by: Erik Industry:Education Occupation:middle school technology coordinator locality:New York City
I just finished a fantastic series of classes taking three groups of 5th graders on a virtual Mars field trip. First we looked together at the surface of Mars using the Mars edition of Google Earth. We zoomed in to a particular crater named Tharsis Tholus. Then the students logged in to a Mars Tharsis Tholus 3D simulation I created with OpenSim (standalone, Diva Distro v.0.6.8, 2x2 subset of 4x4 megaregion). Pairs of students manipulated an astronaut avatar. Their mission, as you can see in the video, is to don their helmet and backpack in the space station, venture out into the crater, find and collect meteorite samples, and bring them back to the space station for analysis. (This was all possible because of the work of Drew Crow of BlueSkySchool blog, who figured out how to use NASA MOLA terrain data to make the terrain files for OpenSim. He sent me the terrain files as well as xml files for the Windlight settings so the sky and water would look more like Mars.)
BOSTON, Mass. - The Immersive Education Initiative today revealed that it will provide permanent virtual world land for one year to every school and non-profit organization that has at least one teacher, administrator, or student in attendance at the 2010 Boston Summit this April. The land, a full region of space measuring 256x256 meters in size (65,536 square meters), would cost nearly $2,500 in Second Life at the normal educational rate ($700 plus $1770 in annual maintenance fees). The free land can be renewed each year, also free of charge, by attending any Immersive Education Initiative Summit.
At the 2010 Boston Summit a series of workshops and presentations will teach educators how to copy or move their existing Second Life objects and worlds onto the virtual land they receive, and they will also receive free pre-made virtual worlds designed for education. In addition, Summit workshops will teach educators how to install and run their own virtual world servers on school networks ("behind the firewall") free of charge.
Platform Ecosystem and The Education Grid
By mandate the Immersive Education Initiative's Platform Ecosystem consists of freely available open source technologies. Open Wonderland, realXtend, Open Simulator (OpenSim), and Cobalt are the official Immersive Education Initiative virtual worlds platforms. Additionally, an enhanced descendant of the open source Second Life viewer (client-side end user software) is paired with open source virtual world servers to provide educators with a fully open, cost-free alternative to Second Life. Virtual world land provided to Summit attendees is hosted on the Education Grid, which educators can access using their own Second Life viewer software or an enhanced version provided through the Initiative.
Built by educators, for educators, the Education Grid is a learning network provided by the Immersive Education Initiative and its members. On the Education Grid, teachers can conduct classes and meetings within a growing collection of virtual worlds. Initiative members can also use the Education Grid to build their own virtual worlds, simulations, and learning games. Virtual learning environments on the Education Grid may be hosted by the Initiative, by member organizations (such as high schools, colleges and universities), or at multiple locations for fail-safe redundancy. The Immersive Education Initiative's virtual world Platform Ecosystem and Education Grid together provide educators with an open and comprehensive end-to-end infrastructure for a new generation of learning worlds, interactive learning games, and simulations. The corresponding Education Grid provides content delivery services, collaboration services and academic services to these and other client-side platforms.
2010 Boston Summit
The 2010 Boston Summit features new and emerging virtual worlds, learning games, educational simulations, mixed/augmented reality, and related teaching tools, techniques, technologies, standards, and best practices. The Education Grid, Open Wonderland, realXtend, Cobalt, and Open Simulator are among the immersive learning technologies that will be featured. Members of the Initiative's open file format, library, psychology, mixed reality, and K-12 groups will give special presentations and workshops. Speakers and panelists at Immersive Education Initiative Summits include faculty, researchers, and administrators from The Grid Institute, Boston College, Loyola Marymount University, M.I.T., Harvard University, United States Department of Education, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Federation of American Scientists (FAS), The Smithsonian Institution, Sun Microsystems, Duke University, Southeast Kansas Education Service Center, Immersive Education High School, South Park Elementary, Cornell University, Amherst College, New Media Consortium, Kauffman Foundation, Boston Library Consortium, Montana State University, Boston Media High School, realXtend (Finland), University of Aizu (Japan), Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden), University of Essex (UK), Coventry University (UK), Giunti Labs (Italy) and European Learning Industry Group, Open University (UK), and more.
