3D models on the web have been at the center of my world for over a decade, and I’m so excited about where we are today.
We’ve got a new post about the HTML Model element and how to use it - and cool demos you can take a look at yourself! Check it out at https://webkit.org/blog/17118/a-step-into-the-spatial-web-the-html-model-element-in-apple-vision-pro/
A step into the spatial web: The HTML model element in Apple Vision Pro
visionOS 26 brings a major update to an important building block for the spatial web: The HTML model element is enabled by default, with a new API that’s ready to use today.
Want to know more about building great content for the spatial web in visionOS? I had the privilege to cover it at
#wwdc24 - and the video is now live! Check it out at
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2024/10065/I hope it gets your wheels turning 🚲 about what you can do on the platform 😄
Optimize for the spatial web - WWDC24 - Videos - Apple Developer
Discover how to make the most of visionOS capabilities on the web. Explore recent updates like improvements to selection highlighting,...
But we do ourselves a disservice by ignoring the other revolutionary moments that lead us to this point. Inventing the future is some of the hardest work we can pursue - but with luck, our descendants will see it as inevitable, even disbelieving there could be a time before it.
7/7
That said, there is something different about the present moment. Spatial computing gives us an opportunity to live and express outside the laws of physics, to encode and discern meaning without the explicit interaction with physical surfaces. 6/
And it’s also essential to understand that what looks revolutionary on a 5-year timeline is really only contributing at the margins of a vast, millennia-long project of better pursuing the universal human goal of expression and comprehension. 5/
I’m enormously optimistic about the scope of technology to change human life - that’s why I do what I do. But it’s also essential to understand that *everything* we interact with is technology, including reading and writing. 4/
Most people are aware that printing is only 500 years old - but did you know that _page numbers_ only became popular about 50 years later? And punctuation - including the *the spaces between words* - only really emerged as a standard 500 years before that, around 1000 AD? 3/
Why look to the past, and why bother going so far? Because it’s the only way we can see change at a scale we need to imagine for the future. Here in the early 21st century, it can be easy to feel like the way we communicate is more or less fixed. Not so! 2/
🧵 To help build the future of computing, I’m reading Steven Roger Fischer’s _A history of Reading._ It’s a stunning, yet matter-of-fact account of the last 5000 years of text and recording.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/H/bo38335756.html 1/
A History of Reading
Tracing the complete story of reading from the age when symbol first became sign through to the electronic texts of the present day, Steven Roger Fischer’s fascinating A History of Reading offers a sweeping view across time and geography of our evolving relationship with text. Turning to ancient forms of reading, Fischer takes us to Asia and the Americas and discusses the forms and developments of completely divergent writing systems and scripts. With the Middle Ages in Europe and the Middle East, innovative reinventions of reading emerged—silent and liturgical reading; the custom of lectors; a focus on reading in general education—whereupon printing transformed society’s entire attitude toward reading. Fischer charts the explosion of the book trade, its increased audience, and radically changed subject-matter in this era. He also describes the emergence of broadsheets, newspapers, and public readings and traces the effect of new font designs on general legibility, and much more. Finally, Fischer assesses a future in which read communication will likely exceed oral communication through the use of the personal computer and the internet. Looking at "visual language" and modern theories of how reading is processed in the human brain, he asks how the New Reader can reshape reading’s fate—suggesting a radical new definition of what reading could be.
Made Emoji fireworks with #threejs for this week's
codepen challenge, pretty pleased with the result!
https://codepen.io/zachernuk/full/vYQropm
Emoji firework generator
Building emoji out of particles! ...
