From Tokoyo Japan: 3Di, Inc. Releases Open Source Virtual World Viewer for OpenSim:

News Release
30 September 2009

3Di, Inc. Releases Open Source Virtual World Viewer for OpenSim: Offered Under Developer-Oriented BSD License and Aimed at Driving Industry Adoption of 3D Internet

3Di, Inc., which develops and offers 3D Internet solutions (Head office: Shibuya-ku, Tokyo; CEO: Satoshi Koike; hereinafter referred to as 3Di) has today launched an open source project, named 3Di Viewer “Rei”, for viewing and interacting with OpenSim-based(*1) 3D virtual worlds in web browsers. With this public release of open source technology, 3Di hopes to assist industry adoption and standardization of 3D Internet technology. Using the same core technology as 3Di's commercial product 3Di OpenViewer(*2), the open source project 3Di Viewer “Rei” offers software developers an open platform for delivering multi-user 3D Internet content inside the web browser.

Multi-user 3D virtual worlds have achieved success in focused application areas, but they have not yet achieved broad penetration and universal adoption, like traditional 2D web media. 3Di Viewer “Rei” addresses this problem by integrating 3D content inside of traditional 2D web pages, allowing existing 2D content to merge with or migrate to 3D content.

According to Norman Lin, Technology Group Manager at 3Di: “We have been receiving quite some interest about the possibilities of a viewer running inside the web browser. Also, the OpenSim community has been looking for a new BSD-licensed(*3) viewer solution. By offering our viewer as open source under the BSD license, we’re hoping to help accelerate the standardization and industry-wide adoption of 3D Internet technologies.”

Since 3Di Viewer “Rei” is open source, application developers can customize the platform as needed. 3Di Viewer “Rei” is currently designed for use with OpenSim-based virtual world servers, such as the commercial 3Di OpenSim Enterprise or the community-supported open source OpenSim.

via: http://3di.jp/en/news/2009093001.html

From the City of Oulu, Finland

Animation produced by Evocativi Ltd www.evocativi.com.
Log House produced by Kontiotuote Oy www.kontio.com
via: www.evocativi.com

Evocativi Ltd
Kiviharjunlenkki 6
90220 Oulu
FINLAND

Evocativi Oy and Admino Technologies Oy have decided to combine their resources. The core connecting factor between the companies and the starting point for synergy is the 3D model, which is and will be applied both in animations and in the virtual world.

Evocativi Oy produces photorealistic animation movies as a cost-efficient and impressive solution for presenting e.g. products of the building industry. High-caliber visualization gives a realistic image of the future before construction work is started, and enables fruitful interaction between the various parties.

Admino Technologies Oy is an expert on the virtual world. The company has been among the first in Finland to develop the Second Life virtual world into a genuinely global trading place. Admino Technologies also plays an important role in developing the realXtend virtual world platform based on open source code.

Virtual Expo is created by the game studio LudoCraft which is also one of the main developers of realXtend.

Instructions for creating a user account and getting to know Virtual Expo:

http://world.virtualexpo.fi

Download new realXtend viewer. http://www.realxtend.org/page.php?pg=downloads
Then connect to world.virtualexpo.fi

LudoCraft Ltd.
Teknologiantie 13
90570 OULU
FINLAND

http://www.ludocraft.com
/realxtend.html#vwp

The core LudoCraft team has over seven years of experience in designing innovative and experimental games for PC platforms using Unreal, Torque, OGRE and Flash game technologies. LudoCraft has worked with the Unreal engine technology for 8 year & is the lead developer of RealXtend

Best of The Best

Yahoo 3D

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

YAHOO! AND CALIGARI CORPORATION ANNOUNCE YAHOO! 3D

A New 3D World Opened for 3D Enthusiasts and Mainstream Web Users

By clicking on the Yahoo! 3D link on the Yahoo! main site, users can now travel through 3D worlds while searching for information on the Web. One click brings the cyber traveler to an expansive 3D courtyard of buildings. Each building represents a familiar Yahoo! category, such as Arts, Sciences, or Recreation and Sports. Viewers choose to be guided by pre-defined camera views or roam freely to any building. Each main category building contains 3D objects representing subcategories, such as a ballerina for "Dance" and rain clouds and lightening for "Weather."

http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/pr/release55.html

I want laugh, but maybe I should not because the press release is dated:

Mountain View, CA -- October 28, 1996

Now this is not 1996 and your daddy's internet. Yahoo's new chief, Carol A. Bartz is from Autodesk and Microsoft Corporation in early 2008 acquired Caligari. In addition Microsoft has for years been working with Dassault makers of 3DVia, PLM,software, Enovia, Solidworks and Catia, on a number of projects. To quote Dassault:

To stay ahead of global competition, manufacturers must create a collaborative environment that brings together all of the key functions including engineering, manufacturing, marketing and sales teams. By integrating ENOVIA V6 with Microsoft SQL Server and the suite of Microsoft Office tools, users will have desktop access to real-time information and project details as needed, enabling employees to work more productively. In addition, Microsoft’s Unified Communications technologies combined with the ENOVIA 3DLive application, provide collaboration tools that enhance the user’s ability to work seamlessly in 3D, regardless of their geographical location or function.

