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I’ve been spending a bit of time in Second Life. Having bought my virtual land, I’ve learned the modeling tools and built a virtual office (cleaner than my RL office, sad to say).

SL Office 01
SL Office 02
SL Office 03

And if you want to read a real blog entry (and I’m getting tired of typing tbh; in-world “chatting” is killing my fingertips – getting hoarse, so to speak), feel free to drop in on the Core77 Software & Technology blog where I post related (and often overlapping) entries. If you read my previous entry here called “The Anti-Sony“, today’s entry on Core is essentially a continuation. The dance is the same, just different partners (didn’t some character in STNG say that?)

Going Virtual

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Sooner or later this was going to happen: I’m now the proud owner of virtual beachfront property (probably as close as I’ll ever get to owning real waterfront turf). I’ve sent emails out which include a snapshot similar to the above, and now need to begin terraforming I suppose… well, after I figure out what I intend to build.

This certainly doesn’t look anything like the images of cyberspace I imagined while reading Gibson’s short stories (collected in the excellent “Burning Chrome“) or how Robert Longo depicted one of those shorts in the movie “Johnny Mnemonic“. I’ll admit I wonder why that is. There’s an easy answer: we just aren’t prepared for 3D spatial orientations that challenge years of experience about what we understand as “reality”. And then there might be another, simpler explanation altogether: we like sand and sun. Even if it’s virtual.

When Did I Become A Hippy?

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Since leaving the cube farm of corporate America and going solo, I’ve found myself ever more increasingly concerned with social issues. Not that I wasn’t previously concerned, I just find myself soaking up more information via the net, mixing the worthwhile bits in with my past experiences, and attempting to integrate the results into my life. Maybe this is a mid-life crises thing. I’m unsure.

This is all to say that I’ve been trading emails with Dr. Bowyer regarding the RepRap project – but (and you guessed it) not in regards to technical issues. As stated previously my real concern was the potential to treat this open source effort as something appropriate only for academia or for those with research experience; to set technical goals but effectively ignore (or at the very least downplay) usability issues. Let’s make something that works, make it freely available to everyone via the internet, but not really concern ourselves with mundane issues like whether people injure themselves attempting to use/misuse the “product”.

I won’t go into details of our discussion but I’m at least impressed that Dr. Bowyer is engaging me in this conversation – there are many I’m sure who would not. This is definitely more encouraging than some product development efforts in which I’ve participated (none of which, I should add, approach either Graco’s shameful behavior or some of the recent automotive recalls).

Maybe I just need a haircut.

What’s That Old Saying?

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You know the saying about setting goals just beyond your reach but not so far out they’re hopeless. That’s been on my mind as I’ve turned the RepRap project over in my head the past few days. And after having just read a website entry by rapid-prototyping guru, Terry Wohler, it’s feeling like an echo chamber in here. There’s a lot of truth in what Mr. Wohler says. A personal rapid prototyper is not going to put Wal*Mart out of business; after all, current manufacturing is geared towards, and Wal*Mart’s very successful strategy is centered on, the basic concept of high-volume/low-price (aka mass consumption). There’s a reason injection molding has been around for so long: cycle times generally stay under a minute and are often 30-40 seconds. Watching a press in action is like watching a rabbit in a carrot patch ingesting raw material and dropping “pellets” into a bin. It’s fast and requires little human interaction (if any). There is of course time and capital expense to create the tooling, but even that is likely to go through a dramatic shift in the near future (courtesy of rapid prototype-technology molds). So it’s reasonable to assume I’ll be wormfood before an RP device approaches the benchmarks set by those processes.

The real issues for me center on defining the User, meeting their needs, and also anticipating future needs of which that User is currently unaware (which, I might add, is how many successful companies are now addressing product development). I suspect, but don’t yet know, that there are probably very different ideas about who the target user is and what their circumstances are. And that concerns me more than the design and technology challenges that Mr. Wohler raises. I can imagine the results of this RepRap effort looking a bit like NASA’s recently announced Water Recovery System which is being recruited for humanitarian purposes planetside. You can read my admittedly pessimistic comments about that repurposing on WorldChanging’s site. Which is why I’m wondering if this project actually has two components: one technological and just beyond our grasp, and another ergonomic that is perhaps not even being considered.

The Copyright Clause and Me

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When I started blogging over on Core last month, I wrestled with the issue of copyright infringement. It’s one thing to cite sources and use quotations, another to use images, in my opinion – even though copyright law allows for so-called “Fair Use”. But what happens when “Fair Use” overlaps commerce? The Core website receives income from advertising on their blogs. And that makes me somewhat uncomfortable. For that reason I made a deliberate decision to use WordPress over Google’s Blogger for this blog because the latter has built-in advertising functions. The grey area was looking more like an 80% cool grey.

Well, it appears this issue will now be taken up by the courts. The Guardian reports that the AFP news organization is suing Google over copyright infringement. Why is that important to reBang? Simple. You only have to visit the CGTalk forum, the Polycount model resources section, or a virtual sim like Second Life to see or read about IP violations of the 3D variety. On CGTalk the issue is often whether or not modelers who recreate and sell vehicle designs violate car company IP. On Polycount people routinely create models of recognizable IP (Simpsons, Star Wars figures, etc). And in Second Life people run virtual storefronts selling virtual clothes branded with recognizable real world logos. If I have issues with images, it’s a safe bet I have an issue with some of this as well. So in the near future when all this virtual stuff can be inexpensively made into real product by casual users through “fabbing” technology (and hasn’t Bruce Sterling been beating that drum pretty loudly lately?), IP ownership will become an increasingly slippery issue. So anything and everything regarding intellectual property is of interest to me; including my own decisions in regards to it. So expect fewer images as I make more deliberate decisions in what to appropriate for this blog.