Virtual Greg

Today I started work at PARC on Coyote Hill Road. It was a good day. PARC is just far enough off the beaten track to feel like you’re riding through the country to get there. They have one,  large, complex building. It has three floors, and large atria divide the floors into sections. Roughly speaking, hardware have the bottom floor, computing the middle, and management the top.

Everyone is in an office but there are a lot of open spaces, and a focus on collaboration. Having been heavily involved with teaching at UniMelb, it’s interesting to see a research-only workplace, and spend a whole day only doing research.

Nic Ducheneaut is hosting me and he spent some time showing me round. I got a computer and an office, shared with Don, a visitor from Taiwan who’s comparing avatar preferences across three game platforms. My name’s on the door and I have a working login – how organized are these guys? We spent some time talking about possible projects and I think we’ve settled on a good one. At noon we got lunch – from the in-house staff cafeteria - which has its own chef ! The CS lab researchers ate lunch together in their open space. After lunch we had the weekly CSL meeting, during which one researcher gave a conference talk. Then Don, Nic and I met with Nick Yee to discuss the results of Don’s recent survey. This place has a good atmosphere. One guy there said “we’re all a family”. There is interesting stuff about PARC on Wikipedia.

Day two

I did some literature-searching for publications relevant to my project. One of the key papers is a chapter from “Collaborative Virtual Environments” (2000). It gave me an idea for how to conduct a relevant experiment in Second Life. I ran it past Nic, he made some suggestions and we pretty much figured out what we’re going to do, and how we’ll set up a lab to do it in. Now I’m writing a plan and doing more literature search.

In the afternoon we went to a forum to hear from a guy who designs public spaces such as shops. He had some interesting things to say about how spatial design affects emotion and behaviour. I think PARC hosts these forums every week. About half the audience were external visitors.

I found out an hour too late about a group visit to Microsoft and Google today. Oh well. I signed up for a Sun visit planned for a couple of weeks.

More cool things in this place: shower for bike-riders, free gym, atm, auto-flush toilets (staff project surely?)