The Foundry will show for the first time at NAB 2010 in Las Vegas new products including the acquisition of Weta's Paint and texturing program Mari.
Mari is a new product for the Foundry, developed by the R&D and texture departments at Weta Digital. Mari has been forged by Weta in the heat of the production of films such as Lord of The Rings, King Kong and Avatar. Mari is a full 3D paint/texture tool able to handle up to 30K textures and produce production ready assets while remaining responsive and interactive. The product is not a modeling tool such as Mudbox - rather it is focused just on texture painting.
The application allows hundreds of production textures to be painted on a model, but rather than be limited to just a static neutral pose, you can import an animation sequence and still interactively work on the texturing. This is important as seams and stretching can often only appear when the character or asset is in motion in a real scene, which is exactly why Mari has this feature - it is a direct result of Production requests from the original Weta team.
One of the programs strongest features is its interactivity. Even with real world production models of high complexity, with multiple 2K textures - the program is lightning fast and responsive. Through the use of some GUI and some very smart CPU programing, the engineering team has produced an extraordinarily interactive program.
To aid in workflow - multiple models can be imported and either models or parts of a master model can be hidden, allowing painting behind the asset and into tight joints and textural creases.
* interactively handles very large 3D model data sets, scaling to over 1 million polygons * supports large textures, up to 32K x 32K pixels (normally, single textures never need to be this large) * handles hundreds and thousands of textures per model, over many layers * provides single- or multi- patch UV texture map management * supports multiple models or model instances in a single scene * handles animated geometry and animated textures - floating point, 16-bit or 8-bit textures
In all, this means Mari is happy managing over 100 gigabyte geometry and texture data sets on a single model without slowing down artist interaction and workflow. High performance is achieved with modest hardware requirements (2-4 gigabyte system memory, .5-1 gigabyte graphics memory), with Mari automatically making efficient use of available resources and background task processes.
Mari will go into Beta soon and is expected to be in the order of around 500 euros, but no actual pricing has been officially announced.
AMIENS, FRANCE—Literary scholars announced that they have unearthed a 33-page handwritten manuscript of "The Camera-Phone," a short story believed to have been written in 1874 by French novelist Jules Verne, the man often considered to be the originator of modern science fiction.
Jules Verne, 1828–1905.
"The discovery of this highly prophetic work is exciting in both a literary and a social context," Jean-Michel Frelseien of the Ecole-Polytechnique said Monday. "This story of a hand-held communications and picture-taking device that leads to social upheaval in 21st-century France provides yet another example of Verne's celebrated prescience."
"Le Telephon-Photographique," which Frelseien identified as having been written just after Verne's masterpiece 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, is narrated by Gui Cingulaire, the nephew of brilliant but monomaniacal professor Bernard Cingulaire. An ambitious, gifted scientist, Bernard fails to predict that his invention, a portable telephone that can take photographs and send short script messages, will contribute to the breakdown of traditional manners among Parisians.
Frelseien said the manuscript was found among the belongings of Verne's publisher, Pierre-Jules Hertzel, along with an uncompleted letter rejecting the work as "pessimistic, preposterous, and unappealing in premise."
Extensible Architecture – Services, plugins, mix-and-match – subtracting or adding features. Evolution as new capabilities are added.
Scaling Virtual Worlds – Many prims, many avatars, … a hospital full of equipment, a stadium full of people, Second Earth, … tiny, cosmic. Connecting enclaves that have different properties.
Populating and Provisioning Virtual Worlds – how can we rapidly populate a large space by importing (or generating) terrain, buildings, and objects? What GIS, CAD, and other standards should we build on? How can we engage the community?
