Author: admin-blog

How many photos can you take on one set of four AA batteries? On Saturday night, as part of a shoot for a music video, mostly on motor drive, I took 4686. They’re going to take some sorting. I’ll let you know how it works out.

Sony’s New Second Life Clone

Check out Home, from Sony. (The article calls it “Third Life” which is misleading at best.)

Briefly, it’s like Second Life, without the user-made content, without creation tools, but with voice, great HD graphics, a free house, and doubling as a lobby to access multiplayer games. PS3 only.

It’s not out yet, and while the video looks great, I have to wonder if people will actually choose to visit it as an end in itself. There’s certainly not much scope for a thriving economy without third-party development. I’d like to think the graphics provide a sneak peek at Second Life v3, though.

There’s some great work being done out there towards multi-touch interfaces, as featured in the Apple iPhone and in great work from Jeff Han. In full-screen two hand interfaces like that, I see potential for an idea I had many moons ago, around 1994, while at university.

If you’re manipulating objects on a screen with your hands, there’s only so much you can do with different configurations of your fingers: stretch, resize, move, etc. More complex operations are going to need a specific “tool” to be selected before an operation can take place, like choosing the brush or move tool in Photoshop.

The idea is that at the top corners of the screen, “drawers” of “gloves” are hidden. As you move your hand to the top corners, the drawer opens, and you can (virtually) wear different gloves for different purposes. A resizing glove on one hand and a reshaping glove in the other. A movement glove on the left and an animating glove on the right.

It seems obvious, but nobody had done it in 1994 and nobody seems to have done it to date. I was excited when I saw Minority Report, but the interface didn’t need that level of detail. Jeff Han’s work is much more elegant, but it looks to be using quite complex finger gestures. Some make sense, but I’m sure they’ll hit a cognitive barrier sooner or later. There just aren’t enough fingers, or positions for fingers, to emulate everything that Photoshop offers, for example. Virtual Gloves provide a clean, intuitive way to work with large-scale touch environments.

Why publicise this? Since this site is archived in at least a couple of places, it should count as prior art, so the idea can’t be patented and locked away — it’s public. Of course, if someone wants to offer me a job (or a research project) making this a reality, speak up. Email iain [at] funwithstuff [dot] com.

macosxhints.com – Enable full screen anti-aliasing using OpenGL Profiler

Banish the jaggies! Second Life looks fantastic if you follow the instructions here:
macosxhints.com – Enable full screen anti-aliasing using OpenGL Profiler
. Not *too* much of a speed hit on my MacBook Pro; probably not a great idea on a MacBook. Really, really good if you’re taking pictures.

And voice is coming to SL too!

I knew they were bad, but I didn’t think they’d come out and say “We aim to make the case and rally support for American global leadership.”

Who are they? Cheney, Rumsfeld, Jeb Bush, many more.

More background here (dated 2003) includes this gem: “The American people, anxiously awaiting some sort of exit plan after America defeats Iraq, will see too late that no exit is planned.”

Alternatively, if your attention span has shrunk too much to read all that, try this animated interpretation of that same content. It’s important.