Scott Anderson: End-user Programming in VR

Future of Coding

Scott Anderson has spent the better part of a decade working on end-user programming features for VR and the metaverse. He's worked on playful creation tools in the indie game Luna, scripting for Oculus Home and Horizon Worlds at Facebook, and a bunch of concepts for novel programming interfaces in virtual reality. Talking to Scott felt a little bit like peeking into what's coming around the bend for programming. For now, most of us do our programming work on a little 2D rectangle, with a clear split between the world around the computer and the one inside it. That might change — we may find ourselves inside a virtual environment where the code we write and the effects of running it happen in the space around us. We may find ourselves in that space with other people, also doing their own programming. This space might be designed, operated, and owned by a single megacorp with a specific profit motive. Scott takes us through these possibilities — how things are actually shaping up right now and how he feels about where they're going, having spent so much time exploring this space.

This episode was sponsored by Glide, and the transcript was sponsored by Replit — thanks to them both for making this possible.

The show notes (with copious links) and transcript are available here: https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/053

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Chapters

1. Welcome (00:00:00)

2. Part 1 (00:05:20)

3. Sponsor: Glide (01:48:57)

4. Sponsor: Replit (01:50:45)

5. Part 2 (01:54:09)

6. Closing Remarks (02:01:11)

7. So Long (02:01:41)