The New Computer Museum, Virtual Edition was released at a small party of the New Computer Museum Meetup group held in Cambridge on Sunday, October 18th.
New Computer Museum Virtual Edition release party!
You can now download the application from the New Computer Museum website and visit the museum from the comfort of your own computer. The goal of the “Virtual Edition” of the New Computer Museum is twofold. It demonstrates the vision of what the “real” New Computer Museum has the potential to become, and it also stands on its own as a valuable and entertaining educational experience. This is particularly true because of the extensive material included in the Guide published on the New Computer Museum site. Check it out!
The New Computer Museum team was out and about learning new skills and sharing the latest draft of the “VR Edition” over the weekend.Here’s a quick recap…
First, Saturday brought a fantastic opportunity to spend the day at Google’s Cambridge office learning all about how to use Unity3D to create and publish content for the Google Cardboard and the Samsung GearVR. These happen to be the two target delivery platforms for the VR Edition of the New Computer Museum when it is published later this summer, so this was a particularly timely and incredibly valuable experience!
Juno Forbes spent the morning doing an amazing job of providing rigorous instruction that ranged all the way from the very basics of Unity3D programming all the way through how to publish our work for Google Cardboard. He was also kind enough to agree to let us re-post this picture that he took of the second half of the day. Thanks Juno!
Saturday VR Code Lab Google Cardboard and Samsung Gear VR (Photo Credit: Juno Forbes)
After lunch Dustin Wish from Samsung gave the crowd a wonderfully detailed walk-through of how to code an application in Unity3D and publish it to the Samsung GearVR. It was awesome to find out that the process for publishing to both Google Cardboard and Samsung GearVR is relatively painless!
Then Sunday was a beautiful day to take the newest draft of the New Computer Museum, VR Edition off to a Show & Tell at the Flea@MIT. Long-time Flea attendees had great fun stopping by to experience the latest iteration of the project, and they provided some ideas for even more cool things that we can add to the next version. As you can tell from the picture, there are some interesting folks that hang out at the Flea@MIT 🙂 Thanks to their help, the next draft will be even better — please stay tuned for information on when and how to see it!
New Computer Museum, VR Edition Show & Tell at the Flea@MIT (Photo Credit: Neil Carlson)
Come see an early version of a “Virtual Reality (VR) Edition” of the New Computer Museum! This is a chance to “walk through” a 3D/VR space and see some of the exhibits that are actually possible in real life now. The application is being built in Unity 5.1 and will be available for WebGL, Google Cardboard, Samsung GearVR and Oculus Rift later this summer.
The version that will be available on July 19th is actually just an early draft, so the galleries and exhibits will be a small subset of what will be in the full version. However, there was an earlier “rapid prototype” of the full vision built in SecondLife — here are a few images from that prototype to give you some sense of what the full version will be like when it is released.
The full Unity based version will demonstrate the vision of what a “real ” New Computer Museum has the potential to become in the near future. It will also stand on its own as a valuable and entertaining educational experience for use in classrooms. Finally, the VR Edition of the New Computer Museum will be an exploration of how the new wave of virtual reality products can be used in the context of museums and art galleries.
Please stop by, say hi, take a look, and share your feedback!
The New Computer Museum just took a field trip to a wonderful event at Brown University where they celebrated the past, present and future of their virtual reality caves Visualization and Creativity in Immersive 3D Environments — From Cave to YURT. If you are not familiar with the concept of a cave, be sure to check out the Wikipedia page about the technology. Brown has been a well recognized leader in the area for many years, and they have just upgraded to a brand new cave. The YURT website gives more in depth information about the event and the technology. The event began with demonstrations of both the older “legacy” cave and the new YURT cave. Check out their slide show to see pictures of the event and both spaces. Some projects that use the caves are available online as well. Overall, it was a fascinating event, and it was great to have the chance to chat about some historic Brown hypertext projects as well. Stay tuned for more news on the New Computer Museum’s adventures at the intersection of computer history and virtual reality!
Some Emerson students dropped by our event on Sunday, April 19th to catch up on the newest in 3D/VR technology (including our brand new Samsung GearVR).
A bit of how-to
Hands-on play time
Nathaniel shares tips
Our next Meetup will be on Sunday, May 17th around 9 am near the entrance to the Flea@MIT/Swapfest. Come swap tales of New England winter woes, trips to VCFs in the south and summer plans!
