LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

How I created the Palace and lived to tell about it!

Greetings!  And welcome to the first edition of "The Tiny Lobster!" I hope this
is the first in a long series of similar newsletters, each replete with
interesting articles, useful stuff and copious toy surprises.

WHY am I giving all this cool stuff away, you ask?  Well basically, this is the
stuff I tend to make when I'm bored, and I have a lot of it.  Bucketloads, in
fact.

Most of this stuff, these little toys, aren't particularly useful on their own,
and I don't have the time nor inclination to spend most of my time selling 'em, so
I decided to give 'em away, as a cheap way to market my skills.  If you check out
my website, you'll find lots more free stuff - particularly Macintosh software.

The Palace, incidentally, almost ended up as a freebie.  It got started as yet
another "thing for jbum to do on a rainy day", but ended up as a full blown
company complete with investments from Time Warner, Intel and SoftBank.

How does such a thing happen you ask?  Well draw up a chair, pour yourself a nice
cup 'o joe, and I'll be glad to tell you:

STORY OF THE PALACE, PART I

The Palace began as a spark of an idea.  I had been reading a lot of articles
about this neat stuff that Jaron Lanier and friends were working on called
"Virtual Reality".  An issue of Scientific American with a data glove on the
cover caught my eye in particular.  I had two basic reactions when I read these
articles.  My first reaction was to say, "Neat!"  And my second reaction was to
say, "Why does this thing have to be so complicated?"

You see, I have always been something of a simplifier.  I like flight simulators
for example, but I have never understood the need for an AIRPLANE.  I would much
prefer a flight simulator which simply enabled one to simulate human flight
WITHOUT the airplane - the kind of flight that we sometimes do in our dreams. 
Now THAT would be cool.  To walk out on the runway, tap your nose, or maybe blink
your eyes, and float up into the ether...  sigh...

And so with the Palace, I also simplified.  I sought to create a kind of
simplified virtual reality - a 2-D virtual reality if you will.  That was the
impetus - that was the seed.  Many other aspects of the Palace were
simplifications as well.  The avatars, the "roundheads" were simplified faces. 
The ability to paint avatars was a simplification of the process of having to
"buy" or "construct" avatars that were found in some co-existing avatar
environments, and so on...

So that's how it began.  Now how did it get created?  And how did I live to tell
about it?  Well, I am sorry, but it's a long story, and I have a newsletter
to get out, so it will have to wait for a future issue.

If the story really interests you, then by all means, write me or call me, and
I'll try to fill you in on the details.

Until the next installment, I remain your faithful editor,

- jbum

go back