November 22, 2006
Darryl Revok: ConSec had hardware & contacts. Keller could see the future.
Cameron Vale: The future? You murdered the future.
Darryl Revok: That’s negative, Cam. Defeatist. You’re starting to sound like them.
- Scanners
Industrial Research has developed a hand-held 3D scanner that quickly creates realistic 3D models of crime scenes, movie sets and large objects, reports New Zealand’s Stuff. The Scene-scanner, developed with advice from another company, Right Hemisphere, can be waved over a scene or object like a can of spray paint, going slowly over areas of interest to create high-resolution images, and quickly over other areas to create a rough picture.
The scanner, still a prototype, uses a digital camera coupled with an on-board laser to calculate the distance between the object and scanner, cross-referencing readings with targets that are placed around the scene to tell it where it is in the room. It’s apparently something like Vexcel’s D-Cam, used by Microsoft’s Virtual Earth to create digital image overlays. Simple 3D lists other 3D scanners often used in product design and the movie industry.
The scan can be rendered on a computer while it is under way, letting the user decide whether to go into greater detail, or redo parts of it.
 The end result is a 3D computer image, true to colour and texture, that can be rotated or used to create “fly-throughs'’ of a room.
The scan of the mannequin (right) consists of more than one million geospatial data points mapped to digital photos.
It took about two minutes to produce. Other 3D scanners are either built for imaging small models or are fixed in place, meaning they must be repositioned several times to scan large objects. The Scene-scanner will be the first that can be moved freely around an object or room to get into nooks and crannies, Industrial Research says.
The goal is to sell the scanner internationally, but it is still two years away from market. The prototype needs to be wired to the computer that renders the 3D image, but the finished product will be wireless.
Meanwhile, motion tracking is now thoughly embedded in movie and commercial production with 3D models (mostly) impossible to distinguish from reality.
Motion Capture is moving beyond the Vicon system (with markers on the face), to paint on skin. Image Metrics is working with Rockstar Games, to provide their patented marker-less, computer vision technology to incorporate performance driven facial animations in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories (for the PSP) and Bully (with a hot kissing scene).
 Maya software pioneered powerful, integrated 3D modeling, along with animation, and rendering for film, television, games and design visualization. Z Brush works like clay model building while Boujou enables fast and robust automatic tracking and Realviz tracks dots on the body. Apple’s Motion for Final Cut lets you play back, move, and resize video layers and even lets you assign parameter behaviors to MIDI knobs and faders. Stray Cinema is an online community where you are able to download and re-edit the raw footage from a film.
Alex Lindsey of Pixel Corps produces two terrific podcasts; The Effects Show and This Week in Media. It’s an insider’s view of the industry, focusing on the latest technologies used in movie-making.
How long until point and shoots include laser scanners for creating 3D models of your loved ones for 2nd Life? Maybe sooner than later.
Just ask Ray Kurzweil.
|
unmediated.av:
The Weekly Show
drawing from extrastruggle.
We've been having a back channel conversation amongst the trackers at unmediated about how/whether to update the way in which we aggregate, present, and make useable the content on the site, in light of all the various aggregators, digg and its clones, and role model group blog sites that we all consume/use/hate/love. Since we all primarily support open media movements and the freedom of bits and so forth, and with all of us being busy with our primary projects, we are looking for ways to make getting content on the site easier and more streamlined, while making it obvious that we are presenting other sources content. With the availability of open API's for just about any type of media aggegration literally getting past the saturation point, and mashups taking every possible form, we are wondering, is it time to take a step back, or a step forward with how/what we do at umediated? In the course of my surfing today, i found this new site, Boxxet Which just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in how we all perceive the current mix and match nature of the web as it now stands. What's different about Boxxet from other aggregators and mashups like the newest entry popurls, (which aggregates digg, slashdot, reddit, newsvine, tailrank, and flickr) is that Boxxet is a Website generator. Thats right, just pop in all the urls u want to aggregate (and WHAT from them) choose how u want to format it, plug in the url that u want it to be accessed at... and whammo: Your own site with everyone elses content, and all thats left to do is decide whether googleplex or yahooza is going to be the source of your linklove revenue. And if u have on older domain that u plug this into...well, we all know how the pageranking with search engines work by now. It used to be that u had to have a bit of code knowledge to make all this stuff work. Eyebeam's Re-blog engine which powers this site was not a simple undertaking at the time that Michael Frumin and Michael Migurski put it all together... a half a year before Marc Broadband-mechanicked the term Reblog as his latest buzzword before casting his attention on the ourmedia-meme. (kudo's, kudo's) But now, with the cut and paste mentality of webculture that we at unmediated have helped create, the pace at which people are remixing and repurposing code is accelerating at a rate similar to the curve that we saw with pro-sumer desktop video... almost anyone can do it. I have this sinking feeling in my gut that we will arrive sooner than later at the same existential threshold that the film studios and record labels are squirming under to our joyful cries of "die, dinosaurs, die!". What i am wondering, is how long until my hero of the open-information movement, Cory Doctorow, and the rest of our pals at BB will tolerate re-aggregation and repurposing of his content, (now that he is investing so much more time at the site) before he (or any of one us) screams, "FOUL!" Stewart Butterfield over at Flickr is dealing with this beast at the moment...and i have to admire the dryness with which he states, "I loaded the FlickrCentral pool and firefox got up to using 240mb of ram before dying. So that's not a great user experience, but it's really terrible for Flickr. If it catches on and you don't limit it, we'll have to cut you off :\" Sure, Stewart, blame it on the user experience and firefox. ;) I admire your candor, and personal attention/approach to what has become one of the hottest new BRANDS in Web 2.0 ...that u still have time to be personal and all flickr-fuzzy even after being acquired, but I am sure that your jeans feel like they're fitting a bit tighter all of a sudden. Pretty soon, I expect, a lot of us bell-bottomed infornistas are going to wake up in a similar pair of Jordaches. I'm curious which of us will cut the inseams and sew in another totally different material to keep our style,and which of us will claim that now that we're wearing skintight jeans ("they're really really comfortable...REALLY! You think i should get a pair of Reeboks to go with 'em?"), that the manufacture of bell-bottoms should be forbidden. I point this all out in good humour only to illustrate a point: The times, they are('nt) a changin'>, and Cory just might wake up one day soon in his magic kingdom, and say "Hey, man, where'd all my whuffie go? And he's going to have no choice but to join Walt's pinstripesuits in pushing for copyright extension. It's a pill i hope he (and we) never have to swallow. So i pose the question to our community readers: How do you see unmediated-Are we crossing the boundaries in how we repurpose content? Would you like to see more editorializing? Narrower/Broader scope? Are we a repository of information that you come back to use, or just part of your daily information addiction? Let us know... I, for one, would like to have an idea about what pair of jeans to wear this year ;) michael
Featured Project
Berkeley Conference: Online Video and the Future of Television - Friday, September 30, 2005
This one-day conference brings together archivists, educators, technologists, entrepreneurs, producers, legal experts, and investors to explore the enormous promise offered by the availability of online video and television content. Demonstrations and interactive panel discussions will highlight new video technologies, services, legal issues, and economic models. Participants from diverse – and until now, largely disconnected – specialties will be especially encouraged to interact.
del.icio.us/tag/unmediated
[+]
About unmediated
unmediated is a group blog that tracks the tools, processes,
and ideas being used to decentralize media production and distribution.
|
flickr/tag/
citizenmedia
[+]
|
