After a disappointing BusinessWeek article about advertising and videogames, I found something more interesting over on News.com. From their article (Link):

An Internet game akin to “Where’s Waldo?” for tracing the movement of dollar bills has helped scientists develop a statistical model for predicting the spread of an epidemic in this country.

Researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self Organization have used the Web game “Where’s George?,” which monitors the geographic circulation of dollar bills by their serial numbers, to forecast how a virus would spread from human to human.

The physicists based their research on the idea that like viruses, money is transported by people from place to place.

This sounds familiar.

Just thought I’d share the results of my first test capturing prim geometry data from the Second Life video stream. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out my earlier post (Link).

The above is something I modeled inside Second Life which I was hoping to someday fabricate; a kind of light sculpture. I’d done sketches years ago and while browsing through some sketchbooks last year, rediscovered it. Doesn’t look like much since it’s just raw triangle data, but it imported into Maya cleanly (better than the rocket parts) and I don’t have any doubt I could take that into Pro/ENGINEER.

Now for the bad news. So far I’ve not succeeded at capturing a model from Doom3. I suspect it’s the Vertex Programming that has apparently caused some other problems with users attempting to capture geometry, but until I spend more time with it, I won’t know if the solution suggested works for me. However, this tool is grabbing the normalmaps, which is excellent. I’ve not checked to see if it’s also logging the uv map needed to allow someone to properly associate the normalmap with the geometry file (I have a bad feeling about that actually), but hopefully it does have something. More later.

A lot of people have been waiting for this:

By using a laser foot scanner to create a 3D computer model of a person’s feet, the ERGOSHOE system bridges the design gap between shoe manufacturers and customers, allowing shoe comfort to be improved efficiently and at relatively low cost in the mass market, and in niche markets such as healthcare and worker footwear.

That comes via an entry over on Core77 (Link). It also puts a spin on what Nike has been doing with their Nike iD program (see my earlier post – Link). Now this is the kind of convergence I’m thinking about.

When I saw the headline, “Avatars Among Us” (Link), I thought Wired was carrying a story about what I blogged yesterday (Link). Wrong. It’s about something I blogged last week (Link). Nice story though.

via Blue’s News

When I first saw screen images for Seed, a forthcoming MMORPG, I was intrigued; it has a visual style I like. So I signed up on the forums and tried to get into the beta. Only their registration system was fubar. Since then I’ve noticed it’s been fixed, but to be honest, that little mistake has me thinking I probably shouldn’t bother with a beta. I’m busy enough as it is without trying to help some company ready a game for production.

I’m not sure about the game itself anyway, but for now it’s just eye candy. So when Blue’s News reported yesterday that there were some video clips posted, I took a peak (Link). Okay, the videos are kinda rough as well. But I still like the look.

{Image Copyright © 2006 Runestone Game Development}