“Most organizations today need to collaborate cross-functionally, bringing together marketing, product planning, customers and outside suppliers to develop high-quality, winning product designs and doing so in a manner that helps products get out to market faster,” said Rob Shinno, global director, Hi-Tech Strategy & Solutions ENOVIA R&D Dassault Systèmes,. “By working together, Dassault Systèmes and Microsoft are able to offer an affordable alternative to more expensive, complex data base solutions—giving companies both large and small the power to easily collaborate using the familiar Microsoft tools that are ubiquitous in business.”

Quote above from: a Press Release dated June 2009

Unbelievably as of today with 3D so hot for movies and with all the talk of Google and Mozilla adding 3D to the browser do a search on Yahoo & 3D and see if anything is left of their first vision.

The Domain name yahoo3d.com is not currently registered. Available for you now!

http://www.whois.net/whois/yahoo3d.com

beware though..

The industry’s transition to respect and professionalism may not be entirely complete. One strategy that has cast a stigma over the industry is called typo-squatting — registering domain names with variations and misspellings of major brand names, in the hopes that Web users will inadvertently stumble upon the sites. It has not gone away.

In the last few months, Yahoo, Dell, BMW and Microsoft have all sued small domain registrars and domainers, asserting that they are profiting from thousands of names similar to their trademarks. The cases are pending.

Quote above via: New York Times- Technology 2-2008

This is not typo-squatting to register this domain name, it is brain squatting and yes registering the name would be a clear trademark violation even though there is no sign of a "Yahoo 3D" so I guess Yahoo does not have to worry, or does it?

1530 Main Street, Dalas TX

1530 Main, originally uploaded by the urban fabric.

I usually post this type of thing on ~wOOt~ our tumblr miniblog: below are the last 10 posts fed from ~wOOt~, not pretty. but if your interested take the link and take a look, follow if you want.

Goto ~wOOt~ our mini-blog/log

WebKit Nightly Build

Oh Yes with WebGL


Screen capture of the initial layout tests for WebKit's WebGL implementation.

links:

• http://blog.wolfire.com
• http://nightly.webkit.org/
• http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/48330
  

Mega Regions for OpenSim

OpenSimulator.org Mega-Regions

This is a bit of experimental code that developer Teravus has been working on, it allows you to 'merge' regions together into a single space. This removes the need for complex 'border crossings', which allows you to cross borders completely seamlessly and transparently when moving within the same physical server.

It is not yet in OpenSim-trunk, but Teravus informs me that it will be, as soon as it is sufficiently bug-free.

The vehicle I use in this particular video has an absolutely terrible control system. If anyone has a nice car script, and feels like tweaking it for the OpenSim physics parameters, I will love you long time.

Via: Adam Frisby

Surfing 3D from Facebook to EON Interactive

Many people and companies are now looking at just who will integrate the Web 2.0 & mobile Social Network experience with 3D & 3D content. Just read along and we will take just one trip from Corporate VR to facebook via a Saturday morning surf.


EON Coliseum is a technology platform built on top of EON Studio that enables building multi-modal virtual communication applications a breeze.

Users can enjoy the same convenience of an intuitive drag-and-drop graphical interface in EON Studio to construct collaborative virtual environments. Functions such as displaying live video feeds, Voice-over-IP and external data connection are embedded in EON Coliseum nodes and users can make use of them in conjunction with other node types in EON Studio.

News Release:08/04/2009

EON Reality Showcase the Technical Preview of EON 7.0 Family, Improved Visuals, Physics and Avatars with Faster Online Experience

IRVINE, Calif., August 4, 2009 – EON Reality Inc., the world's leading interactive 3D software provider, will showcase the technical preview of the next generation EON 7.0 family, a true game changer in interactive 3D software, at Siggraph 2009 in New Orleans, August 4-6, 2009, in booth #3430. With EON 7.0 you will be able to create ultra realistic interactive 3D content with real-time physics in minutes and communicate your content in a shared multiuser environment. In short, the EON 7.0 family is taking a leap forward with respect to realism, interaction, avatars and shared virtual meeting places.

The brand new EON 7.0’s new features such as:

• New photorealistic light including new shader based light with an easy to use light editor. New photorealistic light including new shader based light with an easy to use light editor. Completely rewritten lighting system which uses the programmable pipeline in the graphics card to give you more lights than what can be handled by the standard OpenGL light system. It also allows you to create more sophisticated shader-based materials and visual effects.
• Real Avatars, capturing humans in 3D, full body integrated with 4D View Solutions’ real-time scanning technology.
• Brand new physics engine and much faster downloading. A new Rigidbody Dynamics and Fluids system based on the Nvidia PhysX engine has been introduced, that replaces the old Dynamics nodes in EON Professional. Currently the fundamentals with manager, rigid body and collision geometry types are implemented and ready for testing in this technical preview.
• Smaller EON Viewer for faster online experience. In EON 7.0 we have reduced the size of the free web downloadable viewer with over 70% to 5MB to improve the web based experience.
• Brand new Features for EON Coliseum, we have added new features to EON‘s pioneering multi-modal communication tool, EON Coliseum. This includes real scanned 3D Humans, additional interaction features, easier session management, live video streaming etc.

