I could not resist this, we did not carve it in the end went for a more traditional look. Happy Halloween everyone.
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Evolver Avatar on the Iphone via Unity3d
It has been a busy week for travel and meetings this week. However in the gaps between pieces of work I have been exploring what I can do quickly and simply with the Iphone 3GS. I had been looking at the various 3d toolkits, doing model import by hand.
In the end it struck me as obvious to use unity3d iphone as this just takes away the underlying hassle.
Using unity3d it was very easy to bring things in such as my Evolver 3d model into an app and make it draggable and rotatable using touch. This took approximately 10 minutes to do. I spent more time wondering about the various particle effect parameters than anything else.
Obviously you can do a whole lot more, but it is a massive leap in productivity. It does not require any other strange contortions or going via windows in order to get a good 3d model in.
There are a few quirks in the tool chain but things like the Unity Remote application that lets you see whats going on via your Mac and streaming media from the iphone are great. (Hint if you cant get unity remote to compile and deploy just grab a version from the iphone store (lost a few minutes thinking about that!)
I know the hardcore techs will be saying you can build all this from the various bits, cocos, SIO2 etc but I have had to do that one to many times and I want to explore the ideas for applications rather than the guts of the platform.
Just having this in my hands and using it has created rather a long list of “I wonder if…” apps to create. Including using the touch interface to control some Opensim objects.
Using the Evolver Clone. Is that me?
Yet more experiments with Evolver. I tried using the single photo upload and then adjusting the regsitration points on the face. The result is interesting I think.
It was from this delightful glasses removed picture of my goodself. See what you think.
As an avatar augmentalist rather than a realist I think I prefer the more extreme cartoon or enhanced avatars to the photo real. I was getting a little bit of personal uncanny valley each time I try pasting my face into something. So I will stick with the previous AV for now.
Apply to become a TED Fellow @ TED2010!
I received this via eightbar and thought is worth posting
Ever dreamed of attending a TED Conference…of being around some of the world’s greatest minds and discussing the best technology, art, architecture, music, film, science, literature, etc? Are you innovative and want to meet with other people like you from around the world? Then apply to the TED Fellows program!
Apply online here: www.ted.com/fellows/apply.
Organizers of the TED Conference are searching for 25 promising Fellows from around the world to participate in TED2010. The TED Fellows program will accept applications for fellowships through September 25, 2009.
MORE INFO:
About the TED Fellows Program
The TED Fellows program is a new international fellowship program designed to nurture great ideas and help them spread around the world. This year, organizers will select 25 individuals from around the world to attend TED2010. At the end of the year, organizers will select 15 individuals from a pool of the TED and TEDGlobal Fellows to participate in an extended three-year Senior Fellowship, bringing them to six consecutive conferences. The principal goal of the program is to empower the Fellows to effectively communicate their work to the world.
Benefits
Benefits of the Fellowship include conference admission, round-trip transportation, housing and all meals. Fellows will also participate in a pre-conference with the opportunity to present a short talk for consideration for TED.com, elite skills-building courses taught by world experts, social opportunities and surprise extras. This is not a monetary Fellowship; the benefits are in-kind only.
Who we are looking for:
The program seeks remarkable thinkers and doers who have shown unusual accomplishment, exceptional courage, moral imagination and the potential to increase positive change in their respective fields. The program focuses on innovators in technology, entertainment, design, science, film, art, music, entrepreneurship and the NGO community, among other pursuits. The program targets individuals from the Asia/Pacific region, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle east, though anyone from anywhere in the world is welcome to apply. Applicants are generally between 21-40 years of age, though anyone over 18 and over 40 may apply. They must also be fluent in English.
Application process and more information:
All applicants must apply online at http://www.ted.com/fellows/apply. Information about TED is available at http://www.ted.com; and information about TED2010 is available at http://conferences.ted.com/TED2010/.
Please email fellows@ted.com if you have any questions, would like more information, if you’d like to nominate an extraordinary individual!
