How did this begin?

Back in 2019, I was coming to the end of my PhD and I was demoralized. I had made two things: CootVR, a program for biologists working with electron microscope data, and Viruspatterns.com, a website for teaching people about viruses. I felt like neither were to be very impactful. After those, I was ready to work on small things.

I got lucky: Viruspatterns fell into the lap of Alan Kay, inventor of the modern operating system, the graphical user interface, and object-oriented programming. He was one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever met, and he told me to think bigger, bigger, bigger. Nothing of real value gets made in less than 6 years.

I thought about it. And I noticed there was a huge problem that was plausibly solvable with my abilities. The technical way to say it is: animation interface programmers are carrying around decisions made by electrical engineers 150 years ago. The simple way to say it is: animation is too damn complicated.

I figured out a project outline which I presented here. Four years and dozens of prototypes (seen on the right!) later, I have something I’m ready to present: Snappets, a VR program with an animation interface based on Geometric Algebra. I look forward to giving you hope you’ll get a chance to try it!