The EON 7.0 release also marks a new chapter in EON's software history by offering the user the possibility to install and use many different versions of EON on the same computer at the same time, side by side. This means we can progressively remove the support of old, seldom used functionality and introduce fundamental changes without jeopardizing the stability of the existing EON applications.

About EON Reality
EON Reality, Inc. is the world's leading interactive 3D visual content management and virtual reality software provider. Its powerful, breakthrough technology enables users to experience more by revolutionizing the way companies leverage their digital assets throughout the product lifecycle. Industry leaders, including Atlas Copco, Bechtel, Boeing, Bombardier, Hon, Intel, Lexus, Lufthansa –Teknik, Peterbilt, Samsung, Siemens Medical, Suzuki, Toyota and Whirlpool, use EON solutions to enhance the interactive user experience to effectively increase sales, better communicate product functionality and decrease the cost of service, training and technical support. For further information, visit www.eonreality.com.

Now how did we get to EON?

Eon is a Partner/Reseller of ArchVision RPC

ArchVision is the leader in the development of image-based content creation, management and delivery solutions. In addition to its RPC (Rich Photorealistic Content) Plug-in technology, ArchVision's products include a growing library of RPC content ranging from people, trees and shrubs to image-based automobiles and other popular objects.

ArchVision currently serves customers located in over 100 countries around the world. RPC is the image-based rendering technology of choice for many of the leading animation, CAD, real-time simulation, and 3D modeling software packages on the market today. Native and plug-in RPC support now exists in 3dsmax, Autodesk VIZ, Autodesk Civil 3D, Bentley MicroStation, Newtek's LightWave 3D, Maxon's Cinema 4D, AccuRender from Robert McNeel & Associates, Revit, Piranesi from Informatix, Adobe Photoshop, Graffiti RenderPro, Arc+ Render, VR4MAX, and SGI Performer. For more information, call ArchVision at 859-252-3118 or visit us on the web at www.archvision.com.

PC Defined

RPC stands for Rich Photorealistic Content, a term used to describe the software and content associated with ArchVision's award-winning Image-Based Rendering (IBR) technology. (RPC is also the file extension for this image-based content.) RPC is the first major commercial project in the evolution of image-based rendering technology. Since its introduction in 1998, the company's solutions have become the preferred method of incorporating complex objects into 3D computer graphics environments. Because RPCs rely on photo image data, the incredible richness of detail and quality of images far surpasses even the best computer-generated models.

RPC Users

ArchVision has developed a number of libraries of photorealistic content that can be incorporated into 3D models, including diverse collections of trees, people, cars and other objects. These libraries are being utilized in a variety of fields and applications, including architecture (commercial and landscape), general design visualization, city planning, construction, product design, simulation and manufacturing. Visualization professionals in more than 85 countries around the world access ArchVision's libraries of content via the company's website www.archvision.com.

The Visualization Software Industry Supports RPC

Thousands of designers around the world use RPC because it provides a way to represent complex objects in computer visualization projects without relying on polygonal geometry. As a result, RPC delivers faster rendering times and better image quality over traditional geometry-based solutions. The use of continuously updated and synthesized image data creates a stunningly effective 3D illusion, freeing you to realize your vision to its fullest by placing as many people, trees, shrubs, or other RPC objects into scenes as needed to bring them to life. For these and other reasons, leading visualization vendors like Autodesk, Bentley Systems International, Inc., Maxon, Robert McNeel and Associates, LightWorks and SGI have all adopted RPC technology as their preferred image-object solution.

Applications that Support RPC Technology

RPC technology has been integrated seamlessly into Autodesk VIZ, 3ds max, Autodesk Architectural Desktop (ADT), Autodesk Civil 3D, Autodesk Revit, Robert McNeel & Associates' AccuRender®, SGI Performer, Informatix's Piranesi and Bentley MicroStation. This allows the user to take full advantage of the power of RPC with no additional software. RPC technology is currently supported via a plug-in for Maxon's Cinema 4D R9, Newtek's Lightwave and Adobe Photoshop®.

How It Works

RPC technology uses high quality image data combined with minimal polygonal geometry to create the illusion of 3D. By synthesizing image data as the camera moves through the scene, images effectively reproduce the appearance of a 3-Dimensional object without relying on complex polygonal geometry. A remarkably simple user interface makes the placement of RPC content a simple click-to-place operation. An icon is first used to orient RPC content within the geometry of your scene, and at render time, the RPC plug-in calculates the viewing angle of the RPC object relative to the virtual camera. The appropriate corresponding images are then synthesized, creating the illusion that a complete 3D object exists in the scene.

