RealityPrime

Sometimes, when I work on a project, there’s nothing we can publicly show until the product launches. And sometimes, by the time the product gets attention, I’m off working on the next big thing and can’t enjoy the show, except by proxy.

In this case, Big Stage has partnered with SonyBMG & YouTube to bring you a free sneak preview of our technology. Needless to say, we’re all very excited to see how it goes.

The process is pretty simple from your point of view: you take and upload three slightly different digital photos of your face to MichaelJackson.com (account registration required), wait an hour or so while our big iron servers do some really heavy math, and then you receive an email telling you the YouTube URL of your finished personalized Thriller video, which you can share as you wish.

That’s it.

The result will be something like this — though imagine your own face in place of my 7 month old son’s — and note: it’s not really designed for kids’ faces:

[Read more →]

Tags: Articles, Featured, News by avi
5 Comments »

Well, those of you who keep checking back for this have been very patient indeed. The delay in making the announcement was that I was waiting for the official company press release so as not to jump the gun. But that won’t come for a few months, and so I got the green light to disclose this now.

The company is called Big Stage, or sometimes Big Stage Entertainment. Never mind those acronyms. My colleagues have developed some of the best 3D facial reconstruction and animation I’ve ever seen. They recently demonstrated it at CES during Intel’s keynote, and more public demonstrations are on the way. It tends to blow people away. And the first application is way more fun than most uses of 3D on the web that I’ve seen.

My new title is "Principal Architect, User Created Content," which I’ll leave to your imaginations. As part of the deal, I sold IP from my R&D company to Big Stage in an all-stock deal. I could therefore say that I’ve successfully sold my first company (on my own anyway — I was long gone from Keyhole by the time it was sold to Google). But I don’t want to overstate things — my decision was less about the potential profit and more about whether to join this company or several other interesting options to occupy my time and bring my grander ideas to market better than I could do alone. And note, it will absolutely take additional time and resources* before you get to see those ideas come to life. For now, I’m spending a big chunk of my time helping the company launch the first product, while building a team* to take it to the next level, so to speak.

^{________________
(*) if you’re a top-notch coder and into the kinds of things I like to discuss on this blog, drop me a line. I do have a budget, and I will be holding interviews for a handful of key positions at GDC.}

Tags: Featured, News by avi
1 Comment »

Tags: News by avi
No Comments »

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/01/080129-bionic-eye.html

Well, for me and Ted Chaing, I’m sure this is welcome news. We debated how this might be done several years back. Looks like this new lens doesn’t do much yet, but they can at least build some of the components now. And a rabbit was able to wear the lens for at least 20 minutes without going blind. (btw, I thought we stopped testing eye products on rabbits…). I figure what it really needs is a DMD laser to shine straight on the retina vs. trying to make a correct virtual image at such a close distance.

Anyway, for anyone who hasn’t contemplated the benefits of the VR contact lens, it’s the ultimate in augmented reality. Wherever you look, you could see a mix of real and virtual objects — when the technology is sufficiently advanced, you couldn’t even tell the difference. Phone conversations will then include a "ghost" image of the person you’re talking to, real as if they were standing there with you.

And the interface to more abstract virtual worlds becomes pretty easy too — just close your eyes and you’re someplace else entirely.

Well, we’re not quite there yet. But soon, perhaps.

Tags: News by avi
3 Comments »

I was very disappointed to hear the latest news from Linden Lab(s), maker of Second Life. In various purported internal Linden emails (which look legit to me, knowing their respective styles), Cory Ondrejka is out, apparently by Philip’s hand.

[Note: everything here is speculation, as I haven't talked to anyone involved, nor do I want to wade into the alleged technical disputes at this juncture.]

Now, I don’t worry for Cory — I figure he’s fully vested and that stock should easily be worth many [non-virtual] millions by this time next year, not to mention the nice severance package I’d expect them to offer — Linden would need to do something to get him to agree not to compete (or say anything) for a year or two at least. And I imagine he’ll either start or be recruited to join a promising small company within milliseconds of hitting the street (but maybe take some time off to be with the kids — you’ve earned it).

But what I worry about is Linden itself. To be upfront, I’m not exactly happy with them lately. It might have something to do with my offering to come back to help solve some of those lingering technical problems everyone complains about, and my subsequently getting snubbed for whatever reason. But it might also have to do with my long-term disappointment in some design decisions they’ve made over the years, decisions that actually kept me from joining the company as an employee in the first place, way back in 2001.

