Blender Lab – A Playground for New Ideas
As the demands on the reliability and stability of Blender keep increasing, the Blender Foundation found they needed a space that allows for forward thinking experimentation. The new Blender Lab provides an environment for these kinds of projects.
Francesco writes:
Over the years, Blender has grown and matured into a powerful and complex piece of software. With its unstoppable release cycle, a massive, highly demanding, and diverse user community, natural technical debt, and complex technical dependencies, shipping new features and general improvements requires more and more effort and coordination.
Software stability and reliability have become critical for individuals and companies. As a consequence, development efforts focus on those aspects, offering progressive improvements of existing functionality only when these are clear enhancements of what is already there.
This makes it more challenging to innovate, think outside the box, experiment, and break things.
To facilitate this essential aspect of product development, the Blender Foundation is establishing a new project: the Blender Lab. This is the innovation space where designers, developers, and researchers work together on challenging and future-facing projects that will help Blender stay relevant in the years to come.
Current projects include:
- Beyond mouse and keyboard (touch and pen)
- Beyond mouse and keyboard (VR/XR)
- Volume rendering
- Light transport
