This is a bit of a special blog post.  This week I find myself in Mountain View, California, to attend the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference and Expo 2014.

Many people know (and many don't) that I'm nursing a well-honed obsession for virtual reality, and have been for many years.  I'm been working to solve one of the most significant engineering challenges in the field; that of virtual locomotion.  

The problem can be put simply.  How can you walk around in virtual reality without bumping into things in real life?

Well, if you want it to feel like normal walking, you are going to have to go to some trouble ... or, at least, I have on your behalf.

It's not completed yet by any means, but with the arrival of affordable 3D printing into my world the manifestation of the device into reality is getting increasingly close, and I can now much more easily communicate my design intent to people.  They say a picture tells 1,000 words.  Well a 3D print tells 1,000 pictures.

The Related Projects link has always been on my site here, pointing to this project for those who hunt for it, but here is the link directly: http://www.vrwalkerproject.com/

The image to the right shows the prototype of one of the shoe modules (sole facing upwards).  The green front section has been printed solid, which took the best part of 24 hours to print.  The blue parts are castors, fitted with standard bearings.

Big apologies for people who were hoping to receive 3D printed figurines of themselves this week.  Mailing them out will be the first order of business once I'm back on deck in Melbourne.

I have had the incredible honour of sitting for a portrait by the amazingly gifted and talented photographic artist, Mandarine Montgomery.  Her picture of me, blending with the machinery at the command centre of my dream-filled cyberpunk headquarters, has just hit the front page of The Working Pro magazine, published by the Australian Institute of Professional Photography, after winning a Gold Award at the 2013 Canon AIPP Professional Photography Awards and helping Mandy to take out Portrait Photographer of the Year, as well as winning Gold at the International Loupe Awards.  

Mandy shot the inside of my Solidoodle 2 3D printer and photoshopped a photo of me, looking brooding and intense, into the machine.  The amount of work that has gone into creating this image is just colossal.  I'm sure I don't even fully appreciate the extent of it, but I know it was a marathon of pixel tweaking.  

Those who have been to my workshop, and paid particular attention, might recognise the buckyball on the desk, which is one of my regular demo objects.  I've also made a necklace pendant from the triangular "Air" symbol that is on the display monitor in the shot.

I was actually at the AIPP awards when Mandy's image won gold and essentially sealed the deal on Portrait Photographer of the Year, which was terrifically exciting, but it just seems to keep on doing great things!

Click to open and use your scroll wheel to zoom in.

There have been some interesting tech acquisitions in the news lately, and this is one of the more intriguing ones:  Google buys Boston Dynamics.  

Boston Dynamics have been mostly funded by DARPA contracts to build an array of bipedal and quadrupedal robots, mostly with an eye on military and emergency services applications.  One can't help but wonder how the acquisition fts in with Google's plans, and how it sits with their stated philosophy of "Don't be evil."  Let's hope it's a swords into ploughshares endeavour to make sure these things are used for the benefit of people and not against them, because these things look quite terrifying.