This is worth a post. I just saw mention of a Nintendo “Revolution Mock-Up” concept video being hosted over on the IGN website (Link). Check it out.

Took me a few minutes to figure out, but I believe what they’re presenting is a concept for a wirelessly-networked VR headset with docking station. The headset is nice and has some funky “surround sound” geometry near the ears. But the docking station “brain” isn’t so nice and looks like either the top of someone’s skull, a helmet of some kind or some odd little toaster appliance. Makes me wonder if the same person designed both.

The Toaster Brain can, from what I gathered watching the video a few times, communicate with other game consoles but also communicate wirelessly with the headset so that the game player might be able to use his/her room as a kind of holodeck. So for example, it appears as if you could connect a Game Cube to the Toaster Brain. The Toaster Brain would relay game data to the headset. The headset would then communicate back to the Game Cube via the Toaster Brain that little Johnny has just fallen out the second floor window while attempting to rocket jump off his bed.

And btw, the Toaster Brain can also play games locally and “make games” as well (whatever that’s supposed to mean).

While it’s neat to see ideas like this, even if they never go beyond vaporware, what I really now find myself wondering is if the problem with vr-sickness has been resolved (I vaguely recall that being the reason – directly or indirectly – for the quick death of the Virtual Boy some years back). Something to research.

{Update – My bust. It appears as if this “concept” was shown last May and is actually the work of a Nintendo fan. If only the ign page had a more obvious link to their story (Link) – maybe they have an opening for a UI/web designer. This almost feels like a Jamie Kennedy stunt. Guess I’ll have to think twice before posting after midnight. Now excuse me while I shower the egg off.}

{Image source: ign.com}

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