Metaverse One

This past weekend was the second iteration of Metaverse U put on by Henrik Bennetsen at Stanford University. The Metaverse U conference took place at Stanford University on May 29 th and 30 th . The goal of this years conference was to explore the cutting edge applications of virtual worlds and the open platforms that drive them. Henrik gathered an impressive lineup of speakers and I will embed their videos here once they go online. Some highlights from the presentations: Sirikata , Stanford's open source platform for virtual worlds, had a high representation this year with a demo that showed some of its editing features. Jeffrey T. Schnapp (Stanford University) talked about cultural heritage with virtual worlds stating "museums are the original 3D world" and the need to embrace (inter)active models of educational programming with an emphasis on bottom-up counterparts to traditional top-down approaches. John Hurliman (Intel) presented Cable Beach, a service based a...

So every now and then we here at the office do get some pretty awesome toys, er... research hardware for our projects. Our latest addition has got to be one of the most amazing products I have seen in a while. It is a custom 47" Spatial View 3D Monitor. This 3D monitor brings images, videos, and 3D objects out of the screen without the need for special 3D glasses. Hardware-wise this monitor is a modified top of the line LG television with a parallax barrier screen attached to the front of it. Hook it up to a computer with a relatively new graphics card, install the Spatial View software, and all is ready to go. The software is Power Player 3.0 , Spatial View's own player for displaying videos, images, and other content in 3D. A good amount of examples come with the software, but to create your own content, videos and images have to be created a certain way for the full coming out of the screen 3D effect. The best feature (drum roll) is that Power Player 3.0 supports the web3...

I came across these two examples on how Humanities, Art, and Natural Sciences are adopting 3D web open standard technology for preserving and sharing cultural heritage in Rome. 1. Rome Reborn - Rome Reborn is an international initiative whose goal is the creation of 3D digital models illustrating the urban development of ancient Rome from the first settlement in the late Bronze Age (ca. 1000 B.C.) to the depopulation of the city in the early Middle Ages (ca. A.D. 550). Starting on June 11, 2007, when the model of ancient Rome was first shown publicly at a ceremony in Rome, a number of video fly- thru and static images of the model were posted for free public viewing online. In August, 2008, the alpha version of Rome Reborn 2.0 was demonstrated at SIGGRAPH held at the Los Angeles Convention Center. In November, 2008, the latest version of Rome Reborn 1.0 was published to the Internet in Google Earth. On 12 November 2008, Michael Jones ( CTO of Google Earth) in partnership with Joel...