VW Enterprise Apps or games – How to layer them onto the core virtual world architecture
Planning and Workflows – How to organize a collection of avatar bots to cooperate to solve a problem in a virtual world
Economies – Modeling and trading systems in virtual worlds. Integrating with real world currency systems.
Theme 3: Integration with the Real World
Mirror Worlds – Tying the real and virtual world together. Using virtual world as a command post. Rural telemedicine. Modeling supply chains. Sensor networks and RFID.
Smart Networked Objects – What protocols are needed to make an ordinary object smart and networked? Identity, messaging, API reflection, access control, virtual model.
Man-Machine Interface – how can people communicate with smart networked (real or virtual) objects or collections of them?
Theme 4: Enhanced Capabilities
VW Search Engines and Query Language – Spatial queries, temporal queries, etc
Ontologies – Adding ontologies to make virtual worlds semantic (by analogy to the semantic web)
Security – Alternatives to simple access control, digital rights, microlicensing, micropayments,
Time – Modeling past and future using virtual worlds
Scoping – When are virtual worlds appropriate, when are other modeling technologies more appropriate, can these different modeling technologies interoperate?
Grief/Fraud – Modeling systems and tools for identifying users creating grief/fraud in the virtual world.
With the announcement of the NASA Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG), whose first demo Moonbase Alpha is scheduled for public release in early 2010, the European Space Agency (ESA) is also adopting virtual reality MMOG technology for space education and outreach.
A demo of a future ESA MMOG has been produced by Mindark using its Entropia Platform powered by Crytek's CryENGINE. Crytek's game engine is also used by Avatar Reality's Blue Mars.
While Autodesk has dominates the 3D content pipeline for games and architectural visualizations, in the Television and film world NewTeK has it's place with software and hardware like their TriCaster box for video production and Lightwave software. Lightwave though not up to the same level as Maya or 3DS MAx is much cheaper. LightWave v9 Full with Printed Manuals $995.00.
My interest was peeked after reading that creator & supervisor of the Visual Art Department for Avatar, Rob Powers is now at NewTek.
History of NewTek:
Much of the desktop video revolution can be traced in the history of NewTek. Since founding NewTek in 1985, visionary Tim Jenison has led in the design of a series of ground-breaking products and continues to guide the company in pioneering innovative and affordable tools for computer-generated animation, video and film special effects.
Since its inception, NewTek has been a driving force in pushing the edge of video and 3D graphics technology while redefining price/performance and ease of use. NewTek is perhaps best known in the film and video industry as the company that created the desktop video market segment in 1990 with the introduction of its wildly successful product, the Amiga Video Toaster®.
From: Meadhbh Hamrick To: ogpx , opensource-dev@lists.secondlife.com Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2010 09:44:35 -0700 Subject: [ogpx] Meadhbh Hamrick is no longer at Linden Research
Hey Everybody,
As many of you know, over the past year I've been working for Linden Research on virtual worlds interoperability. Specifically, I've been working with the IETF to establish working groups to develop open virtual world interoperability. I've also been writing internet drafts and supporting third party developers who are implementing the VWRAP specifications.
But recently, I left the lab. The decision was amicable and mutual. It does not mean the lab has abandoned it's work on interoperability; only that it will be done by a different team. I am continuing to participate in the Virtual World Region Agent Protocol working group at the IETF and will likely author or contribute to further internet drafts.
I'm happy to talk to anyone regarding generic virtual world architecture issues, but clearly specific questions regarding second life and linden's future plans for VWRAP should be directed to the lab.
EVOKE is a ten-week crash course in changing the world.
It is free to play and open to anyone, anywhere.
The goal of the social network game is to help empower young people all over the world, and especially young people in Africa, to come up with creative solutions to our most urgent social problems.
The game begins on March 3, 2010. Players can join the game at any time.
On May 12th, 2010 the first season of the game will end, and successful participants will form the first graduating class of the EVOKE network.
