At the Nike 6.0 BMX Open Tour, in Chicago today and tomorrow, Total Immersion will be showing a fun Augmented Reality game based on scratch-off cards.
Every visitor to the Nike tent will receive a scratch-off card, offering a chance to win a pair of Nike 6.0 shoes and additional prizes – all based on the spinning wheels of the first-ever AR-generated slot machine. To activate the slot machine, the attendee displays the card in front of a camera, and his or her image is projected onto a larger screen. On screen, the card morphs into a big 3D slot machine that then appears in the attendee’s hand. The slot machine counts itself down and automatically spins – and if three matching images appear, it lights up and rings to celebrate the winner. Several winners will be declared daily.
Initially at the Chicago Nike6.0 event, this will be touring with the Dew Tour in Boston, Portland, Salt Lake City, and Orlando. The AR system is also available on the Nike website from any webcam-enabled computer, although you will need a Spectator Guide to use it. I figure those will be available online as well in a day or two.
A new app in the Apple App Store aims to turn the meager iPhone camera into a 3D Camera by allowing you to composite pairs of images into analyphic or sterographic images.
To take the photos, you use one of two methods. If you’re planning on taking an anaglyph or sterogram, you take one picture, move the iPhone camera slightly to the right, and take another photo. To make a wiggle stereogram, you point directly at the same object from two slightly different vantage points. The app provides instructions on exactly how to take the two photos each time you launch it.
The app sells for $1.99 (iTunes Link). Anyone want to send us at VizWorld an analyphic image to show?
In New Orleans this year, SIGGRAPH will be hosting the first annual GameJam! Competition. It’s a 24-hour competition to create graphics for computer games, with various challenges and mini-competitions along the way.
During GameJam! participants will take part in mini-competitions to compete for assets like texture, or ten minutes of internet time. What participants will have to do to win these competitions will only be revealed at the event. Attendees will also be able to watch the GameJammers create their characters, worlds, and gameplay via a live feed (monitors in the hallway will display participants desktops so the attendees can see the games as they are created).
Sounds like alot of fun, I hope to check out the feeds when I’m there. Which reminds me, have you Registered for SIGGRAPH2009 yet? Today is the LAST DAY for early registration discounts.
At the recent HiPS2009 Workshops in Rome, Italy, a paper was presented on a new C++ CUDA framework.
This paper reports on CuPP, our newly developed C++ framework designed to ease integration of NVIDIA’s GPGPU system, CUDA, into existing C++ applications. CuPP provides interfaces to reoccurring tasks that are easier to use than the standard CUDA interfaces. In this paper we concentrate on memory management and related data structures. CuPP offers both a low level interface — mostly consisting of smart pointers and memory allocation functions for GPU memory — and a high level interface offering a C++ STL vector wrapper and the so-called type transformations. The wrapper can be used by both device and host to automatically keep data in sync. The type transformations allow developers to write their own data structures offering the same functionality as the CuPP vector, in case a vector does not conform to the need of the application.
Nvidia gave another full-day CUDA tutorial at the International Conference on Supercomputing this week, and the slides for the talk are now available online in PDF form.
The Gnomon School of Visual Effects has the honor of hosting the world premiere of the Music Video for “White Swan” by Lolly Jane Blue. The video was directed by Sil Van Der Woerd, and the premiere will be July 11th.
While several Hollywood studios are outsourcing VFX work to India, you’ld be remiss to forget about the Czechs.
Even during the salad days before the crash, Prague post facilities were surprising skeptical foreign crews with their precision and professionalism, as shingles such as UPP scored vfx work for such pics including “Flight 93,” “AVP: Alien vs. Predator,” “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Youth Without Youth.”
The article points out that the Czechs are mostly interested in complete start-to-finish work, but I suspect that in this economy anyone is willing to take work.
ZeniMax, parent company of Bethesda Softworks, has just announce that they will be acquiring famous game engine development powerhouse id software. Bethesda is well-known for it’s Fallout and Elder Scrolls series, while id is famous for it’s first-person shooter franchises Quake and Doom.
At first glance, id, an almost exclusively first-person shooter dominated studio; and RPG powerhouse Bethesda may not seem to have that much in common, but this may be the thing that makes them the best fit. With no directly overlapping internal competition this deal serves to expand ZeniMax Media’s portfolio without creating conflict between their respective subsidiaries.
This also makes Bethesda the new employer of game engine legend John Carmack. This can mean nothing but good things for the next set of Bethesda classics.
A new website is on the scene offering 1GB of storage space for art, music, and film complete with tools for streaming and selling your work to viewers. PutItOn.com is now offering signups for free, and offers such features as text translation into 10 languages, 0 transaction charge on sales, and several portfolio management features.
So if you’re a starving artist looking for a place to showcase your work, try it out. Let us know how it works for you.
At the Nike 6.0 BMX Open Tour, in Chicago today and tomorrow, Total Immersion will be showing a fun Augmented Reality game based on scratch-off cards.
A new app in the 
In New Orleans this year, 
The Gnomon School of Visual Effects has the honor of hosting the world premiere of the Music Video for “White Swan” by Lolly Jane Blue. The video was directed by Sil Van Der Woerd, and the premiere will be July 11th.
While several Hollywood studios are outsourcing VFX work to India, you’ld be remiss to forget about the Czechs.
A new website is on the scene offering 1GB of storage space for art, music, and film complete with tools for streaming and selling your work to viewers. PutItOn.com is now offering signups for free, and offers such features as text translation into 10 languages, 0 transaction charge on sales, and several portfolio management features.
VizWorld.com 
Comments