3D stereoscopic viewers for virtual worlds

Posted in: Blog, Uncategorized by James on June 16, 2009

I’ve spent as much time as I could over the last two days wandering around Second Life and our Gaelscoil sim on ReactionGrid.com, using Dale Glass‘ stereoscopic Second Life viewer while wearing the Red-Cyan anaglyph specs I brought home with me after  Spy Kids 3D a few years ago (crap movie!).

Not only has it been an eye-0pening experience but also an eye-popping one! It’s ironic in a way that most virtual worlds evangelists have been writing about 3D environments for years without ever having actually experienced them in true 3D - stereoscopic 3D. And the difference is truly amazing.

In fact it makes one realize that the term ‘immersive’ has been applied much too freely heretofore.  I can only imagine how thrilling it would be to interact with these truly immersive environments by using Microsoft’s Project Natal. Roll on the future.

[With thanks to drWhiet on twitter who helped me setup the viewer to browse our ReactionGrid sim]

Components of the Holodeck are at hand

Posted in: Blog, Uncategorized by James on June 13, 2009

It seems to me that we have all the necessary components for the Holodeck already at hand. Now all we need to do is put them together -

1) Cybercarpet / Cyberwalk / omni-directional treadmill

2) Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display

3) Project Natal

4) 3Dvisor

5) Opensim

“One small step for avatar, one giant leap for virtual worlds” — Torley Linden

What do “digital natives” look like?

Posted in: Blog, Uncategorized by James on June 11, 2009

H2 is a Dublin-based educational consultancy set up to assist organisations in designing and implementing learning based projects that utilise ICT and digital media.

On their blog they ask, “Ever wondered what a digital native looks like or how they behave? This video ‘A Vision of Students Today’ provides an insight into how sudents are using technology and multitasking, even when they are “supposed to be ” watching the blackboard.”

It’s very interesting to note how the video opens with a quote from the visionary Marshal McLuhan dated 1967 - “Today’s child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects and schedules”

Dynamically computing the sounds of a virtual world

Posted in: Blog, Uncategorized by James on June 8, 2009

“We have no way to efficiently compute the sounds of water splashing, paper crumpling, hands clapping, wind in trees or a wine glass dropped onto the floor,” the researchers [at Cornell University] said. Until now.

The video below is a startling demonstration that the problem has been solved. It’s incredible to me that a computer algorithm could compute the sound of fluid dynamics to such a convincingly realistic degree -

Multi-touch or no-touch? Notes from 3Dcamp

Posted in: Blog, Uncategorized by James on June 7, 2009

We spent Saturday at 3Dcamp in Limerick where a fascinating line up of talks included  “Wiimote interfacing and looking stupid while controlling a robot“, “AVATAR: a 3d museum exhibit” and “DIY Multi-Touch Haptic Interfaces”. All talks attended were excellent but we refer to the above for how they hint at the match between our interests and the topics of discussion - perfect!

The Multi-touch talk in particular excited us by showing how a device hacked together for a few hundred euro could compete with Microsoft’s several thousand euro Surface technology. Despite that it was Microsoft Project Natal which kept popping up during hallway discussions as the news item generating most excitement among this particular crowd of artists and hackers.

More details and videos keep dripping out in the wake of this week’s anouncement and Milo below just dropped our collective jaw, again -

This prompted me to ask the question - “is anyone developing an Opensim client viewer for the Xbox?” To which Kyle at ReactionGrid.com answered -“ Xenki is the most likely client to achieve this. It is .NET/WPF/D3D capable so watch Kevin (developer) as he progresses”

I pointed out that the reason for my question was the possibility of digital puppeteering in a virtual world, as well as interacting with numerous Milos. Kyle is excited by the same ideas and commented, “By years end OpenSim will likely achieved or be on the cusp of achieving freedom from the SL client in several forms. When we break free of the client, anything is possible….”

Successful team meetings in Second Life

Posted in: Blog, Uncategorized by James on June 5, 2009

Cybergrrl Oh offers tips for ensuring successful team meetings in Second Life and acknowledges what a positive experience it can be -

We didn’t do anything special for our first meeting other than I laid out some comfortable teak lounge chairs for seating and had a cheese platter, coffee, daiquiris and tequila shots available for refreshments. All but one had voice so we were able to have essentially a conference call with over half a dozen people “on the line.” The person who couldn’t get their voice to work just used text chat.

The only structured thing we did was asked each person to introduce themselves to the others and tell everyone something interesting about themselves.Everyone came away from the event excited for a number of reasons, namely they were finally getting to meet team members and many of them were trying out Second Life for the first time so discovering it was a thrill.

We attended the Limerick Open Source meetup on Thursday evening and, while demonstrating Virtual Europe, tried to convey how much richer an experience we’ve found in-world team meetings to be over Skype calls and so on.

Step into 3D with Project Natal

Posted in: Blog, Uncategorized by James on June 3, 2009

It’s hard to know if the real Project Natal will live up to the overly slick video below but if it does then… we’re at nothing less than another milestone in the evolution of 3D virtual worlds. While gyropscopic motion controllers like Nintendo’s wiimote heralded a giant first step in natural 3D interaction, Microsoft’s Project Natal looks like going all the way to full body immersion. It’s quite breath-taking really -

According to Macworld this isn’t just slick advertising - “What we saw today was unprecedented: True 1-to-1 motion tracking. Wave your arm and your onscreen avatar follows you precisely. Bend, yoga-like, to form cute animal shadow-shapes and a silhouetted image on a virtual canvas curls and contorts picture-perfectly. Shift toe-to-toe, tennis-like, anticipating objects hurled your way and whatever algorithms are intelligently sorting behind the scenes recognize your intentions, filtering out flailing limbs or ignoring unnecessary maneuvers”.