All of you CAD minions are no doubt relishing the accelerating convergence of venues & platforms where we can exercise our craft.  Soon the artificial partitions between engineering, product design, CGI, game creators, machinima and artists in general will disappear completely.  The GUI of different CAD systems are beginning to coalesce into singularity — to commodicize, as my Meshverse buddy likes to say — in much the same way word processing did several years ago.  With the expansion of generic CAD apps with full palette capabilities, many things become rapidly more accessible.  Now we need to bridge the differences in tool sets & process between the Maya/3DS tool sets & process and that of the CAD world.  After that, achieving unison among the virtual worlds will be much more straighforward.  As a CAD polyglot, my eagerness is tough to mask.

I do a lot in Second Life, as you will note in my expanding gallery, and I am looking forward to Croquet.  It is an interesting challenge, engaging the environmental differences — like elevators & doors for instance — in a virtual environment.  The role of precision & accuracy in building is also different, but I expect that to shift with the inclusion/application of physics into the virtual building equation.

There is clearly much more creeping across the horizon, especially as hardware ramps up(multi-core processors & the commoditization of servers), and storage/memory prices continue to drop.  The recent news out of Purdue regarding their construction of a supercomputer gives us all Ferrari computer dreams…