In spite, of the release of VR hardware like the Oculus in March or the Vive in April, the single most important development in the past year since our previous experimentations has been the officiation, support and adoption of the draft WebVR specification pioneered by Mozilla (now at version 1.1).
The primary intent of WebVR is to enable distribution and consumption of VR content to end-users without extra platforms, as well as creation of VR content and experiences without significant re-tooling or retraining of developers that use existing web development technologies like HTML or JS.
The widespread adoption of conversational interfaces replaces the master-to-slave narrative (e.g. artist using a paintbrush) with one that’s more human-to-human. Bots are crucial to these developments, which are gaining momentum across popular social platforms (Slack, Facebook messenger, kik and many others) as well as in other unexpected places. We’ll explore some general ideas on how to keep interactions with bots meaningful and enjoyable for everyone.
Computer Literacy vs Digital Natives
Texting someone on Whatsapp, using Slack to talk to coworkers, or speaking to Siri for a pub debate fact-check; these are all examples of conversational interfaces. Even the green-screened command-line used in countless Hollywood hacker…
Stepping into the world of developing VR experiences is incredibly exhilarating, and, depending on which front your exploration starts from, very difficult. In the past few weeks, the development and innovation teams at This Place rolled into “new-to-us” territory.
Following up on our recent VR post, we continue covering in-depth our trials of imagining, designing, and developing for this recently reinvigorated digital medium.
Hiring for new positions in a team often means looking at dozens of résumés and CVs a day. Usually this would be fine. The problem surfaces in smaller companies when hiring simultaneously for several roles while managing multiple sprints, deadlines, and tight client meeting schedules. There are simply too few people to dedicate enough time to coherently filter through job applicants to sort the best of the pile.
We found ourselves in that position. So where to begin? You simply don’t have time to look at all the profiles and résumés. Even then, a résumé is just a bunch of…
In the Beginning
When This Place registered an open house event for Digital Shoreditch 2015, we were excited both to create an entertaining experience for our attendees and to see what the other open house events were like. The events page had a table of 115 events but no easy way to find out how close they were to us without manually entering each address into Google Maps.
It seemed obvious that we wouldn’t make the effort to go to any of the events unless it was more convenient to browse the details and if that was too much for us, it could…
A drop-in solution for mismatched background colors between a web page and its images.
Highlights
- Approximately 230 SLOC (source lines of code)
- No dependencies
The Why
A classic way of improving the readability of a table with lots of rows is to set slightly different background colors for alternating rows. This all works nicely when you’re in control of the content that lives inside a row but what happens when the row has to show a thumbnail in one of its cells?
If there are only 3 different images and our prototype hard-codes the links to them then there’s an easy solution: go into Photoshop and delete the backgrounds. But what if we didn’t know where the…
