I think there’s plenty of it. There’s people making their own rendering engines, playing with game AI’s, experimenting with novel modes of human interaction (wiimotes,multitouch,iphone, openCV), evolving compressed paintings in javascript, and woking on distrubuted/parallelized computing.
It’s not all formal but a lot of it is open, and it occasionally explodes into something useful.
But people who are good at programming/research have a tendency to get hired to do it professionally, so there is little point in the status of productive amateur (in the large scheme of things), except, perhaps, easier entry to these fields.
I think there’s plenty of it. There’s people making their own rendering engines, playing with game AI’s, experimenting with novel modes of human interaction (wiimotes,multitouch,iphone, openCV), evolving compressed paintings in javascript, and woking on distrubuted/parallelized computing.
It’s not all formal but a lot of it is open, and it occasionally explodes into something useful.
But people who are good at programming/research have a tendency to get hired to do it professionally, so there is little point in the status of productive amateur (in the large scheme of things), except, perhaps, easier entry to these fields.