Introducing an innovation space within the Blender project, where designers and developers can work together on challenging or future-facing projects, to keep Blender relevant in the years to come.
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.
What is a lab activity?
A lab activity is a project that brings innovation to the Blender project, and contributes to Blender Foundation’s mission. The project should face some unknowns, but also be handled by a team or individual with sufficient domain knowledge to solve them. Lab activities are meant to be independent of Blender releases.
What does it look like?
Lab activities are always public and visible on blender.org/lab. Here the ongoing projects are presented, sharing objectives, timeline and participants. Intermediate builds for testing and feedback will be available here as well.
First batch, and more examples
... continue reading