Researchers at IBM Zurich Research Laboratory claim a novel approach to accessing patient medical records — using the human body as the 3D framework in the same way that Google Earth uses the Earth as a framework to fuse and navigate geospatial information. Spin the body, click on a body part, and zoom in closer to get more information.
Australian Centre for Visual Technologies | VideoTrace: Rapid interactive scene modelling from video
The Video Trace system isn’t completely automatic. It requires a modeler to mark the boundaries of surfaces in at least a few frames of video. But it does seem extremely fast and well-integrated.
This isn’t quite ready to turn, say, Google’s Street View photos or video into 3D models just yet, but it’s close. Once the system can infer surfaces without human intervention, perhaps only requiring people to go in and fix mistakes, it might be ready to scale up to cities. Right now, it would still be too labor intensive. But it’s impressive nonetheless.
I tried linking the video here, but it’s being difficult. Click the link above for an interesting demo of their approach.
If you read RealityPrime, you probably already have a good idea of the actual connection between Snow Crash and Google Earth. But if you read any of the other blog entries about the intriguing Arizona State University beta test without also coming here, you might have been lead astray on at least one key point.
So I’d like to be as clear as possible about the role Snow Crash played for Google Earth. I’ve also modified the old post on my personal blog to reflect this added clarity for anyone who wanders by.
Over the next 12 months, there will several dozen new 2D/3D social virtual worlds launching, all vying to take Second Life’s crown as the leader in the non-gaming space. They want to be the "YouTube of 3D content," the "Real 3D MySpace," the "FaceBook of 3D UGC" (User-Generated Content).
Obviously, most of them will not be huge. Most of them will actually disappear almost as quickly as they arrive, once the people come and go and the funding dries up. But some will stick around, either merged into bigger entities or grown to independence. What will make one succeed and another fail? That’s the billion dollar question.
(via A Social Network for Google Earth? · GoogleSystem Blog)
Arizona State University students (well, at least one) have received a web questionnaire that strongly hints at a new Google social network using avatars, modeling, and so on. It’s called "My World" and also hints at something large-scale, as in the oft-rumored Google Earth / Second Life hybrid.
Arizona State University has a very close relation with Google: it’s one of the first large universities in the US that uses Google Apps, the site search is powered by Google Search Appliance, the university uses Google Maps and the ASU campuses already have 3D models in… Google Earth. But there’s actually more than this: the university offered photos for the Google Mars project, Google employees serve as guest speakers or adjunct lecturers at ASU and Google has an office on the Tempe campus of Arizona State University.
As always, I don’t know Google’s plans — my former colleagues from Keyhole are not returning my emails lately (possibly because I blog stuff like this*), which has effectively put the kabosh on my "How Google Earth Works" series for now… But I do know that their CTO has publicly stated that Google Earth will remain true to the real world. In other words, it won’t turn into Second Life with new islands, fictional fantastic places, furries, and so on.
He didn’t rule out avatars at some level, and I do think they’re likely at some point — specifically, when GE offers the ability to walk down the street and enter virtual stores. Once you can do that, it makes sense to be able to do that with friends, or just meet on a street corner in virtual Paris and go sightseeing. Street View is a step in that direction. The same data could be used to make 3D models at street level. And there’s an effort paying people to digitize the insides of stores in major cities, at least in 2D. I’d give it two years or less for the technology issues to be worked out and for this to be possible.
However, I still don’t expect that to be a full-blown social network. The next generation of 3D social networks will have the concept of your "home" in the virtual world in the same way that MySpace offers you a home on the web (or at least a bedroom, messy as it may be). You need some kind of anchor point to tie all of your social links together and form a big social space (a graph without nodes is just a bunch of lines). And making a virtual home for yourself is most likely to be a highly creative (read: fictional) activity, not in GE’s main mission to represent the real world.
That’s not to say a "Social GE" is a bad idea, even without the element of role-play and fiction. Imagine the world’s biggest spatial matchmaking service, linked to cell phones and personal profiles (interests, etc..), and you can see at least one 3D social application that’s more or less grounded in the real world. That’s possible, even likely to come from Google or others. But that’s not really what this questionnaire is hinting at.
There were rumors of a number of distinct teams at Google, all working in or near this space. And the wording of the questionnaire, and the target audience, indicates something much more creatively and socially focused, like a 3D MySpace, that pretty much everyone (except maybe MySpace itself) is trying to build this year. This could easily be a ground up effort. Or there could be a new version of the old GE technology that’s rigged for a separate, purely fictional world — a new world, its users get to define. That would fit with the theme of Google Earth, Mars, Moon, and Sky. It’s just one more set of data to visualize (sort of, see below).
Imagine it more concretely: repurpose the GE sidebar for social networking functions, "friendmarks" instead of (or adding to) placemarks, "stuff to do" instead of (or adding to) layers to view. And then let people populate and build this new fictional world however they wish, using SketchUp as the main modeling tool.
