We’ve all heard of the child prodigy who goes off to M.I.T. or Yale to explore their genius and earn a degree before they’re able to drive a car. On the other hand, there are those living in small towns or are cautious about allowing their children to roam the big city alone. So what do we do when we think our child could truly excel if only they, too, had the opportunity, were in the right place, or we had the resources?

We bring the mountain to us.

In a time of over-crowded public education, underfunded teachers, programs in the arts being cut, and rapidly advancing technologies that are driving the jobs of tomorrow, parents must make a choice on how they will give advantage to their children.

Hypatia will be that choice. We are the big city. We are the campus of the future where students will, in effect, be attending prep school for their university experience. In the space of Virtual Reality, humanity is going to build the cities and campuses of the future. Virtual Reality will be a place where culture, history, science, and community come alive.

It is most often the exploration and roaming of the world around us that lead curious minds to the hallowed halls of higher education, where one starts to truly encounter the luxury of finding knowledge. While most anyone can now attend college, the question remains: what will one do with their degree? It still holds true that specialized knowledge is a requirement to participate effectively in the workforce, but it is also now true that a broad spectrum of skills and social networking is essential to success.

In another age, many of us found our networking skills and social abilities on the streets where we grew up among our neighbors and throughout our community. These days, kids are driven everywhere, their days are managed, and their isolation can often be suffocating. One very important skill we are failing to learn is how to relate to a community and build a dialogue with those in our immediate vicinity, and yet it is becoming ever more obvious that we need a global reach in our hi-tech world.

Again, it will be in Hypatia and places like it where the social fabric of the community will be restored. Our local towns, cities, and states often cut off our exposure to the kind of communication and thinking that is driving job creation, which propels humanity forward. Like it or not, society evolves, and either we go with the flow, or we find ourselves trampled underfoot by the march of progress.

One of the goals of Timefire is to offer Hypatia as a tool to foster a new age of self-education. We are the spearhead of crowd-sourced teaching and learning. We predict that the United States must focus its attention on raising the intelligence and cognitive abilities of roughly 30% of our working-age population in the next 10-15 years in order to remain globally competitive. Our current education system may not be up to this herculean task. We must look to new methods that can catapult the minds of millions that have been allowed to lie fallow for far too long.

In the fall of 2015, 7.7 million adults over the age of 25 were attending university (NCES). What of the other 50+ million people who are falling behind the requirements of our modern workforce? Those working adults can neither afford the tuition, time away from family, or time away from their current low-paying jobs to participate in higher learning. This is where a radical experiment in immersive learning may point the way forward. In light of the glacial pace at which large systems bring change to society, we need a new system that can rapidly deliver results. We believe that Virtual Reality is that medium and teaching device.

Is our solution going to be a panacea? We can’t know with certainty but it is a serious step forward. Self-education through virtual reality will help a country right its listing ship against competitive countries in a battle for information.

William Shakespeare once said, “All the world’s a stage. And all the men and women merely players.”

In his day, the majority of humanity experienced their stage from the perspective of the plot of land they farmed. A couple of hundred years later, the players found themselves in the cities where the stage was a factory floor. More recently, many of us found ourselves in some form of service industry performing for an audience of hungry and thirsty patrons who’d just come from a shopping spree at the mall.

The march of time, though, waits for no man or woman. Our stage is changing; it is transmogrifying.

With this change, our roles as players are going to once again be something quite different. This difference will be as significant to us as though Mr. Shakespeare had gone from witnessing his age to being teleported onto a jet flying from his merry-medieval England to 21st-century America from one day to the next.

Virtual Reality will be that disruptive. It is our new stage. And you are the player, the actor on that platform, an inhabitant of a new world. This alternative reality emerging from our imaginations is nothing less than a universe that will require our exploration. The difference with this age of discovery is that one need not be wealthy, an adventurer, or one of the lucky ones chosen to be an astronaut. All we must do is don a pair of VR glasses, have a powerful enough computer and download the app.

Some will say this will be an expensive proposition. Does anyone think it was cheap to go to the moon? Do you know that it typically costs more than $45,000 per person to go up Everest without a guarantee of reaching the top? Have you priced a penguin-watching trip in the Antarctic waters lately?

What is the value to us humans to see new things and have unimaginable experiences?

We are entering an age where almost anyone will be able to virtually participate in nearly any activity humans can dream of. The cost of entry is not free or cheap. But it’s never been free to enter the theater, eat a great meal, or travel the world. The difference is going to be that we are removing the barriers that have only allowed those of privilege to embark on humanity’s greatest adventures.

We recently had a question posed to us by @ExplorAVR in the Twitterverse regarding how we are tackling architecture theory for community building in Hypatia. Seems like a fair question that deserves more than a Tweet back, so here it is.

Before theory comes experience.

The founder of Timefire grew up in Los Angeles and Phoenix, Arizona, but went on to spend a decade in Europe before embarking on traveling the breadth of the United States. He pulls his inspiration from firsthand knowledge of the environments that define these lands. Forty years of observation and study formed the seed of what would be planted as the architectural cornerstone of Hypatia.

