Metaverse One

Today Google went public with its plans to offer augmented-reality glasses, which it’s calling Project Glass. In the concept video they released, the glasses interacts with what you're seeing and saying, provides many features of a smartphone including a planner, navigation system, camera and more. They made a previous announcement that these glasses would be available by the end of the year, but now say that these will not ship in 2012. I am very skeptical about the first release of these glasses living up to the concept video. Even though the Google[x] team states, "We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input. So we took a few design photos to show what this technology could look like and created a video to demonstrate what it might enable you to do", I know that if it doesn't do exactly what they showed, there will be some upset people in the blogosphere. I hope that Google delivers or I feel that th...

April 28 th was the first WebGL Developer Meetup here in the Bay area with a great mix from industry titans to garage developers. Managed by the Khronos group, WebGL is a web-based graphics library that extends the capability of the JavaScript programming language to allow it to generate interactive 3D graphics within any compatible web browser (Chrome, Firefox , Safari). Web3D veteran and my fellow Meetup co-organizer Tony Parisi introduced Neil Trevett , President of Khronos & VP Mobile Content at NVidia , who presented on 'What is WebGL ?' Henrik Bennetsen gave a product demonstration on OurBricks . OurBricks lets you discover, interact with and share 3D content right in your browser. Think of it as a 3D warehouse where you can freely examine the model and much more. A great site for 3D modelers that want to share their work with others. A proper write up on OurBricks will be coming soon but do check out their website and the video below. Closing demonstratio...

Earlier this month was the second WebGL Camp in Silicon Valley. Organized by Henrik Bennetsen (CEO of Katalabs ) and Christian Greuel (Manager of SRI Geovisualization Center), the camp is a developer focused event that aims to bring together the people who are writing the WebGL spec with those who build projects on it for some show and tell. WebGL is based on OpenGL ES 2.0 and provides a programmatic interface for 3D graphics. It provides a 3D graphics API implemented in a web browser without the use of plug-ins. It uses the HTML5 canvas element and is accessed using Document Object Model interfaces. The specification is currently a work in progress and is managed by the non-profit Khronos Group. The event was a who's who from the WebGL community. The presentation list: Gavriel State and Daniel Koch from TransGaming provided a high level introduction to the ANGLE Project . ANGLE provides OpenGL ES 2.0 compatible API's on top of Microsoft's Direct3D. Presenta...

I recently wrote a post on Google's Body Browser that I saw at WebGL Camp#2 this past week. Since that post, the web has exploded with news about this application and web traffic to the blog and video (almost 10,000 views in less than 48 hours) have skyrocketed. Here is the video I took from WebGL camp where it was presented. To experience the application for yourself, get anyone of these three browsers Chrome 9 Beta , Chrome Canary Build and Firefox 4 beta (WebGL is enabled by default) and then got to the Body Browser site . As I have covered in previous blogs, WebGL is a cross-platform low-level 3D graphics API that is designed to bring plugin-free 3D to the web. It uses the HTML5 Canvas element and does not require Flash, Java or other graphical plugins to run. A visit to the Google Health and WebGL team are in the near future for me. Check out the blog I guest write for to get my initial thoughts on this application.

So lately I have been seeing more Data Matrix and QR code around. Data Matrix and QR code is a 2D barcode consisting of black and white "cells" or modules arranged in either a square or rectangular pattern that represent encoded information. Unlike augmented reality markers, data matrix code only represents text or raw data. Data Matrix (DM) symbols are rectangular in shape and usually square, they are made of cells: little elements that represent bits . Depending on the situation a "light" module is a 0 and a "dark" module is a 1, or vice versa. Every Data Matrix is composed of two solid adjacent borders in an "L" shape (called the "finder pattern") and two other borders consisting of alternating dark and light "cells" or modules (called the "timing pattern"). Within these borders are rows and columns of cells encoding information. The finder pattern is used to locate and orient the symbol while the timing pattern p...

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...

Mirror world is the term used to describe a digital recreation of a globe. Google Earth , Microsoft's Virtual Earth , and NASA WorldWind are popular examples of mirror worlds. As the mixed reality Metaverse emerges, these digital globes will integrate more with our day to day. Let's take a look at Google Earth (G.E.). Formerly Keyhole's Earth View Finder, this is a proprietary digital globe that most people are familiar with. One can zoom around the planet, turn on/off different layers of information, import 3D content via SketchUp , look at stitched 360 panoramic images of cities with Street View, links to the web, Google Ocean , and a host of other features. Here is my current residence built in SketchUp, and put in location on Google Earth. Lots of cool functionality but regardless of who makes or adds the content, Google owns the experience. Not a true mirror world in the sense that no one entity owns our real planet. As more cities go digital, these 3D cities an...