Since I arrived in Australia in late 2003, I have been working with media and business professionals to integrate the lessons of the first decade of the web into 21st-century business practices. The web encourages participation (for instance, YouTube), peer-production (everyone making something and sharing what they've made, sites as Flickr) and collective activities such as Wikipedia.

All of these explosive trends are combined with two others: the ability for audiences to distribute their own content (which I have termed "hyperdistribution"), and the emergence of digital social networks (such as MySpace and LinkedIn).

Now all of this amazing ability to connect, communicate and share has been spread ubiquitously across the planet, thanks to an entirely pervase layer of mobile telephones and mobile networks - which are, more and more, just an extention of the Internet.

That's a lot of change - and a lot of opportunity. I founded FutureSt (prounounced "Future Street") to help empower businesses to make the most of the transition to a connected, collaborative, and broadly networked world.

You can visit the FutureSt website by clicking here.

Television
& Radio

From 1995 through 2006 I taught at the graduate and post-graduate level at a number of well-respected universities in the United States and in Australia. In 1998 I was invited to found the program in Interactive Media at the world-famous USC School of Cinematic Arts; I chaired the program for two years, and established the standards of excellence which have made the program a continuing success.

In 2003 I was invited to found the program in Emerging Media and Interactive Design at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS), Australia's national film school. Since 2005 they have been accepting students into an MFA program which is producing the next generation of media professionals for Australia.

I enjoy teaching immensely; few things are more satisfying than challenging a student with a difficult problem, and helping them work to a solution.

I currently hold an Honorary appointment at the University of Sydney.

VRML

From mid 1990 through early 1994 I wrestled with the problem of visualizing arbitrary networks. Inspired by William Gibson's Neuromancer, and working with Tony Parisi, I implemented "Labyrinth", an interactive three-dimensional viewer as a helper application for the brand-new NCSA WWW browser Mosaic.

Tim Berners-Lee invited us to present our work at CERN during the 1st WWW conference. During a birds-of-a-feather session, the name 'VRML' (for Virtual Reality Modeling Language) was suggested by HTML pioneer Dave Raggett. I quickly changed my presentation slides, and VRML was off and running...

Over the next five years, I brought together a broad consortium of businesses, academics and governmental bodies, and VRML went from a bare-bones implementation to an international standard (ISO/IEC 14772).

Today VRML is available on millions of personal computers - and is the forerunner of other, proprietary plugins by Adobe (Atmosphere) & Macromedia (Shockwave 3D).

VRML is part of the MPEG-4 BIFS specification. Over the next decade it will be widely incorporated into an range of consumer electronics devices, beginning with Sony's PSX.

VRML evolved from a longer-term project to develop a comprehensive system of servers which could "share" a consensual description of a unified 3D dataspace.

This "cyberspace protocol" (CP) is described in detail in a paper presented during the first WWW conference in 1994. Utilizing an the phenomenon of "six degrees of separation" - which works in cyberspace as well - servers can make queries to each other, and discover the content of any volume of cyberspace.

In 2007, After a several years pursuing other projects, I have begun to implement CP using Python 2.5.

I hope to have a demonstrable multi-user server available sometime later in the year.

CP is an open source project. All source code will be made available to the public, free of charge, under the GPL.

I have been interested in virtual reality since I heard of the Architecture Machine, a forerunner of modern VR systems developed by Nicholas Negroponte when in the early 1980s, when I was attending MIT.

In 1991, I left my position at Shiva to found Ono-Sendai Corporation. I wanted to create consumer-level virtual reality products - fully immersive video games.

By 1992, I had completed work on a key component, a low-cost orientation sensor for virtual reality head-mounted displays (HMDs). I was later granted a patent for that device.

Throughout 1993 and 1994, I worked with Sega to incorporate technologies developed at Ono-Sendai (including the sensor) into the Virtua VR HMD. Although legal considerations prevented the device from reaching the market, we proved that consumer VR was economically feasible.

Among the long-term projects pursued using VRML, WebEarth is the most significant, and the closest to my heart.

Inspired by Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, WebEarth presents a real-time model of the Earth from space, using imagery gathered by the weather satellites which circle our planet.

Webearth has been available as a VRML resource for seven years. It is an open source project; the code has been adopted for use in numerous other websites.

In Australia, the Ping group is implementing 3map, a project which will fully realize the goals of WebEarth on an open-source platform of software and tools. I am delighted to be helping them in this endeavor.

In 2000 I realized that a digital camcorder could be used for high-density, high-speed data backup. By late 2001, after a few months of research and a few weeks of programming, I had created the first versions of FireUp!, software which allows as much as 18.5 GB of data to be recorded to and restored from a DVCAM, miniDV or Digital8 tape.

In March 2002 I applied for a patent on my invention. Work on a shareware version of the software commenced in April 2003. I am actively seeking investors who want to work with me to take FireUp! to market.

Digital Coast 50, Silicon Alley Reporter, 1999

VRML Consortium, Community Service Award, 1998

International Design Magazine, selection as one of the "ID 40," 1997

Ars Electronica Art Festival, Honorable Mention for "WebEarth," 1996

Network Computing Magazine, "50 Most Important People In Networking", 1995

Meckler Virtual Reality Market Impact Award, 1995