Writings
Hopefully of some service
Wrote this in 2017, still makes sense. There is an industry to come around tele-operated robots, and it could be a uniquely American industry with jobs for everyone.
Civil online places will not be possible until there is a safe system for establishing singular, non-PII based identity.
To correct the escalating wealth inequality inevitable in free markets, make a currency that uses a sales tax to fund a basic income. Can be done with a cryptocurrency.
In smartphone slo-mo, every frame is 4 milliseconds. Capture and count.
Physics is what everyone agrees will happen next.
Fun to build, for older kids.
Videos, Podcasts
A 2011 interview at the under-construction Coffee & Power office at Market & Guerrero. We did a lot of crazy experiments in co-working and P2P markets out of that office.
2006 TED video about Second Life
Original video by James Cook giving a tour of the alpha version features of Second Life.
A panel along with Elon Musk and Baroness Susan Greenfield, a neuroscientist.
Peter Diamandis onstage interviewing me as a remote-operated robot. Looking at the YouTube comments makes me happy.
Patents
... some of
the more interesting ones
2000
Rather than wear gloves and HMDs, immobilize a person and measure the forces they apply to an exoskeleton to move their body in a virtual world. Allows for zero latency as well as inertial mass, haptics, and full body locomotion. And it was a frightening-looking machine that we called 'the rig'.
2014
The first thing we did at High Fidelity was to try to figure out how you could make a huge space where everyone could hear each other, using servers connected together in some way.
2002
Distributing simulation of a virtual world across tiled servers so you could make a really big space. Still hasn't been replicated broadly in gaming.
1997
Back in the days of modems, at RealNetworks, we were trying different ideas to better measure how bad your connection was. This was the idea that if you send two packets at exactly the same time (from a server), you could learn about the speed of the network by looking at the time delay between when they were received.