Now how did we get to ArchVision?
Archvison is listed as a system integrators by

mental images®, founded in 1986, is the recognized international leader in providing rendering and 3D modeling technology to the entertainment, computer-aided design, scientific visualization, architecture, and other industries that require sophisticated images.

Mental Images Major Product is MentalRay , a rendering package, and has a new product or a platform

RealityServer

3D Web Services Application Platform

that produces rendered animation on servers and then sends them them to the net. (Think Onlive - see our post here of just a few days ago)

RealityServer® is the 3D web services software platform that is highly scalable to thousands of servers. It is ideal for creating and deploying 3D web services for interactive and collaborative 3D applications. The software allows for remote creation, manipulation and visualization of 3D content. No matter how large and complex.

Unlike client-based 3D solutions, RealityServer maintains and processes original content securely on the server – streaming images in response to the users' choices, allowing you to interact with even the largest of datasets from any remote location.

Now how did we get to mental images?

mental images just partnered with Scenecaster

Ins april 2009 on their blog Scenecaster announced there new produiuct 3d scenes for Friendfinder and Facebook using Reality Server

Introducing 3D Scenes

Well, it's been quite some time since our last blog post. While we can blame the holidays, the darkness of winter and the global economic recession, the real reason for our long blog hiatus is that we have been busy these past several months working on our latest application.

Well the wait is over. We're really excited to finally be able to tell you about and show you our new 3D Scenes application. 3D Scenes offers users a brand new way to view, interact and share their personal media, including photos and YouTube videos, in a rich, immersive 3D environment. Significantly, 3D Scenes is a Flash based app and therefore doesn't require any proprietary plug-ins or lengthy downloads -- it just works!

So how does it work? Users of 3D Scenes can select from a wide range of fun and thematic 3D templates such as Fashionista, Gothic Princess, Surf's Up, Soho Gallery and Medieval Times, point and click to add their photos and videos and then post their personalized 3D Scene on their social networking profile page or embed it on their web page or blog. A quick intro video of the app can be viewed here.

We're especially excited to announce that we have partnered with Friendster, one of the top global social networks, for the initial launch of 3D Scenes. Friendster's 85 million users can now enhance their profile pages by creating amazing 3D Scenes. The Friendster deployment of 3D Scenes can be found here. By the way, within the first week of launch, 3D Scenes is already the second most popular app on Friendster's global network!

Ok, so what if you don't have a Friendster account? No problem. We're launching a Facebook version of 3D Scenes within the next couple of weeks and we expect to be on other major social networks very soon.

Before signing off, we'd like to thank a couple of our partners, Paypal and Zong who are providing the payment systems for the purchase of premium templates and virtual goods on 3D Scenes. We'll be adding more payment options soon, including OfferPal, and new templates and features so keep coming back often to check us out.

Finally, I thought I'd leave you with one of my 3D Scenes which features my profile picture on Friendster (I know it's dark, but I like it) and celebrates one of the great comedy troupes and movies of all time: Monty Python and The Holy Grail. Click on the photos and videos in the scene to get a closer look.

We have clipped company Press Releases, blog posts, about and product pages to tell a story without overhead of commentary, to just let the story tell itself as it was discovered.

To make sure proper credit and attribution is given:

Here are all the links to the above so you can surf this on your own in the reverse order of the post and in the order of discovery. Maybe you will find a few other trails to follow.

1. http://www.friendster.com/explore3dscenes.php
2. http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=60138418959
3. http://abduzeedo.com/20-futuristic-3d-scenes <-Got sidetracked ~LOL~ later we will look more
4. http://blog.scenecaster.com/2009/04/introducing-3d-scenes.html
   
5. http://twitter.com/my3dscenes
6. http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS188981+23-Apr-2009+BW20090423
7. http://www.mentalimages.com/products/realityserver.html
8. http://www.archvision.com/WhatisRPC.cfm
9. http://www.eonreality.com/news_releases.php?ref=news/news_releases&sid=340
10. http://www.youtube.com/user/EonReality

One last thing: Looking at another YouTube post by "EonReality", One must wonder why it is tagged "Second Life"

Maybe another time we will follow that lead... Time for breakfast, and a fast tweet first ~LOL~

Picture the Impossible Countdown Clock - Alternate Reality Game

Picture the Impossible Countdown Clock, originally uploaded by mamamusings.

September 12, 2009

Alternate Reality Game with Rochester Democrat and Chronicle

http://picturetheimpossible.com/

Picture the Impossible is a community-based game developed jointly by the Lab for Social Computing at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle. The game engages members of the community in exploration of the City of Rochester, and encourages both creativity and charitable giving in the community. Players participate in a range of activities, including casual web-based games, games that bring players out to events and locations throughout the city, and games that involve the tangible aspects of the Democrat & Chronicle newspaper itself.

Players will have the opportunity to win individual prizes, including Kodak cameras, picture frames, and printers, as well as tickets to a gala party held on October 31st at RIT's new Student Innovation Center. The points they score each week will also help local charities earn contributions from our sponsors.