Players who successfully complete 10 game challenges will be able to claim their honors: Certified EVOKE Social Innovator – Class of 2010.
Top players will also earn online mentorships with experienced social innovators and business leaders from around the world, seed funding for new ventures, and travel scholarships to share their vision for the future at the EVOKE Summit in Washington DC. (Learn more about these rewards.)
EVOKE was developed by the World Bank Institute, the learning and knowledge arm of the World Bank Group, and directed by alternate reality game master Jane McGonigal.
Shortly you will see 3D games in your browser & not just in Flash but native in the browser. With webgl in beta versions of both gecko and webkit rendering engines Microsoft must counter, so the following about the next step for IE 9.0 makes sense. Microsoft and NVidia are making a news splash today with the demonstration and announcement of the upcoming Internet Explorer 9, which features GPGPU acceleration in the rendering engines.
Internet Explorer 9 includes a new JavaScript engine, support for HTML5 and hardware accelerated graphics and text. Internet Explorer 9 is the first browser designed to take advantage of modern hardware, resulting in graphics and performance improvements throughout the browser including the first to deliver hardware accelerated scalable vector graphics( SVG); the first to enhance JavaScript engine performance with the benefit of shifting from the CPU to the GPU; and the first to deliver GPU-Powered HTML5.
A. No. Internet Explorer 9’s GPU-powered graphics take advantage of new technologies available in Windows 7 and back-ported only to Windows Vista. These technologies depend on advancements in the display driver model introduced first in Windows Vista.
March 29-31 Orlando Hilton - adjacent to the Orange County Convention Center
GameTech is a unique user-focused conference dealing with gaming technologies that enhance warfighter training. The conference program is final and includes experts from Government, Academia, and Industry that will discuss the current state of gaming and virtual world technologies. The conference keynote speakers are:
General John Mattis, Commander of Joint Forces Command Bio »
Mr. Will Wright, Creator of The Sims, SimCity, and Spore Bio »
Major General (Sel) Melvin Spiese, Commander, USMC Training and Education Command Bio »
Mr. Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium Bio »
Conference Objectives
Defense GameTech User's Conference Goals:
Promote the use of game technology within the Department of Defense
Provide a forum for DoD game technology users to exchange ideas and information Defense GameTech Users' Conference Objectives
Provide tutorials for DoD personnel that maximize their ability to use game technology fielded within DoD
Provide DoD personnel an update on industry/academia gaming and virtual world trends
Provide community at large an update on DoD gaming and virtual world projects
Register now while there is still space available.
Who Should Attend: Serious Game and Virtual World users (to include researchers and developers), military training personnel, and anyone interested in how to apply gaming technology for training.
The new 2.0 viewer interface appears to be headed toward what will be a blockbuster product this year. Can LL port the viewer to the Ipad? Will they? Here is a look at what others are doing:
Second Life is a large, on-line virtual world where avatars dance, fly, shop, play, meet, work, fall in love... and program.
This giant, collaborative development environment is run on a grid of over 30,000 CPUs that simulate the land of Second Life. Since August 2008 Mono has been available as a scripting engine for running interactive content in Second Life and over 27 million user created scripts are now running on Mono in Second Life. This talk will discuss our experiences using Mono in Second Life and our plans for the future.
FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Development European Meeting) is a European event centered around Free and Open Source software development. It is aimed at developers and all interested in the Free and Open Source news in the world. Its goals are to enable developers to meet and to promote the awareness and use of free and open source software. More info at http://fosdem.org
There are a number of tools required to be a successful 3D modeler & content creator from Photoshop to Blender and Maya. One of the most important tools in the toolbox is tool to create seamless textures. Today I ran across a press release for Genetica and downloaded the demo.
Spiral Graphics Inc. has released Genetica 3.5, a giant leap forward for its flagship seamless texture, animated texture, and HDRI environment map package. A free trial can be downloaded from here.
