Tomorrow I'll be joining Girl Geek's Bootcamp to espouse the virtues of working with 3D. Why? Because 3D will be the defining feature of our digital lives - and thanks to the steady progress of 3D printing and augmented reality it will come to shape our real world experiences too.
If I had to retrain in anything right now it would be as a 3D designer or developer. Taxi drivers may be replaced by self-driving Ubers, farmers supplemented by lab-grown food and factory workers could find themselves making way for a 3D printer in every home - but 3D experts will continue to play a vital role. Mastery of 3D is already a skill that can take you far. 3D files already crop up everywhere from architects' offices to animation studios; industrial design to game development - in our work at Draw & Code we are amazed at just how many places the same 3D software keeps cropping up.
As with any role in the tech world, we as an industry and as a nation need more women to get involved in 3D design. This is both from a creative perspective, but also from the standpoint that we are on the cusp of needing a lot more 3D experts to compete on the world stage in fields such as virtual reality, filmmaking and architecture. Without women performing a major role in 3D the UK will be trying to win the game with half the players missing.
Fuelled by free-roaming games like Minecraft and Grand Theft Auto, there is a new generation that have come to expect to move around a gaming environment as they please. However, the impending 3D revolution is about a lot more than video games; almost any form of digital interaction that you currently perform with your phone (and a fair few that we haven't even thought of yet) will be defined by 3D. Expect to be able to walk around a photograph, become your own cinematographer in movies as you shift the viewpoint and consign the deceiving fish-eye lens images on Rightmove to history as you walk around properties as if you are really there.
So that's where we are heading, but how are we going to get there? As with so many technologies, 3D animation started inauspiciously with experiments in university labs and ended up a part of our mainstream culture. Arguably Pixar defined both those moments with their president Edwin Catmull co-creating a seminal early 3D piece with the snappy title of 'A Computer Generated Hand' in 1972. Over two decades later and Pixar redefined cinema with Toy Story, in between we had seen CGI take a starring role in shorter doses such as TV title sequences or cult music videos like Will Powers' 'Adventures in Success'.
However, animation was one thing - interactive real-time 3D rendering was quite another. According to the interwebs it was Atari's I, Robot that was the first true 3D game in the early 1980s. From my perspective the 3D game only started to come into its own when Doom was released and first-person play really started to gain traction.
So if 3D has been around forever, why am I talking about the future? That is because immersive tech such as virtual reality is poised to make the first-person perspective more important than ever while 3D printing is allowing those who master design to also make a start in manufacturing. Meanwhile the 3D scanners are finding their way into phones and tablets, unlocking the potential for us to record our the world around us in unprecedented detail. Never mind choosing your best angle - a photograph will capture all angles.
The future of 3D is the stuff of wild science fiction made real. While Google's Project Tango smartphones and tablets with in-built sensors are on the cusp of being released to the public, the Lytro series of cameras give us a taste of where we will eventually end up. These wildly expensive cameras (if you can call them that) promise to turn film on its head completely as they let us all become directors who can pick the vista of the scene ourselves. While 360 video is a really cool technology, it is set to act as a stepping-stone towards the likes of the Lytro.
Right now you can already get your hands on Occipital's Structure Sensor, Microsoft's Kinect and Intel's Realsense; all gamely attempting to bring the 3D scanner within reach of developers, hackers and gamers.
At Draw & Code we have been experimenting with these incredible tools, most recently creating a virtual reality music video of All We Are. Filmed using Microsoft's Kinect for Windows v2, the video was a proof-of- concept to show that creating fully interactive video from a scanner is possible. The resulting VR video looked raw and unpolished. However, so did 'A Computer Generated Hand' back in the 1970s, 22 years later we had Toy Story!
Written by Phil Charnock from the awesome Draw & Code.