Welcome to hockenworks! I’m Brian Hockenmaier and this site is full of things I work and write on. That includes game development, AI, VR, DIY, Home Automation, 3D printing, Money, Happiness, the Singularity, and more. I hope you find something interesting here.
This site is also a video game. Play around and discover it yourself or learn how to play here
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I’m Brian Hockenmaier, dad, engineer, and fun haver.
I grew up in Ventura, California with two UCLA-engineer parents. Even though neither of them were engineers long-term, I was an engineering child. I was always building something, highlights including a functional submarine and weather balloon with Lego robotics.
I went to school for industrial engineering at Cal Poly SLO, nearly double majored in economics, and then promptly moved out of both fields just like my parents had moved out of their education fields of mechanical and aerospace. Since then, after reading Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near in 2011, feeling I needed to be closer to software and realizing I liked building systems more than anything in industrial engineering, I’ve built a career in software and then AI.
April 30, 2024 · 7 minutes · Read more →
Lots of chatter right now about AI replacing software developers.
I agree - AI will take over software development. The question is: what work will be left when this happens?
January 24, 2024 · 2 minutes · Read more →
I made “Postman for PMs,” a tool to help non-engineers understand and use APIs!
January 13, 2024 · 1 minute · Read more →
This was a board game I “cloned” back in 2015, but newly redesigned in 2024 with resized pieces and a self-contained custom game box and instructions printed right into the box.
I love small games that travel well, and this game is about the same depth and nearly 1/4th the area of the original box - thus “pocket”. It’s a snug fit but nicely sectioned out for all pieces. Have fun!
If you have a multi-filament printer, check out the new 3mf for “Hocken Pocket Blokus” - a self contained full blokus game and box with a hinged lid, and game instructions printed into the box.
January 3, 2024 · 2 minutes · Read more →
If you like retro video games and also drinking things, you’re in luck! Print them for your living room! Print them for your friends! I hope these characters remind you of some of your favorite series.
I returned to this project after 10 years to make more coasters, including some designs for multi-plastic printers and a reinforced 4-coaster holder!
It was super fun returning to this project! I was able to fix a few things that I had noticed failing over the years, like the new reinforced sides to the “? Block” holder. Now that multi-color prints are proliferating more widely, I’m hoping people can use the new colored files - they really pop with the Silk+Matte PLA combo I used here. Links to those filaments:
August 6, 2023 · 1 minute · Read more →
I have been occasionally challenging GPT to create models using OpenSCAD, a “programming language for 3D models”
Both struggle, but GPT-4 has been a massive improvement. Here are both models’ outputs after asking for an acorn and 3 messages of me giving feedback:
For the record, it is impressive that these LLMs can get anything right with no visual input or training on shapes like these. Imagine looking at the programming reference for openSCAD and trying to do this blind. The fact that the 3.5 version has a bunch of strangely intersecting primitives and some union issues has been normal in my experience. It takes quite a bit of spatial logic to get a model not to look like that.
March 19, 2023 · 1 minute · Read more →
I’m writing this post retrospectively as I never published it at the time of creation. It will live here as a “stake in the ground” of AI software capabilities as of March 2023. Note- if you’re reading on substack, this post won’t work. Go to hockenworks.com/gpt-4-solar-system.
The interactive solar system below was created with minimal help from me, by the very first version of GPT-4, before even function calling was a feature. It was the first of an ongoing series of experiments to see what frontier models could do by themselves - and I’m posting it here because it was the earliest example I saved.
Here’s a link to the chat where it was created, though it’s not possible to continue this conversation directly since the model involved has long since been deprecated: https://chatgpt.com/share/683b5680-8ac8-8006-9493-37add8749387
March 18, 2023 · 3 minutes · Read more →
I made my latest Unity project into a multi-application “engine”. I am now building and releasing two applications from one project. Let me show you how it works.
I did this because I had a lot of assets and code in Treekeepers that would directly translate to a new project I was prototyping. I considered other approaches - git submodules, unity packages, just cloning my old project. After a cost-benefit writeup I decided on this.
Now when I change variables, I edit a class called “Application Definition” for each application, which look like this:
March 17, 2023 · 2 minutes · Read more →
I’ve been playing around with neural radiance fields (NeRFs) lately and thought a fun way to explore them would be flying through them in the Treekeepers “Puddle Jumper” in true scale.
February 1, 2023 · 1 minute · Read more →
Treekeepers VR is a networked VR game where up to 4 players can cooperate to navigate an oversized world and save a giant tree.
Treekeepers is in production on both Quest (standalone VR) and Steam (PC VR) with full cross-play functionality. See the Treekeepers VR Website for links to all storefronts and more detail about the game.
October 1, 2022 · 2 minutes · Read more →
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