Foremost of the projects I think I could undertake in parallell to a full-time job is Wild Iris, a technical web portal / wiki / discussion site on the subject of physics-based, algorithmic approaches to creating beauty.

In practice the major fields we’re talking about are procedural content generation, physical simulation and control and modelling, texture synthesis and aging, etc, etc. I deliberately avoid the area of shading, rendering, global illumination, since that is actually well-covered elsewhere.

Everybody talks about procedural content… there’s so much buzz about it… and yet from where I’m sitting, it seems so few people push it to the level of polish I feel it should be able to achieve. Why is the most comprehensibly impressive demonstration of this idea still that 96kb demo from 2004?

Generating realistic-looking, physically valid motion for virtual creatures, given high level goals — that’s another one of those fields that’s so extraordinarly important for the future development of graphically immersive realities, that the only reason it’s not the subject of endless web buzz is that the solutions are still so flawed and complicated. Hey, this also happens to be the subject of my old master’s thesis!

Anyway, Wild Iris would be mostly Wiki with forums and a terse multi-author blog. The emphasis would be on vigilant linking to actual resources out there — research groups and projects, toolkit software, and the like — and a terse multi-author blog with updates on the fields.