About Karmanaut and Viveka Weiley
Karmanaut is a user experience design agency based in Sydney, Australia. Specialising in virtual reality and advanced hypermedia projects, Karmanaut is committed to finding innovative and appropriate solutions for the most interesting and challenging design problems: Interactive data visualisation, multi-dimensional information design, and effective human interfaces.
Karmanaut is me, Viveka Weiley. Hypermedia, in case you're wondering, occurs when multimedia information is structured in a hyperlinked information space, such as the Web. I did my first website design consultation in 1994. I had no idea what I was getting into.
I've been working with Virtual Reality (mostly using VRML and now X3D) since I got hooked on its capabilities at the SIGGRAPH conference in 1997. I'm now pursuing research into the interaction between virtual & augmented reality and urban design through Ping, a company I founded with Chris Thorne in 2002. We've had some success with the planet-earth project, powered by 3map, our Free/Open Source geospatial virtual reality platform. This seems an appropriate moment to thank the Telstra Broadband Fund for their very generous support during our R&D phase.
I've been interested in computer graphics since I first animated
an LED matrix 
(in 6502 assembly language, on a hexadecimal keyboard) at the age of nine.
When I was twelve, I attempted to program a GUI
for my Commodore
64, and it worked, for a loose definition of "worked".
Main competencies
- Usability and User Experience Design; based on industrial design principles, and incorporating requirements gathering, use case preparation, user testing, usability analysis and/or heuristic analysis.
- Information design, especially for hypermedia systems such as the Web.
- Information architecture; ensuring that data is structured in a user-focused way.
- Accessibility - Web Accessibility Initiative compliance - a legal requirement for many web sites in Australia and elsewhere.
- Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, mostly using X3D/VRML, but also other immersive technologies such as QuicktimeVR, Shockwave3D, game engines etc.
- Geospatial technologies, particularly relating to 3D representations of geospace.
- Teaching, speaking and occasionally ranting on the subject areas above.
- Managing creative technical teams collaborating on software and new media projects, and including remote participants, employees, contractors, volunteers and clients.
Education, teaching & research
I hold a Bachelor of Design from UNSW CoFA.
I have taught Urban modeling at UNSW's Faculty of the Built Environment. I've also taught Game design theory, Screen design for interactivity, Web design theory, Virtual worlds design, and Interaction design principles at the Silicon Graphics Centre & the Enmore Design Centre, Sydney Institute of Technology.
I've given guest lectures, papers and tutorials on virtual city and planet design at UNSW and at the ECAI, SIGGRAPH, GRAPHITE and Electrofringe conferences.
Professional consultancies
For 1997 and '98 I was a Producer and Creative Director in the Broadband Content research and development group at Optus Multimedia, implementing and testing virtual worlds, telepresence, streaming media, universal messaging, multi-player networked games (including Quake level design), interactive TV and online collaboration.
For 1999 and 2000 I was a Hypermedia Designer at Brainwaave
Interactive/Beyond Online.
At Brainwaave, I did information architecture, human interface, and visual
design on websites for a wide range of clients, including Audi, Canon,
the Olympic Coordination Authority, Beyond 2000, the Sydney Gay and Lesbian
Mardi Gras netcast (which won an award), Telstra, the Biennale of Sydney,
and many more. I also did virtual worlds design, a couple of touchscreen
kiosks, some TV graphics, an ATM, and the interface for a consumer internet
appliance.
In December 2000, I decided to move full-time into independent consulting
work through Karmanaut.
Since then I've done formal usability testing and analysis for clients
including HSBC, the Edmund Rice Centre for Justice & Community Education,
Qantas, Landcom and others, Web design for Rimshot Music, Surgical Graphics/Anatomate,
the Cape Gallery and others, and multimedia & Virtual Reality interaction
design for Surgical Graphics/Anatomate. I've also done some lecturing,
attended & presented at many conferences, and involved myself in my
professional community.
Community
I'm Past Chair of Sydney ACM SIGGRAPH, our local professional chapter of ACM SIGGRAPH, and current chair of its website committee. I'm Chair of ANZGRAPH, the umbrella group for Australia and New Zealand ACM SIGGRAPH chapters, which convenes the GRAPHITE conference with ACM SIGGRAPH and South-East Asia's SEAGRAPH.
I'm a member of various other ACM Special Interest Groups; Computer-Human Interaction, Computers and Society, Hypertext, Hypermedia & the Web, and Knowledge Discovery in Data. I was a ballot group member for the Software Engineering Code of Ethics & Professional Practice.
I maintain the MacWeb3D mailing list and web site, supporting a community of Mac-using Virtual Reality practitioners.
I'm a Professional Member of the Web3D Consortium, which stewards the VRML and X3D standards.
Current work
Since late 2002 I have been working full time on the planet-earth Free virtual earth publishing & search engine and 3map, the collaborative Open Source geospatial VR engine, built on enterprise database technology and open standards.
3map is supported by the Telstra Broadband Fund, and our software is in use at the US Naval Postgraduate School for terrain simulation; in various virtual tourism applications such as VR maps of the Dolomite Mountains in Italy and the Aeolian islands; and by the Western Australian Department of Land Administration. We are now working with Jack Barton on the UNSW research project A Spatial Decision Support System for Public housing, supported by the NSW Department of Housing.
