Mobitrends

That’s an extreme approach to immersive gaming – my wife’s never gonna allow this in our living room …. This concept is called the “Cocoon” and although I really do not expect this to happen ever, I’d love to have my personal 360º personal Imax dome . YEt I think the concept is only halfway – gaming is not just about visual immersion, it’s also about physical interaction and sensitive feedback. I also wonder if they can create 3D images there…

Source CNN.com

If you’re a virtual world fan, you can’t have missed the latest Microsoft announcement regarding the Xbox 360 Dashboard upgrade featuring 3D avatars and an online social world… Here’s a sneak peek video to get an idea of how it’s gonna be:

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.

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

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.

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

I discovered this place while browsing latests bookmarks on sl-messenger, and this place discovered by Lapsus Weinstein really caught my attention, it’s the nicest idea I’ve seen on SL for a long time, taking back iconic paintings and recreating the original place. So nice !

There is something that I’ve been missing in Second Life for quite some time now… Have you noticed how impersonal the avatars are in SL ? They move through mechanical gestures with no real link to what the person behind it is really doing. I gave a few keynotes inworld and it’s really a pain to see that as a speaker your body language and your attitude just don’t reflect at all your words. As body languages transmits so many useful information which are currently lost when in SL, I though it was time to act.
The VR-WEAR team has been working for a couple of months on integrating cool signal processing abilities to the SL client which is now able to connect to your computer’s camera and analyze your head motions in real-time.
Below is a short demo video of tracking my head moving “Yes/No”. We’ll be releasing in September a full load of cool emotions/motions filter that will give your SL avatar a more human look.
This project will be released under a dual license (GPL-like for non-commercial applications) – so if you have some mad skills that you think could be useful and want to give us a hand, don’t hesitate !

In a few minutes, there’s going to be a FULL solar Eclipse starting in China, and on top of that exceptional event, I’m amazed by the quality of the coverage made by Exploratorium.edu. Online web TV, SL islands, high quality live video feeds – first time I see such a professional multi-medias coverage Online, this is almost as exciting as the Eclipse itself ! HAving a great time inworld with tons of SL residents watching the coverage, teleport to join me!

I have ben watching Unity3D game engine for quite some time – I always thought it was going to be worthy but not ready yet for production. I guess time has changed. Just after a conf’call I had this afternoon I got back for a test-drive of Unity3D game engine and really had that striking “wow!” effect : the unity 3d guys just made wonders.
Unity3D comes as a light plugin to your navigator (4.4Mb for Safari/OSX) and renders wonderful 3D scenes in a glimpse – the loading and the rendering was so fast that I firstly thought it was playing a movie… This can make awesome 3D scenes way above whatever you can see on SL, Lively or Virtools… Check it out !
The engine is multiplatform (including iPhone and Wii).
The software also includes an impressive physics engine – another awesome WOW effect … really can’t wait to see production applications based on this.