Via an entry over on Clickable Culture comes word of an update of sorts to the HijackGL tool I used earlier to capture data from a videostream and convert it to solid data (Link). It appears that the folks at Eyebeam OpenLab, inspired by HijackGL, have created their own opensource videostream ripper called OpenGLExtractor (Link). Nice.

From the sample images they show taken from the virtual world Second Life (picLink), it appears as if they’ve corrected some issues HijackGL had with capturing prim geometry. I’ll have to give this a try. I’ve been hoping someone would finish off what the guys behind HijackGL started, so this is a nice development.

Also happy to read they intend to release a Maya plug-in for Google Earth’s format. I happened to go looking for one yesterday and was disappointed at the current options available.

And one last thing, given this news, I should probably point to a recent entry (Link) outlining a next-gen solution we might see that builds on this (maybe from these guys). If they can pull the normal map out of the videocard’s cache, with the right tools, you’ve got some nicely detailed models.

Via dezain.net I ventured over to MoCo Loco to see some photo coverage of the IMM Cologne fair (here’s that Link). What (of course) caught my attention was the work put on display by the folks at Materialise; the above image in particular. Nice close-up showing the layering of the rp material.

But that’s not all folks! I decided to browse to MoCo Loco’s continuing coverage (Link) and read this little bit:

Says Gimena, “The guys from Freedom of Creation (FOC) had a very nice bag made using rapid prototyping… what’s new about it is that it’s plated in silver, so it feels like real metal.”

The above image is one of three showing Freedom of Creation’s silver-plated, rapid-prototyped handbags.

Damn. Metal-plated, rapid-prototyped product. It must cost a fortune to make those things.

Y’know, it’s hard not feeling jealous right now.

{Image source: MoCo Loco}

Big development in the MSM market. It appears CBS and Time Warner are taking UPN and the WB offline and merging the two into a new, more efficient network (The “CW”?). From the Yahoo!-Reuters article (Link):

UPN and the WB, both formed 11 years ago, have each struggled to build their ratings and achieve profitability with programming aimed at younger viewers than the 18-to-49-year-old audience regarded as the advertising preference for the Big Four broadcasters — ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox.

The merger comes as the most obvious sign yet that the increasingly fragmented U.S. television market is incapable of supporting as many as six commercial networks.

“Five might be one broadcast network too many,” said Bob Thompson, head of Syracuse University’s Center for the Study of Popular Television.

I don’t know. Unless the networks find ways to connect with the younger demographic they’re chasing (and which isn’t getting any younger), I’m not sure if the market – in it’s current form – will even exist in the coming years. They’re going to have to change. Combining “Gilmore Girls” with “Everybody Hates Chris” isn’t going to be enough, in my opinion.

Well, I’ve tried to stay mostly outside the social spaces that are forming online everywhere because a) I wanted to stay objective as I watch them develop and b) I wanted to pick the right one (or two) so that I avoided duplicity. If people reading this are like me, they have far too many email accounts with which to deal. The explosion in these mostly-cloistered networks (sounds like a contradiction in terms) seems like another potential “account juggling act” in the making; I’m visualizing all these networks as outdated spaghetti code. Not good. However the first enticement was a combination of an old invite from CBC columnist and friend Sue Braiden and a recent, irresistable topic thread over on Omidyar.net. Those two together finally got me to finally join the network late last week. And now, having received an invitation from long-time design accomplice and fellow alum Anthony DeMore to join his online network at LinkedIn, I succumbed.

Maybe this isn’t a bad thing. Might be time to see how things operate from the inside. Now where’s the fire alarm (just joking).

Instead of drowning the comment section of Wonderland’s entry (Link) about the television show Lost and its link to videogames, I thought I’d post my comment here and use the trackback feature appropriately. So, in response to Jez’s comment, here goes:

I’m familiar with the alternate reality gaming aspect of Lost. I posted my original thought the morning of May 26th (Link). The ARGN website posted news of the ARG side of Lost the evening of that same day. I saw their post the next morning and posted an entry regarding it afterward (reLink).

But ARGN news doesn’t go into the possibility of the show actually being about or taking place inside a videogame; only about it having a component that’s invaded ViewerSpace as a game.

Early on, like most viewers, I thought the show’s characters were in Purgatory. But after reading an interview of someone involved in the show wherein they effectively discounted the Purgatory theory when they said all the happenings (the “monster” that kills the pilot, the polar bear showing up, aso) had plausible explanations, I got to thinking about the ways in which what we were watching might make sense. That’s what prompted my original post that Lost might be a show happening inside a MMORPG.

Maybe television viewers are in Spectator mode and watching actors/players and NPC’s in a virtual game world. It’s just that no one’s told us! It’d be like accidently walking into an arena full of video feeds (or maybe one of Mark Cuban’s digital theaters) and watching a CPL championship for a MMORPG that looks entirely realistic (the future of gaming/television/entertainment???).

In this case, maybe in the “story” – assuming there even is one – the characters are actually on the Oceanic flight and hooked into a videogame to help pass the time (trans-Pacific flights can be killer). Their activities in the game might be other people’s entertainment, broadcast from the plane and reaching “viewers” everywhere; nice way to get productivity out of idle travelers and people might actually receive compensation or discounted airfares in the future for just this sort of “work” (I’ve previously gotten into the blurring definitions of “work” and “play” on this and other blogs).

The show 24 portends to air hourly segments of simulated realtime, but Lost might actually be stretching out gametime to fit the “really real” time of ViewerSpace. An entire season in the television show’s ViewerSpace realtime might only be a few hours in the show’s Character/Player’s flighttime. And that time is itself distorted when the Characters/Players enter the simulated world of the MMORPG.

If you start looking at the possibilities of what this could be and what it suggests, my entry (reLink) discussing Peter Molyneux’s virtualspace experiment “The Room” might make more sense. It’s also the reason I post about Lost on this blog, because I came to see it as related to the topics I cover here.