I’ve talked before about the issues, mashing up Google Earth and Second Life conceptually, so I won’t repeat all of that here. To sum it up, Second Life would need literally billions of simulators (or a new approach) to cover the area of the real earth. Google Earth would need to support much more dynamic content than it currently does, and deal with the inevitable fictionalization of the world. There’s also the real danger of a million avatars crowding into a virtual Times Square, sending your PC into neverland (even NYC slows down my PC with 3D buildings alone). Plus, letting people build in SketchUp and import into a world is generally fine for adding 3D buildings. But when it comes to inhabiting your virtual living room with your custom avatar, you really want simple in-world editing tools that let you move your couch an inch to the left. They’re not quite there yet, nor does it really fit with the GE user interface as it is currently defined.
And while it would be very interesting to see the GE platform turn into a more generalized 2D/3D content editor and browser (that was something I strongly pushed for, way back when, and John was always keen to pull in full HTML rendering in one way or another), it’s not quite ready to replace your old browser just yet. Someday, maybe. And if any application has the potential to stealthily come in and become your browser of choice for Web 3D, that’s what I’d pick as a starting point.
For this ASU student beta, I’m leaning towards something web-based, 3D in the [current] browser, using Flash or Java with a significant portion in 2D. And the reason is simple: social interactions happen at the scale of people, not planets; living rooms and coffee shops, not continents. While it’s cool to imagine an earth-sized virtual world, capable of pulling in 10 billion people, it’s not yet necessary to make one that big. We’re still at the "city" scale of social virtual worlds — and if you’ve ever lived in New York, that may be plenty big enough to keep people busy solving technical and usability problems.
However, with 100 250 million downloads, I don’t underestimate the Google Earth team or ever rule them out.
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* for the record, I don’t even ask Google employees about Google’s internal projects. All my speculation is based on my own experience in the field, public tidbits, and industry veterans I’ve talked to outside of Google. In fact, my friends know the best way to get me to not blog about their project is to tell me all about it. It effectively ties my hands until they announce.
CMU professor gives his last lesson on life
That’s just a highlights video.
Here’s a link to the the complete media stream from the event (about 1hr, plus).
I’m posting this on the professional site because Randy has made some great contributions to the field of virtual reality, science, and education — and everyone should know about it.
I’m also posting it because I know Randy. I worked with him when I was at Disney. And I can attest that he’s not putting on a show or brave face. That’s exactly how he is in person: positive, smart, and genuine.
He doesn’t want pity or sadness. He’s achieved his childhood dreams. So I’m not sad for him, but for his family, friends, and, in fact, the rest of the world, who will miss him, whether they all know it or not.
Here are two alternate visions of providing the nation with enough energy from the sun to obviate our need for fossil fuels almost entirely (I still want my gas stove top).
First, the military takes the view that we should launch giant satellites into space, beaming the collected power back to earth in concentrated columns of energy.
Space Based Solar Power Fuels Vision of Global Energy Security
Second, we have a number of solar power startups that are racing to improve efficiencies of collection and especially storage for ground-based solar arrays.
Can Sunshine Provide All US Electricity?
Which approach is better? Boy, that’s a tough one. Let’s see. Simple and easily repairable technology focusing the sun’s energy into heat which turns turbines… Or complex, expensive, and vulnerable military satellites that can double in wartime as directed energy weapons…
I’m just not sure. But I do know this: with some cool technologies on the horizon (esp. heat storage), we can almost certainly power the entire US with a single sunny circle about a hundred miles in diameter, with no need for burning anything except the occasional dinner.
Do we have a hundred miles of sunny land to spare?
Intel Snaps Up Havok | Metaversed
This is fairly big news in the game and virtual world’s industry. Havok has had one of the best sets of physics middle-ware around, used in Second Life (on the simulators) and in many games. Intel is in the business of making chips. So why would they buy a software company like this?
Well, there are a few reasons. First and foremost, Havok’s competition (apart from roll-your-own solutions and a few FOSS libraries) is hardware — the PPU — or physics processing unit, analogous to the GPU for graphics. Not many people have PPUs yet, but there will be more and more of a push from marquis games and high-end gaming PC makers.
In fact, I’d expect AMD, which swallowed ATI recently, to begin offering more generalized or bundled accelerator chipsets that can handle graphics, physics, and perhaps even AI together on the same board. Havok can take advantage of ATI GPUs as well as NVidia, but with this acquisition, we can only hope that continues.
So what is Intel to do with their own "multi-core" CPU push and sub-par (but very widely installed) motherboard 3D graphics business? Well, anything that needs more CPU cycles vs. buying specialty add-in boards is good for Intel. And physics simulation software scales nicely to multiple cores. It’s pretty simple when it comes down to it. If Intel gave Havok away for cheap or free, Aegia would have a much harder time selling PPU hardware.
The story that Intel is getting more and more into virtual worlds is interesting. Second Life, for example, is somewhat of a "thin client" approach (though not so thin — still lots of CPU needed to make it smooth), leaving more of the heavy lifting to the grid of simulators, which could use 80 core chips yesterday. Intel would certainly like selling beefy simulator chips, but there are far more customers out there to attend to. And virtual worlds often lead themselves to optimizations that push computing work to the server, vs. the more plentiful home PC.
So games and Peer to Peer virtual worlds may be more up their alley. Intel is reportedly paying one Palo Alto company, qwaq, for some undisclosed work, probably relating to business worlds. They’re using Croquet, which is an open source peer to peer world, of varying levels of visual fidelity. I doubt they use Havok, if the open source physics engines are reasonably sufficient, but I imagine Intel will make more investments in this area over the next few years.