Shonzilla, a pattern-seeking animal

Mon Feb 15

Here’s another jawdropping TED video from Blaise Agüera y Arcas who definitely knows how to reverse-engineer 3D spaces by using geo-tagged 2D pictures/movies. He has previously stunned the crowd with Seadragon and Photosynth technologies, which have been since then acquired by Microsoft.

In this presentation, Blaise is showcasing the technology to be experienced on Bing Maps. I’ve been too used to using Google Maps which might change when amazing projects like this become widely available. For now this won’t happen, however, since Street view is not supported in Firefox (and I won’t even start thinking that Chrome might work). ;-)

All I can say is: Praise to Blaise and his team!

This is probably the most exciting to leave the gates of Microsoft (pun intended) next to Project Natal presented by that guy wearing sunglasses indoors.

I guess Google should start cracking their brainpower and company acquisition resources…

Sun Aug 9

Rhonda - 3D sketching

Rhonda is the new sketching tools that will finally allow us to do it as it was always meant to be - in three dee! :-) The author is Amit Pitaru who has been working on this for quite a while (more than you have imagined, but not for more reasons like technical complexity).

In the first two minutes of the video you can see Amit’s collaborator James Peterson’s creating a 3D sculpture that was done in - 2003! The rest of the video contains some of his works from 2004 and 2005. In case you wondered, music in the video is Neil Young’s “Out On The Weekend”. From product point-of-view the project has been dormant since, while it has been capturing far too little eye balls in galleries, museums, festivals and conferences.

In a nice turn of events, two well-known software art engineers (according to Google I coined a new term) have joined the project - Zach Liebermann (of OpenFrameworks, who also took part in Toyota iQ Font campaign I wrote about) and Zack Gage (of synthPond, the spacial sequencer).

Want to be in the know when Rhonda will be out? Follow rhondaforever on Twitter.

Do you want to beta test this baby? Leave your name and email on Rhonda website.

[via Peter Kirn @ Creative Motion]

Thu Jun 4

Deceived Cinematic Trailer

Fist, hit Fullscreen. :-)

If you’re curious, this is the new game from Bioware.

Here’s the scoop about the game:

The Sacking of Coruscant. It was the crowning achievement of the Sith Empire’s ambitious military strategy and the moment that changed the history of the Old Republic forever. You may have read about it before, but our first cinematic trailer captures this event with breathtaking action and beautiful detail.

Republic leaders have traveled to Alderaan to engage in promised peace talks with the Sith Empire. The most powerful Jedi have accompanied them to safeguard against an Imperial deception. The Empire’s real motive, however, was simply to lure the Republic’s strongest defenders away from Coruscant and set the stage for an audacious attack. Under the command of Lord Angral, the Sith fleet approaches the Republic’s capital planet for the first time in centuries. In advance of the fleet, the strongest Sith Warriors have flown a stolen Republic ship into Coruscant’s orbit. Their mission is critical – to destroy the planet’s defense grid mainframe hidden in the heart of the Jedi Temple.

The game is due out in January 2010, starting from the European market.

Thanks to Robert for sending me this jawdropper. :-)

Tue Jun 2

levelHead

Wow, what a mindblowing use of augmented reality!

levelHead is an augmented reality spatial memory game (wicked title, isn’t it?).

What is levelHead?

Here’s the explanation what levelHead is from the web site:

levelHead uses a hand-held solid-plastic cube as its only interface. On-screen it appears each face of the cube contains a little room, each of which are logically connected by doors.

In one of these rooms is a character. By tilting the cube the player directs this character from room to room in an effort to find the exit.

Some doors lead nowhere and will send the character back to the room they started in, a trick designed to challenge the player’s spatial memory. Which doors belong to which rooms?

There are three cubes (levels) in total, each of which are connected by a single door. Players have the goal of moving the character from room to room, cube to cube in an attempt to find the final exit door of all three cubes. If this door is found the character will appear to leave the cube, walk across the table surface and vanish.. The game then begins again.

About this video

As yet unseen footage of the first stable version of levelHead, an augmented-reality spatial-memory game by Julian Oliver. Warning! This is a spoiler for the first 3 cubes: the easy Red Cube, the tricky Green Cube and the ridiculously difficult Orange Cube

levelHead has been designed and created by Julian Oliver who seems to be working with his SelectParks team on several interesting projects connecting art and technology in really creative ways.

C++ source code has been released under GPL license and is available online for everyone who wants to play this game and is brave enough to build it.

[via Vlado Hadzinski]