The game begins on September 12th and ends on October 31st of 2009. Each week, activities will focus on a different theme related to Rochester; these themes are Arts and Crafts, Local Food, Rochester Firsts, Peforming Arts, the Imaging Industry, Famous Figures, and Social Justice.

http://labforsocialcomputing.net/

Visit the IGM Website

The site was designed by our friends @ Darkwind Media. Both the founders and several of the staff at Darkwind hold degrees in New Media Interactive Development and/or Game Design & Development

Another project @ RIT which we first posted about in 2008 is:

Preserving Virtual Worlds

Interactive media are highly complex and at high risk for loss as technologies rapidly become obsolete. The Preserving Virtual Worlds project will explore methods for preserving digital games and interactive fiction. Major activities will include developing basic standards for metadata and content representation and conducting a series of archiving case studies for early video games, electronic literature and Second Life, an interactive multiplayer game. Second Life content participants include Life to the Second Power, Democracy Island and the International Spaceflight Museum.

Partners: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (lead), University of Maryland, Stanford University, Rochester Institute of Technology and Linden Lab.

The Preserving Virtual Worlds project is funded by the Preserving Creative America initiative under the National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP) administered by the Library of Congress.

[Above includes excerpt from Library of Congress Press release; 3 August 2007.]

FYI: Here is a little non virtual history. Gannett (USAToday) started in Rochester, at this paper. Other notable companies started and flurished in Rochester include Kodak, Xerox, Wegmans and Paychecks. Notable residents have included Susan B Anthony and Fredick Douglas.

What is wrong with the Second Life viewer open source license?

In every other sentence of a discussion about other viewers one hears that the SL viewer open source licence makes it difficult for others to create an alternative viewer and this criticism immediately calls into question the Lab's direction and intent. I remember when Nicholaz left, and why.

Now I am not familiar with the fine points of open source licenses or exactly what the beef is so I typed into Google search the following:

"What is wrong with the Second Life viewer license?"
This is the best result I got.

Linux.com... An open source "Second Life" for Linden Lab
September 11, 2007 ( exactly 2 years ago)

"Linden Lab, the creator of online virtual community Second Life, released its viewer earlier this year with a GPL 2.0 license, adding a clause called the "FLOSS exception," which releases developers using certain open source licenses from the requirement that any derivative works be licensed under the GPL. Linden added the exception to make it possible for many more developers to create new applications from Second Life viewer code. "We had the sense that Second Life has the potential to be much bigger than Linden Lab alone," says Rob Lanphier, Linden's director of open source development. "We needed to figured out a way to let the world build this into a much bigger thing."
.....
Lanphier came onboard in September 2006, after the open source initiative had begun. CEO Philip Rosedale, former CTO at Real Networks, quickly realized he needed a true open source expert to lead a project as complicated as open-sourcing the Second Life viewer. Rosedale turned to Lanphier, the person who was in charge of open-sourcing the Helix client for Real.

Lanphier has a solid grasp on the benefits of releasing the viewer code to the community. "If you look historically at companies that have had similar opportunities with respect to Internet technologies, you can see AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve, all duking it out for consumer network access. All of those companies had the potential to be at the foundation of what became what we call the Internet today. What prevented that from happening was that, at a time when they should have been figuring out how to open up, instead they spent their time focusing on monetizing it. What's ironic about that is that they missed out on that opportunity to become Cisco, Google, and all of those other Internet giants of today. They were too focused on trying to keep their arms around the whole enchilada."
.....
Lanphier wants Linden to bypass that mentality by making Second Life as open as possible, from the inside out and not just as a reaction to the current trends. "We could try to create lock-in effects at every level, but we're better off creating a really broad ecosystem that others can build on top of.
.....
A company that is considering going open source also needs to start treating its community the right way, right away. "The culture shifts need to be part of the plan. I was floored at how quickly everything hit the ground running [with Linden]. One of the reasons for that was how we treated some of the developers prior to open-sourcing. There was a project with Second Life that was technically a violation of our terms of service. We could have come down hard on them and crushed that initiative. But one of the things the team realized was that, look, it's a game of whack-a-mole, and we should be open-sourcing the viewer anyway. It was the TOS that had a bug. By actually treating the folks well, it created a ready-made open source community for us when we did put out the code.""

For some reason, this all sounds so "before the apple soured", and now you get the impression this was all hot air. Will they ever support teleports directly to other grids not running "The Lab's" closed servers package, like OpenGrid. Will they ever support cross platform avatars and not hold our inventory hostage? Is Lanphier still at Linden Lab, that I don't even know...

If anyone can help me answer these questions please comment.

Thanks JR

WE LIVE IN PUBLIC - Then & Now

Then:

The movie trailer:



On the 40th anniversary of the Internet, WE LIVE IN PUBLIC tells the story of the effect it is having on our society as seen through the eyes of the greatest Internet pioneer youve never heard of, visionary Josh Harris. Award-winning director, Ondi Timoner (DIG!), documented his tumultuous life for more than a decade, to create a riveting, cautionary tale of what to expect as the virtual world inevitably takes control of our lives. Please visit the website: www.weliveinpublicthemovie.com for more information.