About TED:
TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader to include science, business, the arts and the global issues facing our world. The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes). Attendees have called it “the ultimate brain spa” and “a four-day journey into the future.” The diverse audience — CEOs, scientists, creatives, and philanthropists — is almost as extraordinary as the speakers, who have included Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Nandan Nilekani, Ashraf Ghani, Jane Goodall, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Sir Richard Branson, Stephen Hawking and Bono.
Painting with physics – Kinetic Sketch
AnnieOK just tweeted a link to this kinetic sketch web application. Its a Flash based application that the brushes are objects that are responding to one another and acting as physical simulations. i.e. a round brush rolls and square one will tip from its corner. In addition to simple physics like gravity there are lots of creativity settings for the trails that are left behind. You can even use live video (though on my Mac I had to tell flash to use the USB video class (a right click on the background and quick menu select in settings to sort that out) in order to get me as a brush. You can then post to multiple places such as I did here with going straight to Flickr (so its suitably social media aware as to be useful too 🙂 )
I still find the most basic of physics simulations interesting, as they used to be the things I wrote with my first computer (a ZX81) intertia, collisions and gravity even just in 2D have an organic feel to them. This though takes that even further with the painting aspects leaving a digital echo of the physical movements. Wonderful stuff IMHO.
I did a little extra with it that was not camera based.
It started to remind me of the recent Tate Modern show on the futurists that I went too.
It is interesting what those talented and revolutionary artists may have done back in 1911 with the technology we have today.
It also reminded me I had not blogged about the wonderful sculpture that I did not get a photo or postcard of by Umberto Boccioni (who also did the running man above) entitled “Development of a bottle in space”
This was a very striking piece but also one that looked more like prim twisting in Second Life than anything else I had seen.
Second Life behind the firewall
As I dont think the Linden blogs are very track back friendly I thought I would post my comment on the Second Life behind the firewall article here too, having had a small part in driving the demand that has led to this 🙂
I have to say that this is nothing but good news. Way back in the distant yonder when Roo and I sat there wondering how to get IBM into the industry we certainly by about day 2 realized how great it would be to also be able to run secure instances of something similar to the public grid. There was a great google video from about 4 years ago of Cory and Philip aluding to that direction.
The public SL grid has a massive role to play still, but, just as with the web, there really is no reason to have it all served out of one place. The resistance in the early days to us corporates turning up (even though it was unofficial to start off with) has in fact generated support for an industry that we can all enjoy in our own way.
Developers are able to go off and build new virtual world platforms and explore extending existing ones. Residents of SL are able to carry on being who they are and who they want to be, company employees are able to explore ways of better, richer and quite frankly more enjoyable communication at distance.
Second Life has sparked many directions, the open source movement with opensim, other providers with products to help in other sectors.
There is plenty of room for every application and every personal need for many of these ways of interacting. We often get caught by the real world analogy of a single planet working a single way but we have a chance to explore a whole new set of ways to interact, for grids to interact, to augmenting real world with virtual information. The list goes on.
SL is evolving, peoples expectations of a virtual world are evolving. We are moving from “why bother?” to “can we?”. As soon as the “can we?” deman arrives that brings change and innovation.
How this all is structured at the moment clearly is not the end of the journey. We have not solved every technical, social and philisophical puzzle, but we have opened up many people eyes.
I am really looking forward to seeing where we all take this.
Rednosin, Chinposin for Comic Relief
The rednosin twitter account made me aware of the excellent addition to the comic relief donation options. That of buying a digital rednose picture. Whilst many of us can bolt a red nose onto a picture that is not the point. The ability donate and join in with the excellent charity that is Comic relief is something we should all do. We use avatar pictures all over the place and you will see twitter full of them next few days.
Check out Rednosin Chinposin so see more.
So what are you waiting for! It works for Graham Norton, Chris Moyles or who ever comes up in this picture from the website :0)