With life, we explore curiosity. From curiosity, knowledge can grow. Knowledge evolves until the wisps of wisdom alight our way.

From the historical decisions and serendipity that have built our most beloved cities to what is being written and talked about right now, these, too, are our architectural drivers. Hypatia is a reflection of what makes a city interesting and, hopefully, fun. We are taking heavy influence from the quaint corners that seem to universally delight travelers from around the world, such as Amsterdam, Barcelona, Venice, Zurich, and Osaka, to name but a few.

Next up are the ten design principles for Livable Communities as identified by the American Institute of Architects: 1. Design on a Human Scale, 2. Provide Choices, 3. Encourage Mixed-Use Development, 4. Preserve Urban Centers, 5. Vary Transportation Options, 6. Build Vibrant Public Spaces, 7. Create a Neighborhood Identity, 8. Protect Environmental Resources, 9. Conserve Landscapes, 10. Design Matters.

But we alone are not the ultimate voice and curator of what drives humanity’s architectural curiosity, and so while we will have a heavy hand in the development of the first phase of Hypatia, this city will evolve, as cities do, with the help of others who contribute to the design and building of a community. Over time, even the sacred halls that were the foundation of our city will be torn down and replaced by the crush of progress.

Until that moment comes, though, we will encourage others to take inspiration from their influences and dreams to join us on the virtual canvas to paint a new reality. So grab your sketchbook, brush up on your Frank Gehry, I.M. Pei, Moshe Safdie, Zaha Hadid, and Tom Wright, then join us to create our virtual city from the shared vision of artists from around the globe.

Over a year ago, we made the decision to use Blender as our primary 3D modeling and animation tool; you can read more about that here.

Today, I’ll go over some of the other factors that influenced this choice. First and foremost, the software is free. It also has the support of both Epic and Valve (important if you are a game/VR developer). Finally, it is very well-positioned for use in scientific visualization. And it is here that things can get into the weeds but are also very exciting for the scientifically inclined.

I have found over a dozen add-ons that extend and facilitate using Blender in some highly technical ways, as though 3D software wasn’t difficult enough. An “add-on” for Blender can also be seen as a plugin, a 3rd party application that hooks into the host software to deliver greater capability.

Three of these add-ons rise to the top of my list due to their ability to help Timefire build assets for our game Hypatia.

Sverchok is a procedural architecture tool that allows us to replicate forms where repetition would slow us down to a snail’s pace if we were forced to build every piece manually. Renowned architect Zaha Hadid is an expert in the field of this style of architecture, and while I have no idea what tools she uses, we can thank some programmers from Russia for giving the world this free add-on to allow all of us to explore and experiment with procedural architecture.

Animation Nodes is an add-on from Germany, with the generous support of others from around the globe, which is also free. This complex set of nodal-based tools gives the animator the power of procedural animation. An example use case for this is to animate 1000 similar on-screen objects. The artist controls the objects using node-based parameters and functions that are able to be assigned specific numeric and mathematical attributes. Repetitive tasks are thus reduced to understanding the flow of sequences that can be used to achieve the desired result of moving the objects along, say, a particular arc.

Tissue is more of an artist’s experimental friend as it relates to computational design. Originating from Italy, the add-on allows one to perform magic, or so it appears. Starting with a base mesh, the add-on “Tessellates” your objects into works of amazingly intricate works of art.

Now, on to the more esoteric add-ons. You’d better fasten your seat belt.

Whether you are studying brain sciences, atomic structures, biology, or computational fluid dynamics, there is an add-on for you. But let’s be serious: if you are a parent reading this, what is the likelihood you’ll up and decide to create some glycogen analysis visualizations? Your kids, though, should be encouraged to start learning some of these tools because multi-disciplinary education and broad knowledge are shaping up to be part of what is considered essential workplace skills. Plus, the tools are free.

To go into details about what the specific tools do would certainly weigh this blog entry down, maybe even sink it, but I will offer a hint of things.

There is BioBlender, another add-on from Italy. BioBlender provides the tools for exploring and visualizing biological molecules.

NeuroMorph is just the right gift for anyone interested in the morphometric analysis and visualization of 3D models created from electron microscopy image stacks – it, too is FREE!

Combine that with the add-on for creating dendritic structures with the aforementioned glycogen add-on, and your precocious 10-year-old will be performing Ph.D.-level brain analysis in no time.

There is also an Atomic clustering add-on, a protein data bank reader, and a tool for running building simulations so one can see how heat and air conditioning move through a structure. Maybe you are more interested in parametric anatomical modeling? There’s an add-on for that, too; it’s called PAM.

Finally, the folks at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are able to run Blender on a 300,000-core Jaguar Supercomputer. If you are thinking that $104 million for a computer is too rich for your wallet, you could always opt for the Nvidia Digits DevBox, but I’d wait for next year’s Pascal-based unit if I were you.

Oh, I almost forgot to tell you about the Gwyddion add-on for importing Scanning Probe Microscopy files.

Image courtesy of Computational Design Italy