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}

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).