The new version adds a suite of tools for the creation of seamless textures directly from photographs, allowing photorealistic results to be achieved in seconds.
The demo is free, but Genetica does not come cheap. $669 US for the Studio version
This week at the Game Developers Conference (GDC 2010) in San Francisco, 3DVia is showing off 6 new games developed with 3DVia products. Among those is the first game built using 3DVIA Studio, an online social game, called Billions, that I can tell you right now is the very reason I’ll be staying up all night gorging myself with Twizzlers and Coke in front of the computer screen. via: SolidSmack
Billions, Save them All is a bold new concept in social game development and the first title developed on 3DVIA Studio. via:
The Federal Virtual World Challenge provides an outlet for the U.S. Federal Government to access a global community of content developers. The use of mass collaboration is a ground-breaking strategy to access innovative and interactive solutions to solve practical problems. The criterion for the challenge is intentionally unbounded to allow for creative solutions. This event started off as an Army, then DoD initiative. It soon became clear, however, that other agencies could benefit from the results. The intent is to be inclusive of any U.S. Government Agency that may benefit. Government agencies currently represented include Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Transportation, Department of Health and Human Services, National Defense University, Department of Justice, the Central Intelligence Agency and NASA.
Winners will be showcased at the Defense Users' Game Tech Conference in Orlando, Florida. The top three winners in each non-Government category will receive air-fare, rental car and hotel accommodations to attend the event. First place winners will receive $1000, second place will receive $500 and third will receive $250. In addition, the director for the Simulation Training Technology Center, COL Langhauser will have the option of awarding a $25,000 grand prize if a submittal is deemed to be such a significant advancement that it likely will lead to additional future Government investment.
November 15, 2009 - Submittals due - Submittals will be sorted into categories as they are received.
December/Jan - Government evaluation period.
February - Top challengers made available for public evaluation.
March 29-31, 2010 - Winners will be unveiled at the Defense Users' Game Tech Conference.
Below are the candidates for the Federal Virtual World Challenge.
The coming weeks and months will see the launch of new six-core processors from both Intel and AMD.
On the Desktop:
Intel is expected to introduce a 6-core processor designed to crunch through the most 3D-intensive games in the coming weeks.
The first glimpses of the chip running 3D-intensive games such as Napoleon: Total War could happen at the 2010 Game Developer's Conference next week, according to industry sources. The official roll-out of Intel's 6-core "Westmere" processors, however, is expected later this month.
The Core i7-980X is distinguished primarily by being Intel's first 6-core "Extreme Edition" processor based on the chipmaker's cutting-edge 32-nanometer process technology
Intel will release its fastest and highly anticipated eight-core Nehalem-EX server processor later this month, a company executive said late Thursday.
The processor will be targeted at four-socket servers, said Shannon Poulin, Xeon platform director at Intel. Each physical core will be able to run two threads simultaneously, giving the chip 64 virtual processing cores on servers.
The final version of OGRE 1.7.0 was released February 28th, 2010 .
OGRE is one of the most popular 3D rendering engine and is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. OGRE supports all modern rendering paths: OpenGL, Direct3D 9, Direct3D 10 and Direct3D 11.
Ogre is the rendering engine used by the Sirikata & realXtend viewers.
While Henrik Bennetsen is working on Sirikata and WebGL for 3D in the browser, he noted this work from Germany.The second video below is raytraced in realtime in a modified Firefox that supports the new declarative 3D description language XML3D developed at DFKI/Saarland University.
Quote " XML3D is an extension to HTML, and that means we use the same events as HTML; programmers can apply their knowledge to 3D without needing to become an expert in another language "
First Impression: This is very interesting research but we are close to standards for 3d in all browsers and this appears to be just off the path that will be adopted.