Ok, so it is getting a bit hard to deny that winter has arrived in New England. But with winter chill has come a whole new round of fun events. Here is a run down of what’s been happening.
Some of us from the New Computer Museum Meetup were happy to be among the audience.
Bob Erickson (right) and Dwight Bell (left)
Then the next day (Saturday, December 6, 2014) Walter Isaacson was next door at his alma mater to speak more specifically about computing pioneer Grace Hopper and the history of the Mark I (still on exhibit in the Harvard Science Center). In case you missed it, here is an earlier blog post and YouTube video about the day they even fired it up!
Walter Isaacson speaks about Grace Hopper at Harvard
Walter Isaacson also introduced a fantastic panel about women in computing that was moderated by Harvard Professor Margo Seltzer and included some extremely inspiring young women involved in CS at Harvard.
Margo Seltzer moderates inspiring panel on women in CS
Bob Erickson joined me at this too. Here is a photo he took of me chatting with the speakers.
Bob Erickson’s photo of Mary with Isaacson, Seltzer and other members of the audience. Thanks Bob!
Sunday turned out to be a beautiful day for the last Flea@MIT of this year, and a wonderful crowd turned out to enjoy some browsing and visiting before the winter months set in.
Later on some Meetup members enjoyed some snacks and conversation @ Champions.
Bob Erickson generously donated some wonderful goodies to the New Computer Museum.
Bob Erickson, proudly donates a complete, pristine set of software.
Thank you Bob! An inventory of the donations will be forthcoming.
In fact, speaking of inventory…
In the next few weeks the New Computer Museum will be moving into a new, larger and more accessible space. The move will serve as an excellent opportunity to put together a more formal inventory of the exhibits and collections, and that will be posted on this site after the move.
Last weekend turned out to be a busy, wonderful time full of fun visits with other fellow East Cost computer museum folk.
First Mary Hopper ventured down to Providence to visit with Michael Umbricht and Dave Fischer at the Retro-Computing Society of Rhode Island for their regular monthly open house on the third Saturday of the month (http://www.rcsri.org/). It was her first visit there, and it was very encouraging to see all of the excellent work they are doing to restore important systems like a Symbolics 3630 lisp machine and even a Cray J916! They are celebrating an impressive 20th anniversary this year, so maybe we can look forward to an announcement of a birthday party sometime — there will definitely be a Meetup for a field trip to attend that 🙂
Then Sunday was September’s Flea@MIT day, and it was a particularly special one, because Lonnie Mimms of the Computer Museum of America was in town for a visit. Mary had the pleasure of introducing him to some local collectors and giving him a tour of some MIT computer history hot spots.
All in all, it was a beautiful weekend and a great culmination to a year of exploring the world of computer museums both near and far. It has been quite an adventure!
The New Computer Museum hosted Which way to the holodeck? on Friday, August 22 at the Microsoft NERD Center in Cambridge. Around twenty attendees got to have fun chatting with each other and playing with some geeky toys ranging from a Virtual Boy to an Oculus Rift. The evening included a presentation by Mary Hopper in which she gave her personal take on the past history and present state of Virtual Reality. She also gave a somewhat pessimistic prediction about the field’s immediate future based upon her analysis using a framework for technical paradigms she developed during her research at MIT and Brown.
Welcome!
“Cardboard” really?
Mary’s DIY Viewer
The presentation concluded with an announcement that the New Computer Museum is in the process of evolving away from the year’s focus on events and moving forward with more of a focus on documenting and expanding the archive.
It is August, and things are starting to warm up at the New Computer Museum! We are definitely going to be increasing the storage area and maybe the formality of the archive. If you have something that you want to contribute to the collections, please contact me at MEHopper@MEHopper.net. This Sunday morning at the Flea@MIT is the best time/place to arrange drop-offs. It is also a good time to just stop by, say hello and catch up. If you RSVP, we’ll know to watch for you.
The New Computer Museum and Digital Den are also going to be sponsoring this new event.
Which way to the holodeck?
Friday, August 22, 2014
6:00 PM to 9:00 PM
Microsoft NERD Center
1 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA
Have you heard? VR is back! Or is it? Is it hype or real? Can you really feel like you are walking around Paris, Egypt, the Moon or Mars from the comfort of your chair? Come find out, and better yet, try it! You will also hear about what is going on in the local area and even find out how to make your own VR experiences.
As always, you can get updates about the New Computer Museum’s evolution at either event!
New Computer Museum 