CARY, NC–Richard Boyd, CEO and Co-Founder of 3Dsolve Inc., a simulation learning company based in Cary, NC, didn’t start using computers until he graduated from college and still takes vacations from the digital world.

What is your day job?
I am CEO and one of the co-founders of 3Dsolve Inc., a computer gaming technologies company formed to take advantage of our fifteen years of experience in interactive 3D graphics. The main mission of 3Dsolve is applying the 3D gaming medium to what we call simulation learning for the government and commercial customers.

What would surprise people most to learn about you?

I didn’t use a computer until I was well out of college. I was a committed liberal arts Luddite who was convinced that I would make my living as a writer or an attorney…or worse.

But then I attended a talk by Ross Perot at the UNC business school in the waning days of the eighties and a halo of light shone down upon his tiny balding head as he pontificated on the need for more technology entrepreneurs. He said that the U.S. had 5 percent of the world’s population and 85 percent of the world’s lawyers and I swear he pointed right at me with one of those bony fingers when he said ‘young man, go out there and get involved in technology and make something. Create value.’

So I flushed my LSAT score, abandoned my aspirations for law school and bought myself an 8086 Amstrad laptop computer with a 7-inch flip up amber screen and started learning about computers.

When I say “learning about computers”, of course, what I mean was that I told my girlfriend at the time that I was learning about computers, but what I was really doing was playing 688 attack sub over a 1200 baud modem against slower opponents equipped with only 8088 computers who couldn’t avoid my jaggy amber torpedoes.

Within three months I was a certified gaming addict.

How did you become involved with that?
I bought every game created by Microprose and even got involved in some of the role playing games that were all text-based back then. I wasn’t sure initially how I was going to do it, but I was committed to making a living out of squeezing graphics experiences from the ones and zeroes in these over-sized, hopped up calculators.

I met David Smith, founder of Virtus Corporation and creator of the first 3D adventure game for the PC, The Colony. David had just formed a company in 1990 to take his gaming technology and bring it to solve problems in the movie, engineering and architecture industries. I had found a conduit for my passion and David had discovered a star sales person who was ready and willing to take the gospel of interactive 3D into the wilderness and convert everyone or die trying.

David Smith, Alan Scott and I ended up writing a best selling book together on the future of 3D technologies on the Internet. David and I still work together after 17 years building business around interactive 3D. We have had our successes and failures in gaming and are just beginning to see some good success in commerce and education. David is working on building a new 3D operating system with Alan Kay focused on K-12 education.

What is its attraction to you?

The whole idea of having this portal into a virtual 3D world where all of the rules of our physical plane can be removed or warped or refined completely fascinates me. It is one of the most compelling media types every created by man. The rapid growth of the video game market is living proof of the power of the medium, but I believe that we will soon see this medium subsume all other media as the best means for educating, socializing and entertaining humans.

The nice thing about interactive 3D as a medium is that it contains all other media as a subset. Sound, video, text, and animated objects and worlds are all embedded in one landscape. When you give humans the ability to add to the content of virtual worlds such as in Second Life, new behavior and opportunities will emerge.

And I think large multiplayer gaming environments will become even more immersive and compelling. We won’t be watching the latest James Bond movie; we will be inside the movie, interacting with professional actors playing those movie roles that we once sat on the couch and watched passively. History students will enter the battle of Agincourt and become one of the archers. Science students will fly around inside of molecules and will walk on distant planets. The possibilities are endless.

Can you provide details (what, when, where, why, how?)

There are some interesting forces moving interactive 3D towards these inevitable conclusions. There are the obvious improvement trends like processor speed and bandwidth. Probably the most interesting trend to track is the rise of the Digital Native.

Marc Prensky coined this term to describe people who have grown up with computers, video games, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging. This group of generally under 40-year-olds socializes differently and has different expectations of media than the baby boomers. They are driving this trend. They are the ones playing World of Warcraft and games on their Xbox360 instead of watching network television.

Our education system, the entertainment industry and every business out there will have to reach them on their terms. And increasingly, they prefer connection and immersion to broadcasting and passive consumption of media. Second Life and World of Warcraft are the beginning. I can’t wait to create or see the next generation of these experiences.

What is the most interesting reaction you’ve received?

After preaching this gospel for so long, beginning with the Meckler Virtual Reality conferences in the early nineties, I am finally seeing instant recognition of this message among Fortune 100 executives. They are beginning to reach out and ask for help talking to this new generation. And they are starting to write checks. I am enough of an old school guy to know that that is the only vote that counts. Everything else is opinion.

How do you think your hobby helps you do a better job at the career you’ve chosen/company you’ve built?

By staying involved in gaming I keep abreast of the social change and the expectations that will inform our simulation learning environments. In the end I expect there will be only a slight change of ambience when stepping from a world designed for play and a world designed for learning. In the best examples I can conjure, the experience is indistinguishable. Fun learning. Imagine that.

Gaming also has a great degree of convergence between the virtual worlds located inside games and the real world. For example, last year one of my business associates in Japan asked me to join his World of Warcraft guild and before long, I was playing WoW with Silicon Valley digerati. These executives will call meetings in the game to discuss not only major raid tactics, but also what big deals are going down in the real world. Thus, online 3D worlds such as WoW have evolved from forms of pure entertainment to conduits for connecting with potential partners, building trust and conducting business.

So, is there anything else about you we don’t know? (Other interesting hobbies/facts about your life?)

When I do disconnect from the digital world I go to Italy with my wife and daughter to a small town forty miles outside of Venice where everything slows to a rhythm that is probably unbearable to digital natives. It’s all slow walks with my wife’s family to the piazza for lingering coffees and aperitivi with occasional visits up to our nine acre olive farm.

Even my world GSM cell phone doesn’t work there and there is nothing to do but watch my daughter and her Italian cousins run through the slow growing trees while we sip wine in a setting that hasn’t changed for a thousand years. I guess I am a digital immigrant after all.

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