This movie will be showing at Burning Man, see the social media at Burning Man booth in the 3 oclock plaza for details. Wed night at 1AM and Friday night at 2:30AM.

Now:

via: Leo Laporte --- http://twit.tv/

67 Terebytes for $7867.00 USD

How to build a Backblaze Storage Pod

A Backblaze Storage Pod is a self-contained unit that puts storage online. It’s made up of a custom metal case with commodity hardware inside. Specifically, one pod contains one Intel Motherboard with four SATA cards plugged into it. The nine SATA cables run from the cards to nine port multiplier backplanes that each have five hard drives plugged directly into them (45 hard drives in total).

Above is an exploded diagram. The two most important factors to note are that the cost of the hard drives dominates the price of the overall pod and that the rest of the system is made entirely of commodity parts.

via: http://blog.backblaze.com <- read all about it

Backblaze offers Unlimited Online Backup Data File Storage for $5.00/month

SketchUp plugin adds Rendering and Physics

While the 3rd party developers abandon or get discouraged with Second Life, the Web 2.0 Community has embraced open Api's & Google has provided an ecosystem around Sketchup that thrives and breads innovation,add-ons & plug-ins.

To find out how to do this within SketchUp, goto: www.twilightrender.com purchase a copy before the introductry price of $59.00 USD ends Sept 24th! or get the free crippled demo.

I am not sure of the connection but in addition look at : Kerkythea

About:

Kerkythea is a standalone renderer, using physically accurate materials and lights, aiming for the best quality rendering in the most efficient timeframe. The target of Kerkythea is to simplify the task of quality rendering by providing the necessary tools to automate scene setup, such as staging using the GL real-time viewer, material editor, general/render settings editors, etc., under a common interface.

The development of the Kerkythea (KT) application began in September (2004) without having much time to invest on the application at that time. The good thing, is that it started with the kernel and libraries of Phos (an older render engine), so a big part of the source code was already tested and well structured.

It took more than half a year before Kerkythea was finally born (April 2005)! In that phase, the first users were not so many but there were enthusiasts that joined my efforts and gave substantial feedback. Seeing that a general weakness of other render engines was the lack of an interface, I decided to make a turn and enhance the user interface even more. The enhanced version was based on Fox toolkit, with the additional benefit of KT becoming platform independent (October 2005).

Reaching now the 3rd year of development and gaining popularity, I want to believe that KT can now be considered among the top freeware/open source renderer engines and can be used for both academic and commercial purposes. In the beginning of 2007, we have a strong and rapidly growing community and a new site that is more "alive" than ever!

After one more year of development we have reached a new release at the end of January 2008. A very powerful release with lots of improvements. Kerkythea has grown constantly over the last year, growing into a standard rendering application among architectural studios and extensively used within educational institutes. Of course there are a lot of things that can be added and improved. But we are really proud of reaching a high quality and stable application that is more than usable for commercial purposes with an amazing zero cost!

License Agreement

We believe in free software that continues to be of high quality, user friendly and can be used in your commercial work without any fees or any other restrictions. We have only some terms of usage to basically protect our hard work. Kerkythea is freeware copyrighted product and can be used under the following terms: You can not re-distribute Kerkythea software from web sites or other ways of massive redistribution (for example, magazine CD). Person to person redistribution is permitted provided that the package is distributed without modifications and without gaining money from this action, or any kind of advertisement material. You can use Kerkythea and its produced output (rendered images) for your work (including commercial) completely free without any fees. Mentioning the rendering software is appreciated but not required.

Last Updated ( Wednesday, 30 January 2008 )

720p, 1280×720 pixels at 30 frames per second

Microsoft LifeCam Cinema 720p

The new Microsoft Cinema has a top resolution now of 720p, 1280×720 pixels at 30 frames per second.

The image encoding/decoding and compression take serious processor power, lots of memory, and real broadband bandwidth. Microsoft says this requires a dual core 1.6GHz processor, and recommends a 3GHz dual core processor and 2GB of memory.

No news yet on which drivers and codecs they'll use, how much burden using the Cinema will put on your system (will you be able to run Outlook while calling?), nor how much bandwidth a HD video call will take.

This year Skype published the free SILK audio codec for wideband audio at the same bandwidth and Google announced it's buying On2, the maker of Skype's video engine. The race to fidelity hasn't been this hot since Skype promoted the GIPS audio codec suite in 2003, followed by Yahoo!, Google, AOL, and Microsoft.

LifeCam Cinema Features: 4x digital zoom, glass lens, auto focus, Microsoft "ClearFrame" frame-rate doubling technology, noise-cancelling microphone, Windows Live calling button, aluminum body. For Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. £70 or $80.

