Mobitrends

Dassault System, the editor of Solidworks, one of the reference software for 3D modeling just announced a new platform, Post3D, letting you collaborate in a virtual environment to discuss the design of an object created using solidworks. In the past I’ve covered such used cases on Second Life, but one of the pain point, aside from the non-enterprise-friendliness of Second Life, was that you had to actually redesign your object with SL’s tools inworld. Here the feature is incorporated within the production chain in a very fluid and clever way.

Check out the video below for a sneak peek.

One of my previous projects, VR-WEAR, died 2 years ago. Financing of the prototyping phase failed  - happens, was the crisis and anyways the prototype was still expensive and probably a bit to in advance… For those who don’t remember the idea was to create a set of virtual reality devices enabling strong engagement in video-games both enabling immersion and interaction with sensors monitoring facial expression, eyeballs motions and body language. We built proof of concepts of the headsets and the glove and bound the sensors to Second Life enhancing the avatars with their puppet masters body language.

This year at CES2011 are showing that the vision I had still lives – and we’re getting closer and closer :

1. Microsoft announced that “Avatar Kinect” is coming to the Xbox 360 and will apparently be a place where you can virtually hang out with your “friends” using the ability for Kinect to detect facial gestures like eyebrows, smiles, and laughs.
2. Sony unveiled a crazy 3D prototype of Head Mounted Display  with 720p OLED displays and 5.1 sounds (no price nor release date)

This is something that has been cooking since Linden Lab’s 2008 partnership with IBM : an appliance for an Enterprise version of Second Life. The price is a bit hefty, 55KUSD, but for corporation with many remote locations who recognize the value of Virtual World to organize live meetings without the need of actually having people fly to a same spot, this is going to be a good value for money. The only drawback is that it still requires a 3D video card in your laptop to render somehow nicely (read, LL, please do invest more in your viewer!).

I hope F-Secure will try this soon, since this would definitely help save on plane fares and phone bills !

If you’re a corporation and you’re wondering what Virtual World could bring to internal communication processes, I suggest you read Thinkbalm’s reports on the topic who are more than insightful (I’ve been myself a contributor to some).

Orange Island has been one of the livest place in Second Life for the past couple of years. With high-level conferences and events the highland was really showing how SL can be used by a company to create and distribute a corporate image in virtual worlds. I had the chance to be part of a few panels as a former SL resident (yeah Linden Labs killed my account and dropped ALL my inventory – suckers !!!).
I guess this just stresses the fact that SL has not been evolving for years now and that the enthusiasm around this platform is stating to fade, while real corporate use-cases start at last to emerge.

Total Imersion and Mattel just released the game cards for the new Avatar movie. This is probably the first full-scale implementation of Total Immersion’s augmented reality technology in a mass market consumer product. They had this amazing demos for years with Pokemon cards fighting one-another.
Congratulations, hope this will be the first of many successful consumer products for them!

Technologyreview has a nice cover of this week’s Siggraph 2009.
One innovative interface that really caught my attention is this work from INRIA merging camera analysis for precise motion detection and a HMD for full immersion. Results are stunning but as they say “A cluster of PCs is needed to perform the necessary image capture and 3D modeling”.
Indeed, camera processing is always a pain, as at VR-WEAR we developed a mod to the Second Life viewer using the webcam to analyse the user’s facial expression and paste it to his avatar, we witnessed some serious processing power trouble between our algorithms and the already ultra CPU-savvy Second Life browser. Anyway, can’t wait for these things to get mainstream and maybe game consoles such as Xbox 360′s Natal project will give enough power to let the mass market experience this level of interaction.

This is my networker of a wife’s dream, being able to tell in a public place who’s who by just firing your phone (and thus saving you the hassle of asking the waiter to investigate….
Pretty nice concept video (all fake) but illustrating brilliantly the idea.

Thinkbalm is probably the most interesting analyst group I’ve seen on the Immersive Internet field. They just released a Machinima where they present a lot of data on the status of Immersive Internet for Businesses in a very unique way. While the video might be a bit long for the web (9mins) it’s really inspiring!