Another video that I would rate under the term Augmented Reality concept videos.
In this video
A strange man uses holographic tools to build a world for the woman he loves. This is a short by filmmaker Bruce Branit……
See the following YouTube video or the WebSite of Bruce Branit.
I am fascinated by concept videos based on augmented reality by mixing real and virtual environments.
They are a real good basis to prototype future scenarios for augmented reality applications.
An application for advertising a game in a different way can be found at the announcement of “The Settlers 7″.
See the following video on YouTube or the relevant WebSite of the Game: The Settlers 7.
It is very interesting to see that projects like 80days are on the way as path-finding research initiatives of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research and technological development (FP7) to explore new frontiers in Digital Educational Games (DEGs), which combine effective learning with fun and pleasure.
The project description can be found on the relevant project WebSites as follows:
This project is a successor of the ELEKTRA project. 80Days is running for 2,5 years from April 2008 until September 2010. The project focusses on game-based learning and it is coordinated by CSS.
Recreational computer games are overwhelmingly popular. Hence, there is no doubt that educational games, which combine effective learning with fun and pleasure, are a desirable vision. Still, educational games, which can compete with their non-educational counterparts in terms of narrative and gaming quality, have not yet entered the market – especially those for children who are used to the quality of computer games. The main reason is the difficulty in merging both game and educational environments. To cross today’s horizon of educational games, a scientifically sound and valid methodological and technological foundation is required. Grounding on this mission, 80Days is a RTD project concerned with theories, methodologies, and technologies for game-based learning. To accomplish a significant step towards successful and effective educational games, 80Days is addressing the following two main objectives: First, integrating models of adaptive personalised learning with those of adaptive interactive storytelling, and second, merging virtual game environments with existing learning resources, thus reducing development costs and time. These fusions will result in an adaptive and responsive system, enabling the understanding of active learning processes within a virtual learning environment, adapting to individual needs and abilities, and therefore fully exploiting the learners’ capabilities. The quality of this approach will be assured by evaluation activities based on theoretically and empirically sound methods. 80Days entails the smooth integration of interdisciplinary work (learning science, storytelling, game and didactic design, game development, and human-computer interaction). 80Days delivers an innovative and advanced methodological and technological framework for effectively developing successful educational games to be demonstrated by a geography game prototype realising gaming/learning scenarios inspired by Jules Verne’s “Around the world in eighty days”.
For further information on this project see:
futurezone.orf.at-13.11.2007 (Report in german language)-
Ästhetik und Effizienz der “Demoscene”
Mit dem ersten “Demoscene Meeting0001″ am Donnerstag, dem 15. November setzt das Team [d]vision den Auftakt für eine monatliche Veranstaltungsreihe zur digitalen Kunst.
Anders als gerenderte, also fertig berechnete Animationen erzeugen die “Demos” - gerade einmal 64 KB große Programme - bis zu 15-minütige Bild- Ton-Sequenzen, die bei der Vorführung in Echtzeit Pixel für Pixel errechnet werden.
Some links:
[D]vision
Kostas Pataridis aka Navis
Demos of Andromeda Software
As each year also 2007 it is time for the very interesting Prix Ars Electronica and the Ars Electronica Festival.
Prix Ars Electronica (PrixArs):
The Prixars is the most interesting competion for international cyberarts. It serves since 20 years as an interdisciplinary platform for everyone who uses the computer as a universal medium for implementing and designing creative projects at the interface of art, technology and society. The Prix Ars Electronica calls for entries and awards prizes in the seven categories. The winners are awarded a Golden Nica and a certain amount of cash prizes.
“Goodbye Privacy” is the theme of this year’s Ars Electronica, the festival extraordinaire of art, technology and society in Linz, Austria. For a week the focus will be on these late-breaking phenomena of a new culture of everyday life being played out between angst-inducing scenarios of seamless surveillance and the zest we bring to staging our public personas via digital media.
Also during this time the Visualized Linzer Klangwolke (Cloud of Sound) takes place:
This years theme “Six Tales of Time”.
The 2007 Klangwolke is an account of six human inventions that have led to the world growing from a place of small villages to one of megalopolises and, as a result of growing interconnection in worldwide networks, developing further into a “global village.”
On a second narrative level, this production tells of six human lives on six different continents, lives of people that, in a mysterious way, are linked together with one another. The mise en scène integrates the audience, the Danube and adjacent buildings
So as each year I follow this event with big interest. Due to lack of time just from distance, but let us see next year.
If you don´t have seen it yet also see the Ars Electronica Center.
Motion Capture technology is what is used in the Industry in order to reproduce “real” movements with 3D puppets/characters. Also our well known 3D anmation software Blender can import easily .bvh files. Thankfully the “feeblemind” Blender blog has created a nice little tutorial on how to use certain motion capture animations inside Blender. The tutorial also gives links to multiple sites where motion capture can be downloaded for free as motion capture systems are very expensive, which means far too expensive for the hobbyist.
As a final note it provides a link to Skinny, an automatic mesh generation, rigging and UV mapping from armatures. This could have funny uses with the Import BVH script if one does not have a fully rigged character at hand.
If you are interested in further scientific issues of motion, see The Biomotion Lab which is working on several aspects of visual perception and cognition. Their major interest is focused on questions concerning the biology and psychology of social recognition. A nice demo is for example the BMLwalker who shows in an interactive way that biological motion contains information about sex, weight, emotional state and personality traits.
I am at the moment evaluating Blender for use in technical visualisation. There are a lot of areas I could imagine its application. A very interesting possibility which is integrated in Blender is the possibility of fluid simulation. I have not done trials yet,
but there are ideas to use it perhaps for oil, fuel, coolant system simulation.
A good source on scientific publications on this topic can be found on the homepage of Nils Thuerey.
Vienna. Today the first public accessible Blender Training took place in Vienna. Karl Kühberger an experienced blender user and artist gave first basics in blender modeling to the very interested and enthusiastic blender “students”. Blender showed quite impressive its functionality for modeling,rendering,animation,post-production, creation and playback of interactive 3D content. Some additional links and interesting resources on blender we were informed on and can be found on:
http://de.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender (Blender Wiki german)
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Main_Page (Blender Wiki english)
http://www.katorlegaz.com/3d_models/index.php (free Blender-models)
http://mayang.com/textures (free textures)
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=24038 (free sky and angular maps)
http://yorik.orgfree.com (Brazilian architect showing the power of Blender in architecture)
http://thoro.de/portfolio/blender/index.html (German Blender Artist and Software Developper using Blender for some work)
http://repository.parastudios.de (Open Material Repository)
http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/gallery/images/ (Blender Image Gallery)
http://projects.blender.org/projects/makeh/ (creating 3D humanoid models)
On my regular trip to blendernation news page i cmae across PlaneShift. This sounds to get a nice project. And nice it is also a free and open source MMORPG under heavy development.
PlaneShift is a cross-platform fantasy MMORPG in development. Client software is available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. It is produced by a developer community, founded by Luca Pancallo, and guided by the Atomic Blue non-profit organization. The engine code is based on the Crystal Space engine and therefore free software. The content is released under another license.
Will look into this MMORPG wat is in this world of playing.
