Mobitrends

Release day today for VR-WEAR with a huge announce, we finally got OSX support in our RC3, and it works great (finally I don’t have to bootcamp under XP anymore to test-drive the software). For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, VR-WEAR has modified Second Life’s viewer to add support for your computer webcam and uses it to analyse your head motion and attitudes and paste them live on your avatar’s head.
More details on the release are available on sl.vr-wear.com along with the downloads URLs.

Just read this article from PO Carles and it’s really fun to see how so many people are heading in the same direction with different approaches.
Camtrax is using a webcam to detect objects in your hands and have you interact with the game through their motion.
Pros : only requires a webcam
Cons: You need to be far enough from the webcam (i.e. my Macbook webcam only sees the head not the upper body as i’m staying too close), it requires colored stuff to detect and track, it’s not really motion capture i.e. that won’t give you enough data to recreate a proper avatar motion.

Kapor has come up with a highly special webcam that can measure depth - I had a demo of this at CES 2008 and it really works great. Still you got to be staying a a distance from the cam but the motion capture is pretty good as it almost can see the body parts in 3D. Yet that requires a special hardware and an unnatural gaming position.

At VR-WEAR we are focusing on emotions and body language to give a soul to your avatar and as cajuntechie on Seesmic said “let people see a user through their avatar”. By using a simple webcam we analyze live the facial expression of the user, mouth, eyes, eyebrows and extract qualitative information about its attitude and map them on the avatars face. Webcam is cool for the facial language, but not for the rest of the body though. For that part we have some cool ideas but I won’t disclose them before 2009.

Re: VRW - SL Viewer mod - 0.99 beta 1 public release

Just read this note from Hank Williams where he reports the creation of a fund called nycseed and dedicated to seeding New-Yor tech entrepreneurs.

NYCSeed is literally for two guys in a garage. The requirements are two techies that live in New York City, and a compelling idea. The terms are fairly simple: a convertible note for $200,000 that ultimately gives them around 10% of the company. The note converts to equity when the next round closes.

I really find this idea brilliant, as some proof of concept phase *are* costly - that is when you’re going on hardware or highly technical grounds that require some heavy investments to be able to show decent prototype. Hope old Europe can come up with something similar some time soon, I’ve seen so many brilliant ideas wasted by entrepreneurs-to-be that got drawn away from their project due to bad seed practices ranging from business angles taking 50% of stake for 50k€ to VCs not really shaped to manage this kind of mini-deals.
I’m really looking forward to see their first deals and I hope they can demonstrate that seed funding makes sense (I guess it makes even more sense if you can keep on investing in the following rounds somehow…).

Release day again for the RC2 of our head motion analysis mod for the Second Life viewer. We reached RC2 which brings a lot more reliability to motion detection to RC1 mostly by introducing a camera calibration process. By waiting a few secs, the camera will analyze the environment around you and “erase” all the unnecessary stuff that might trick the shape recognition system thus reducing unwanted motions that might have occurred to you on previous versions when used in “noisy” environment.
Also this version adds an update checker, to let you know when we reach RC3!
You can grab RC2 on the download page. We also added to the seesmic user thread a getsatisfaction feedback module for those not feeling at ease with showing their face to the camera.

There will be a full wee of conferences being held on Orange Island in SL, here is the official flyer from the Orange Island blog.

Although I won’t disclose all the details, VR-WEAR and I (Ksso Yamauba as I’m known in SL) will be there on a couple of panels and showcasing its technology, hope you (my beloved readers) will join us there !

I’m totally excited, we just put live a dedicated website for our modified SL viewer at http://sl.vr-wear.com with the first public beta of our modified Second Life client that includes head analysis. It now features :

• Head motion Yes/No
• Head bending left/right
• Surprise detection
• Smile detection

Still a long way to go, and we’re taking the challenge step by step, but it’s great to see the feature list get longer and get the user feedback.
Again if you’re a signal processing expert and want to be part of a revolution that will turn puppet-like avatars into emotional selfs, get in touch with us !
We started a thread on seesmic to get feedback, download and try the software and join the conversation !

VRW - SL Viewer mod - 0.99 beta 1 public release

This is my holiday’s book - that I received home the day after I left (Ok, it costed me only 4€ but shipping from the US is so slow…) - and it’s developing a really interesting vision about the use of wearable computing in 2020s which is giving me a whole bunch of new ideas for VR-WEAR.

In the near future, the European Center for Defense against Disease discovers a diabolical pseudomimivirus. Rather than set off a panic, secret agents of the EU, Japan, and India work clandestinely to uncover a conspiracy seemingly based in a San Diego lab. Former poet Robert Gu, a recovering Alzheimer’s patient (one of the lucky few who took to all the treatments), returns to school just as agents Braun, Vaz, and Mitsuri put their wheels in motion. Immensely frustrated by simultaneously living with his son’s family and completely reeducating himself, Gu becomes a perfect dupe for the hacker hired by the gang of spooks. Under cover of a library protest, Gu and some old friends get into the lab, trailed by one of Gu’s adolescent classmates and his granddaughter. The conspiracy runs deep and has some terrifying implications on account of YGBM (you gotta believe me) technology, regardless of the conspirators’ intentions. The near future is less alien here than in some of Vinge’s other work, but no less fascinating and well constructed. Regina Schroeder