Via: Gizmodo

Now wth Burn Man and Burning Life approaching it is good to reflect and look full circle.
From Wikipedia:

Rosedale's strong coding skills eventually resulted in the creation of a video compression technology that would later be acquired by RealNetworks, where he was made CTO at the young age of 27. While at RealNetworks, Rosedale's ambition to create a virtual world was resurrected and recharged by technological advances in computing and his attendance at the popular music and arts festival Burning Man.

Now lets imagine a new Architecture for SL. SLive ( SLin the browser) Just use OnLive to stream SL from your avatar's camera position to any browser video player with VoiP via: Skype, Vivox, or Jajah

Behind the Scenes - Building out Content Delivery Platforms

Surfing you can find very interesting things, like this quote:

SP – A number of the social sites are
3D – Entropia, Kaneva, Second Life. And
IBM and Second Life and others are working
on next-generation browsers that would
be 3D. Do you anticipate much of an impact
on traffic volume when the streams have to
carry 3D imagery and people start demanding
over long distances the kind of richness
and low latency that we see now only from
chip to chip on a game console? Is that
going to have a big impact like HD will?

DeBlasio – I think so. And I think video,
as it progresses and more and more users
increase their expectations of what the video
experience is supposed to look like, as they
want more and more, video as the consumer
of bandwidth that it is, the demands are
going to be even more strict. The users will
require an online experience that is fast, reliable
and of the highest quality.

Above via: http://www.internap.com/pdf/ScreenPlays_6-08_Issue_DeBlasio_Interview.pdf

Found after seeing a Press Release:

Vivox, Inc. Embeds Real-Time Voice Communications in Virtual Worlds and Online Games for 9 Million Subscribers in 180 Countries Using Internap

Managed service adds voice, instant messaging, and presence to online games and virtual communities leveraging Internap’s Performance IP™ networking and data center colocation

After reading that (Vivox is a Partner with Bigfoot Networks) Who is Bigfoot? Read on.

Bigfoot's Technology & Their Killer™ Technology
http://www.bigfootnetworks.com/how-it-works/

Killer™ Technology is what separates Killer from ordinary networking products. Designed specifically for gaming, Killer Technology is designed to accelerate your network processing the minute your game's data arrives at your computer.

Introducing the NPU

Killer Technology uses a custom chipset called the Network Processing Unit (NPU) to allow parts of the game to run inside the Killer NIC. The NPU acts as a co-processor dedicated to running the networking portion of games and other applications.

A New Networking Model

Killer technology is completely Plug & Play, and works in all games. Killer literally bypasses the traditional Windows Networking Stack, enabling an entirely new game-optimized model of networking. This new networking model makes a dedicated, accelerated path for every gaming network packet, giving network traffic unprecedented speed and priority in your gaming PC.

Separating Networking and Graphics for Smoother Gameplay.

Games check the network for new data constantly - simple, but important checks ranging from "Is he shooting at me?" to "Is that door open or closed?" These checks are mixed with graphics and frames showing the result of the question (e.g. a closed or open door). Killer can answer these questions in just one CPU instruction. With Killer, your game has effectively separated graphics from networking. It can now dedicate more instructions to the other tasks - graphics and gameplay - that smooth your overall experience, especially during intense action.

The Voice of Virtual Worlds - now accelerated on Killer™ Xeno™'s NPU. The voice technology that's chosen by more developers than any other comes to the Bigfoot Networks' Network Processing Unit. Working together to port their Voon voice chat client to the Killer Xeno, Vivox and Bigfoot offload voice operations to the network card, making for smoother gaming and even smoother voice chat than ever before.

The Voice of Virtual Worlds - now accelerated on Killer™ Xeno™'s NPU. The voice technology that's chosen by more developers than any other comes to the Bigfoot Networks' Network Processing Unit. Working together to port their Voon voice chat client to the Killer Xeno, Vivox and Bigfoot offload voice operations to the network card, making for smoother gaming and even smoother voice chat than ever before. Bigfoot Networks:

Bypassing The Operating System for Better Network Performance

Bigfoot's Killer™ Technology bypasses the Windows Network Stack and routes game network traffic through its accelerated Network Processing Unit (NPU), sending, receiving and processing your network traffic faster than Windows can itself, leaving your CPU free to run the game. In independent tests, Killer Technology on the Killer NIC™ and Killer Xeno have shown a 5 - 20% increase in frame rates in online games and a similar decrease in latency.

By allowing Killer Technology to manage your network processing load, your performance in all intense online applications improves, and your online experience is unequalled.

This link came from Dell via one of their wholly-owned subsidiary Alienware:

Dancers synchronised by SyncDancer.

via: NPIRL <- Read the full post by Bettina Tizzy

Google Has Plans for Wave

"We hope to bring Google Wave to all Google Apps users next year"

Tuesday, September 01, 2009 at 9:09 AM (same day Gmail goes down)
via: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/

From SaaS to SaaP

3DXplorer Behind the Firewall

Altadyn has announced plans to ship a behind-the-firewall packaged version of its browser-based 3D collaboration server & proprietary java, no plugins needed viewer: The 3DXplorer Enterprise Edition.

