Metaverse One

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.

From Canada it was back to Silicon Valley for the ARE2010 in Santa Clara. "The Augmented Reality Event (ARE), the first global event dedicated to advancing the business of augmented reality in the US, announced today that the inaugural event will be held at Santa Clara Convention Center, June 2-3, 2010. The activities will be kicked off by a highly anticipated keynote from the “augmented reality prophet,” world-renowned author, futurist, editor and critic, Bruce Sterling. Start-ups, developers, mobile and hardware companies along with organizations within entertainment, media, education, healthcare, government, tourism, and many more, will gather to focus on evolving the much hyped technology into a productive, sustainable and entertaining new medium. ARE will include more than 30 sessions organized into business, technology and production tracks. The exhibition floor will showcase leading companies and products in augmented reality and will also host a career fair to help kick st...

Monday was the Virtual Medical Environments Workshop by Media X at Stanford University. This event was really intriguing to me as no industry has used 3D for visualization as long as the medical industry has. Parvati Dev with Innovation in Learning Inc and Media X at Stanford University lead the workshop that looked to, " bring together selected industry and academia representatives with experience in developing and disseminating virtual medical environments. Existing use cases will be presented and discussion will focus on opportunities and barriers. The goal will be to generate a Roadmap that presents some possible paths from the trough of disillusionment to a plateau of productivity." The workshop had over a dozen presentations of work being done in the medical field with web3D technologies. I thoroughly enjoyed the presentations from UBC students AJung Moon's ' Nonverbal human-robot interaction and opportunities for cognitive rehabilitation in virtual...

So right now is the 14th annual international Web3D Symposium . This is the Web3D Consortium 's annual event sponsored by ACM SIGGRAPH (in cooperation with EuroGraphics ) held this year in Darmstadt, Germany at Fraunhofer IGD on June 15-17. This symposium celebrates a decade of innovation and interoperability through the 3D Web open standards. The Symposium will showcase Web3D Consortium’s standard X3D, the only open, royalty-free and ISO-certified technology available today for interactive 3D graphics on the World Wide Web. Use of X3D systems has increased steadily throughout the world, delivering durable applications in industry, science, medicine, culture, entertainment and education. Indeed, worlds and scenarios authored over ten years ago still run today and are faster than ever. X3D systems have a proven track record of protecting content and have the process in place to support projects that require their content lifetime to exceed 50 years. Because X3D is a direct...