Metaverse One

I want to share a well written post titled, ' Future of virtuality in-the-making: Reflections from Stanford University' by Ates Gursimsek for the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation's Blog. Ates is a PhD researcher at Roskilde University, friend, and visiting scholar at Stanford University's H-STAR Institute who studies collaborative design and innovation in virtual worlds. Ates states, "my observations have introduced me the rising culture of technological and social innovation through collaboration and co-creation in Silicon Valley (SV), as well as research and development studies on these emerging Web technologies, focusing on social sciences, humanities and educational studies, at Stanford University." Check it out . Here are videos covering a couple things he worked on and experienced while visiting Silicon Valley. Tesekkur ederim for all the great info Ates. I look forward to seeing where your research takes us!

So this August in Vancouver, Canada was SIGGRAPH 2011 . SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques) is the annual conference on computer graphics (CG) convened by the ACM SIGGRAPH organization and this was the first time it was held in Canada. The conference was attended by tens of thousands of computer professionals and had a strong presence of Canadian companies, developers, and schools (go figure). As usual, it had great sessions and a busy exhibit floor. I am thrilled to report that the Web3D Consortium BoFs were standing room only with people packed deep and spilling out the doors as there was a huge amount of interest in X3Dom and the current state of X3D for augmented and mixed reality . The WebGL sessions also presented to a full house. Truly a great event for web3D in general. As a fan of digital fabrication, I was happy to see companies like Shapeways , and 3D printer machine sellers there showing off their services and products. There wer...

For years I have been wanting to see 3D on the web become ubiquitous and with Katalabs' OurBricks, I am closer than ever to seeing that dream come true. Leveraging the power of WebGL and its supported browsers, OurBricks allows users to examine a full 3D version of any model uploaded to the site with no need for any plug-in. Visitors to the site can download content, embed it in any webpage as easy as embedding a Youtube video, or drop it into Katalabs' multi-user 3D sandbox for a 'virtual world' type experience. OurBricks seems the ideal solution for 3D artist that want to share their creations. Countless times I have seen on other sites where artists can share their 3D model, in the form of a 2D image, for peer review and "Can you render this model from a different angle," appears somewhere in the comments section. Now that problem is solved! The OurBricks platform supports the following 3D file formats: COLLADA, OBJ, FBX, DXF, and KMZ. There is an option ...

I just received in the mail my Sony Ericsson Xperia Play smartphone. This is the first PlayStation certified Android smartphone, hence it is also known as the PlayStation phone. The phone has a slide-out game pad, sports the Qualcomm Scorpion processor clocked at 1GHz (which runs alongside the on-board Adreno GPU and 380MB RAM), has a 4 inch backlit LCD screen with a resolution of 480x854, a 5.1-megapixel camera with auto focus and flash, and runs the Android OS Gingerbread. I won the phone from a party Qualcomm had during the Game Developers Conference 2011 for their new Snapdragon platform . I haven't won anything like this before so I decided to make my first unboxing video. Yeah unboxing videos are silly, so I decided to spruce mine up with a little bit of augmented reality. I need a couple days to test drive this thing for a proper review. Stay tuned and thanks Qualcomm!

On June 10 at the Google Campus in Mountain View, California, the third WebGL Camp took place. For those that need a refresher on WebGL visit here . MC Henrik Bennetsen of OurBricks and Kenneth Russell from Google hosted WebGL Camp #3, a full day of presentations, demos, and conversations about this developing graphics API. Session videos in order of the agenda. Rachid El Guerrab - Human Engines Tony Parisi Tim Johansson - Opera Altered Qualia - three.js Remi Arnaud - Screampoint Vangelis Kokkevis - Google Henrik Bennetsen - Katalabs Aleksandar Rodic - Chrysaora and ro.me Neil Trevett - Khronos & NVIDIA Nicolas Garcia Belmonte - Sencha John Pywtorak - SRI Kenneth Russell - Google & WebGL working group chair Thanks to Ken, Henrik, and all the presenters for such a great informative camp.

Cool combination of the Kinect and an avatar from Bitmanagement Software GmbH ! IVN from Bitmanagement Software GmbH on Vimeo .

This video covers the Augmented Reality Event 2011 last week in Santa Clara, California. A nice variety of people from all over the world shared stories of AR related success, vision, and technologies. I will do a proper write up soon. Thanks again Ori and Tish!