Read More:

• 3DX_Enterprise.pdf
• http://www.3dxplorer.com/static-v3/3DX_enterprise_edition.html

"The Enterprise Edition server software itself is easy to install, requires minimal bandwidth to deliver and only a low-grade computer for end-users to access (no software or plug-ins needed to install on end-user computers). In fact, the integration process for any IT department is extraordinarily simple.

The Enterprise Edition puts full control of development and customization in your hands. Use the integrated authoring tool, import user-generated 3D content and/or use the API for scripting (Javascript/PHP/HTML). Fully customize and even whitelabel your 3D applications. All data is converted to proprietary formats, can be password protected and is hosted behind your firewalls for maximum security."

Altadyn originally launched 3DXplorer as a SaaS app. It appears they hit a wall flying in the Cloud, maybe because customers wanted to be in control of all their data, they have firewalls & security concerns, or they had IT departments that won't let anyone in the office out to play. The advantages of going "Only on our servers" are:

• Performance -- it's faster than over the Internet if you have an intranet.
  
• Data security -- it's safer to store data in-house than to hand it off to France or some unknown host provider.
• Geographic distribution -- can you say my team is all in Washington DC.
  
• Brandable - Create your own Portal & integration, SaaS integration, especially single login and authentication is problematic at best.
  
• Your own IT team -- I will leave that one to your imagination.

Who is Aimee Trescothick?

Here is a video from Youtube by AimeeTrescothick. the latest of a series that have flashed through the blogshere this past week. Aimee is the first to demonstrate the Linden's new LLMedia Plug-in API. There is a great interview at Rez Magazine that I would clipped, fair use but it says All Rights Reserved and you should read it all, not just a few sentences if the title of this post caught your eye.

11 million Active users and Growing

App Watch: Facebook’s 11 Million Farmers

from WSJ.com: Digits

FarmVille, which social-gaming company Zynga launched on June 19, is a free Facebook app that lets members grow produce and raise animals. They can harvest fruits and vegetables, collect milk from cows and wool from sheep, and expand their farm by selling the goods. They can help other players’ farms and exchange gifts with them, and enterprising players can get bigger by buying more land for their plots. While there’s no “game over” point, negligent farmers wind up with wilted crops.

Farming apps are popular on Facebook, with others including Farm Town, Barn Buddies, Country Store and Farm Life. FarmVille, however, is not only the most popular farming app, it led all Facebook games in monthly active use in early August, according to Inside Social Games.

In a little over two months, it has grown to see more than 11 million daily active users. Its adoption has surprised Zynga, which also produced popular gaming apps such as Mafia Wars and Vampires. FarmVille went live quietly on a Friday and had more than 100,000 players within a few days, said Mark Skaggs, its executive producer and a general manager at Zynga.

“We were kind of all blinking,” he said. “We had to double-check our stats.”

Zynga makes money from the game through online advertising and virtual-good sales, though it declined to say how much. “Zynga is a profitable company, virtual goods being one of the main revenue drivers,” a spokeswoman said.

via The WSJ.com

Feed me 3D

Google has added a RSS feed for 3D content, something Linden Lab should think about for XStreet. Imagine filtering the feed for content you need or you sell.

" Today we added a feature to the Google 3D Warehouse that allows you to track search results and collection contents using a feed reader, like Google Reader. How is this useful?"

via: http://sketchupdate.blogspot.com/2009/08/feed-me-3d.html

Google Skecthup (free) will drop DWG import & add Collada

From: The Official Google Sketchup Blog

Coming Soon in Google SketchUp...
Friday, August 28, 2009 8:35 PM

.......

We originally assumed that our free Google SketchUp users would never really need to export models into other tools. As it turned out, folks wanted to use Google SketchUp models in all kinds of crazy ways. Things that we could never have imagined! We decided that Google SketchUp users should be able to export their models into some easy-to-read and fundamentally hackable file format to make this easier. Your models should be yours to do with as you see fit.

Our pick for that new format is COLLADA, a 3D model exchange format that is open, extensible and public. We've been using COLLADA internally for some time now for 3D buildings in Google Earth, and there's a lot to like about it. It's easy to read, easy to write, and easy to extend for new features. I hope you'll like it, too.

In our next release, we're going to make COLLADA an official first-class format for all modelers. You'll be able to import and export COLLADA models, as well as COLLADA models wrapped up in the KMZ format for Google Earth, with any version of SketchUp.

Unfortunately, this improvement won't come without a cost. Import/export capability is tough for us to maintain and tough for you to use effectively. There are just so many fiddly little settings on both sides of a file exchange that it is always a challenge to get everything working just right. Looking forward, we decided to make a trade-off.

In the next release of Google SketchUp, our free modeler, we've decided to remove the dwg/dxf importers. We know how important these importers are to our professional customers, especially those who depend on CAD products in their daily work. And for that reason we'll focus our attention on supporting them in Google SketchUp Pro, where we really understand all the nuances of your workflow and where we can provide professional support to troubleshoot your issues.

.....

Posted by John Bacus, SketchUp Product Manager