I can safely say that of the decisions I do roundly applaud, most of these came from or were championed by Cory. He’s the kind of leader that anyone would love to work for or with. He listens and understands. And his ego does not extend beyond his skin.

My best guess is that this has more to do with the rumored liquidity event for 2008 than any technical dispute. I expect that Linden will soon bring in a CTO with a Wall St. pedigree, if they haven’t lined that up already, or Philip will take over the CTO role and bring in a shiny new CEO to guide the sale or offering (not that Philip isn’t capable of doing either role, but to investors, money is money and more is more).

Tags: Articles, News by avi
2 Comments »

Google Body Education Video

This is purported to be a video of "Google Body," allegedly available next year, though I don’t see any evidence of Google branding or an official press release. If it was a leaked video, I’d think it would make more of a splash on the internets. More likely, it’s an existing 3rd party app or a research project that someone just assumed would be tied to "Google" because people now [finally] get why 3D search, visualization and user-markup is really part of Google’s mission.

The video is also lacking the usual Google simplicity in UI — having to click a body part and then a button to remove that body part each time is cumbersome at best. But the 3D rendering, on the other hand, is very nice.

You can read my previous comments on why making a "Google Body" or "Google Human" for individual body shapes is much harder than just rendering. But this is a nice start. What I really want is something that lets me zoom down to the cellular level, complete with annotations and the ability to overlay personal data. But that’s still a ways off, I think.

_____________

On a related note, I mentioned a while back that I’d be making a big announcement about RealityPrime. Well, we’re not quite ready to announce. But I can say this. I’ve been very busy since October, including an upcoming move to LA. In the search for my next interesting gig, I passed on several really cool options, including being software lead on an academic 3D brain/body viewer that would, in fact, handle those individual differences I discussed. I passed on forming a group to re-invent 3D avatars for ultimate portability. And I passed on joining a group that’s blazing a path to use virtual worlds in a serious way.

So what gig did I accept? We’ll announce something soon.

Tags: Articles, News by avi
6 Comments »

Following the Virtual Worlds fall conference last week, there’s some interesting fallout. First, a big WTF? to Microsoft, whom I’d given ample credit for having their heads on straight with respect to virtual worlds. Afterwards, I’ll cover the Linden/IBM "synergy."

[Read more →]

Tags: Articles, News by avi
1 Comment »

igdmlgd: AMAZON ONE-CLICK PATENT REJECTED BY THE US PATENT OFFICE AS A RESULT OF MY REQUEST

In a recent office action, the USPTO has rejected the claims of the Amazon.com one-click patent following the re-examination request that I filed on 16 February 2006. My review resulted in the broadest claims of the patent being ruled invalid. In its Office Action released 9 October 2007, the Patent Office found that the prior art I found and submitted completely anticipated the broadest claims of the patent, U.S. Patent No. 5,960,411. I had only requested the USPTO look at claims 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 21 and 22 but the Office Action rejects claims 11-26 and claims 1-5 as well!

This is most excellent. All bad patents must die.

It makes me want to go invalidate that Sony Mind-Writing Patent that even Sony admits is complete blue sky.

Tags: News by avi
No Comments »

Free the Avatars - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog

IBM teams up with virtual world developer - MSNBC

Update: Here’s the official press release with a little more specificity than the above two articles.

With the new crop of "open" virtual worlds systems like Areae’s Metaplace coming out, Linden Labs (makers of Second Life) clearly had to take their ground-breaking but oft-criticized efforts up a notch. And they have, with this announcement of an initiative (with the muscle of IBM behind it) to make their avatars, and by implication everything else, cross the boundaries of their grid.

[Read more →]

Tags: Articles, News by avi
4 Comments »

Focus images instantly with Adobe’s computational photography

Now here’s a camera I’d love to buy. It’s certainly not the first in the field of computational photography. But it’s nice to see companies start supporting this at the application level too.

Now, there are lots of ways to get 3D images via digital photography. You can shoot lasers or IR signals out from your camera to measure distance per pixel based on return trip time. You can take stereo pairs and infer depth. But this method goes much farther — it takes many similar pictures from slightly different angles and can compute the whole field of images from any point nearby.

In other words, it’s as close to real-time digital holography as we current can get. And the result is a photograph that not only knows the distance to each pixel, but can also tilt the image in 3D to see around objects, as well as modify the focal plane across the image.

And when companies start using cameras like these and computational photography techniques to compute novel viewing positions (i.e., positions that might sit between or outside of actual sample), we’ll have a truly 3D photographic world to explore.

Tags: News by avi
1 Comment »