I went surfing through MIT’s Technology Review site and two pieces discussing SXSW caught my attention. The first is called “SXSW Day 5: Future of the Book: The $100 Laptop” (Link) and I thought it made a nice bookend to something I wrote earlier (reLink) which is related to some thoughts I had some time back (Link). I’m very much looking forward to hearing the end-user reviews of the OLPC computer. I’m still not on the bandwagon, but I do hope they prove skeptics like me wrong.
Continue reading →

Things have gotten a bit too cerebral around here lately, so I’m just going to post the above image of a sculpture by Pierre Matter and point you to where you can see more (Link 1, Link 2 – fwiw, second link is an ad-heavy site and you might not want to visit it). For fans of steampunk and biomechanical design, this stuff should inspire you.

via Boing Boing

{Image Copyright (c) Pierre Matter}

I was doing a bit of research into the state of today’s PLM (product lifecycle management) offerings and while there’s not been the kind of progress I’d hoped, there’s definitely a trend… toward services for small businesses. Among the services/applications, there’s UGS’s TeamCenter Community and PTC’s “PLM on Demand“. While not exactly “PLM”, the newly-announced Croquet-based Qwaq certainly provides some of those collaborative capabilities… in a three-dimensionally immersive, avatar-centric “virtual workplace”. And on the other end of the spectrum from Qwaq are services like WebEx which provide on-demand collaboration through more traditional means: voice, video, aso.
Continue reading →

Arcspace discusses/reviews (Link) a Frank Gehry installation at the Danish Architecture Centre. Of interest is the emphasis on the use of 3D applications to create and to collaborate on the famous architect’s curvateous designs; from digitizing models to structural engineering to client review. From the piece:

Digital Project [Suite], a new software that is simpler, more usable, and able to interface with other systems, was developed by Gehry Technologies to disseminate his Catia enabled design and construction methodologies to the rest of the world.

Continue reading →

There’s a neat video from Microsoft’s Techfest (Link) demonstrating some transreality technology that’s worth a peek. There are two parts to the video. The first is called “surface computing” and that basically deals with making commonplace surfaces “live”. The demo for one example of this shows a regular table top with some construction paper formed shapes sitting beneath an infra-red camera setup which is used to derive a heightmap. This information is then ported into a racing videogame where digital cars drive over representations of the shapes. The computer cars are themselves then projected onto the tabletop as they move. Everything is “live”, so if someone sticks their hand into the scene and moves the paper around, the videogame environment is modified in real time as well.
Continue reading →