Earlier this week I received an email from Michael Frumin, R&D Technical Director at Eyebeam Openlab and the man responsible for the OGLE geometry capture utility. Turns out he’d managed to map textures onto captured geometry. Unfortunately, the sample he sent was a Maya 6.5 file and I’m on 5.0.1. No joy.

Well, he’s just sent word that there’s now an update to OGLE (Link). Those of us so inclined can give it a try. It’s not automatic, but it hopefully it won’t be too difficult to get that Doom3 sentry bot (reLink) mapped and displaced. Now I just have to map out some time…

From UGS’s Monday press release (Link):

Tecnomatix 7.6 leverages a natural extension of the Teamcenter PLM backbone, enabling tight collaboration across the design/build process where manufacturing and design engineers can create and plan production processes concurrent with product design. Moreover, with Tecnomatix 7.6 manufacturers can virtually create, plan, validate and execute production processes, for workcells, machines, production lines and entire plants before purchasing and commissioning a single piece of physical equipment.”
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Extending the knowledge capture, management and distribution features of Teamcenter into process planning and the production environment provides a virtual ‘manufacturing backbone’ to support the world-class functionality of Tecnomatix.
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The result is a more complete PLM solution that shares data models between product and process design and manufacturing execution with feedback loops that facilitate continuous process improvement and support global innovation networks.

If you’re familiar with the robot factory in The Sims, this starts to sound like that kind of capability. Only the robots on the screen are getting built in some factory … somewhere. Parts of it may even be fabbed. Continue reading →

I’ve more or less ignored the recent news regarding Cyworld U.S. I suspect that’s because I’m interested in 3D environments – or potential 3D environments. That would explain my interest in Hive7 (reLink) even though it’s currently only a 2D space and not even an isometric.

Fortunately, Mashable has an excellent post discussing Cyworld U.S. (Link). Thank you, Pete.

For a little background, Wired News had a nice article last Fall (Link).

Via Wired News (Link):

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt … said. “We now have a solution that we believe enables advertisers to offer a digital product on the Web so that when people click on it, through a credit-card mechanism, it is automatically taken care of.”
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Matt McMahon, vice president of marketing services for Fathom Online … it would give a previously unknown advertiser a look at what could be seen as a Google seal of approval. “By using the quality of another company’s brand name, you get clout,” he says. “Buys on the web are anonymous, so they need that trust.”

Something new to which I should give some thought. On the surface everything looks good for the little guy … until someone figures out how to manipulate the system.

WorldChanging.com has posted notice (Link) that “the European Space Agency has kicked off a competition, open to students at European universities specializing in aeronautics and/or space technologies, asking them to come up with a design plan for a UAV best suited for exploring the planet Mars.” How cool is that?

A shame it excludes people. Other European students … other Europeans, period. That makes no sense to me.