HyperGrids -- connecting virtual worlds for OpenSim and web arch From: Tim Berners-Lee timbl@w3.org> Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2010 10:25:13 -0500 Message-Id: Cc: Christa Lopez lopez@ics.ucs.edu> To: TAG List www-tag@w3.org>
Interesting to see what connections there should be between web architecture and the hypergrid. Does the hypergrid use URIs? Can I put one in a HTML page and link to a virtual world portal? Can I link back the other way, putting an arbitrary URI in a link in a virtual world?
"The Hypergrid: An Architecture for a New Web: OpenSim is chartering territory in making Virtual Worlds interoperable with each other and with the Web. At the heart of it there is the Hypergrid, an emerging architecture that allows the seamless transfer of users' agents between grids operated by different entities. While the Hypergrid is coming to life in the context of OpenSim-based 3D Virtual Worlds, its foundations shed a new light into what the Web could be." -- http://metaverse.stanford.edu/agenda/crista-lopes/crista-lopes
Google and browsers are increasingly incorporating 3D (Coming Soon)
The next major change to Second Life will be the introduction of 3D meshes (Coming Soon).
Linden Lab has shown it is focusing on core competencies and will outsource, purchase or partner with others to complete their platform & associated offerings.
TurboSquid is one of the largest 3d content stores on the web, with strong ties to Autodesk.
"Professional" 3D content found at TurboSquid is different in quality and cost then that found in xStreet.
Publishing Best Practices - Modeling in Real World Scale
Unlike Second Life were object scale is a complete mess we find this from the TurboSquid Blog
With more 3d animations relying on dynamics in one form or another; for example rigid body dynamics to destroy buildings or entire civilizations, soft-bodies for cloth, hair and other “squishy” bits, fluid dynamics for water, smoke and fire and much more, and global illumination rendering becoming more prevalent, it is becoming more critical that vendors consider the scale of the content they post for sale. In many cases, it is no longer simply enough to make the model “look right”, because it might be imported into a scene that needs real-world scale in order to function properly, whether as part of a specific render or as part of simulation system. This can be especially frustrating for a client who purchases your content (especially architects and designers, who use our library more often these days), so do your best to consider the following things while modeling:
TubroSquid licensed content may be used in a game but not resold, so no selling it on Xstreet. Looking at how TurboSquid & content creators make money I found the following:
Before you read it ask yourself "Does this all sound strangely familiar, maybe even a hint of things to come"?
Comment by: Michele Bousquet (a turbosquid employee) to a post and comment thread at: Vizworld.com February 26th, 2010
It is unfortunate that a few of the small percentage of people who have become disgruntled with TurboSquid have chosen to comment here. And as disgruntled people will, they have chosen to give incorrect and misleading information on something that has nothing to do with the blog post.
TurboSquid started the SquidGuild last August as a loyalty program; those who join pledge to publish their models at TurboSquid only. Since then, more than 50% of our active publishers have joined, and for good reason: they make more money as SquidGuild members. Before the SquidGuild, everybody got a 50% royalty on all sales. But now, SquidGuild members get a 50-60% royalty (depending on lifetime sales) and can earn an extra 20% on sales they refer to our site, for a possible 80% royalty, the highest of any site out there.
The reason these commenters are disgruntled is that they’ve chosen not to join the SquidGuild, and so have been bumped down to a 40% royalty. In order to give away more money to our loyal members, we had to make this adjustment. Any member is free at any time to join or not join the SquidGuild, or to go elsewhere to sell their models. Just the same, these commenters follow us around the web and complain every chance they get.
In the past few months, TurboSquid has had the highest total sales ever. This means customers are buying more models and spending more money at TurboSquid than ever. Our SquidGuild members are earning more than ever.
I’m sure this won’t be the end of the comments. Some of these guys have commented on TurboSquid training videos on YouTube, for Pete’s sake. They seem to think that if they keep complaining, we’ll change things. But when more than half our 20,000 sellers think something is a great idea, and the complainers number about a dozen, this isn’t likely to happen. The SquidGuild has been very successful, and has helped us continue as the largest online marketplace for 3D models.
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