Techno Babble

snippet …

Back to the real subject of this article

Online video is no longer just fun and games: You might actually learn something.

The University of California at Berkeley said on Tuesday that it is using Google Video to deliver college courses, including lectures and symposia, free of charge, the first university to have its own featured page on Google Video.

The site is at http://video.google.com/ucberkeley.

As an initial offering, the university has put up a library of more than 250 hours of video for public viewing. Most of it previously was not available online, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in a statement.

“Coursecasting” is a growing trend in educational technology, enabling students and the general public to download audio and video recordings of class lectures to their computers and portable media devices. Berkeley has been offering a limited set of material since 2001.

Autodesk has recently introduced Autodesk Labs a web-site that provides free, early access to prototypes, experimental and beta applications and technologies.

The intial offerings include:

• Feature Recognition for Inventor 11, User Guide for converting neutral 3D CAD data models (STEP, SAT or IGES) into fully featured Inventor 11 models.
• Autodesk Vault Mirror Beta which provides the ability to create a read-opnly mirror of the files and directory structure in a Vault.
• DGNV8 Translator allows a user to share AutoCAD DWG and Bentley Microstation 2D V8 DGN files.
• Google Earth Extension Beta provides the ability to publish 3D models from AutoCAD 2007 based products directly into Google Earth. (User Guide is available HERE Adesk Google Users Guide.pdf )
• Project Freewheel http://dwfit.com/ both a web-site where you can enter a DWF url for interactive viewing and a web-service that allows you to embed an interactive DWF viewer in your own HTML page.

The software is not intended for mission-critical projects, nor is it supported.

Quoted from a recent article at Yahoo News,

…Since going live about two months ago, Autodesk Labs has received more than 190,000 hits and over 49,000 unique visitors from 150 countries. There have been more than 10,000 downloads of the beta products available on the site, and hundreds of positive emails about the offerings and the overall experience, including suggestions for new products.

In August Google was sued by an organization called Copiepresse, which represents a number of newspapers in Belgium. It argued that the Google search engine and news site breached these publications’ copyright.

Recently, a court ruled in favor of Copiepresse and ordered Google to remove these publishers’ content from both Google.be and Google News. The court also required Google to post its ruling to the home pages of Google.be and Google News Belgium.

The decision of the court is due to be reconsidered in November.

Interesting questions are raised by this case … does this mean you should never reference text from another website explicitly?

Typically a Google web search will reveal a snippet of the item and a link to the originating source requiring a user to visit the original website to view the full article. There are techniques available (robots.txt) that prevent indexing of content.

I wonder if any of these newspapers have an RSS headline feed? Does content published in this way become public domain?

In a somewhat related case, the Agence France-Presse (AFP) have been fighting Google in court since March 2005 over indexing its news content. (This is possibly because the AFP have a deal in place with sites such as Yahoo! News to license and carry its articles).

An article in CADCAMNet by Randall S Newton (21 September 2006) asks the question:

When will analysis tools be available as desktop widgets?

and quotes SimXpert from MSC. SimXpert is part of the MD Nastran offering, SimEnterprise from MSC Software.

Based on a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), SimEnterprise enables open connectivity between designers, analysts, and other simulation stakeholders for a highly collaborative design ecosystem, allowing each stakeholder to work within their preferred environments. With SimEnterprise, product development stakeholders, regardless of application preference or global location, can easily collaborate and manage simulation and simulation-based design information to accelerate product development in a highly cost-efficient manner.

Here’s some links:

SimXpert Press Release

SimXpert

Seems as though they are looking to provide an SOA for Analysis products.

First announced as a software library of functions for finding parts based on the 3D data 3DSearchIT from Geometric Software Solutions is a search engine that allows you to search for 3D models based on the shape or from textual attributes.

Features include:

• Shape/Geometry base Indexing and search of 3D data
• Search based on textual attributes
• Independent of CAD file formats
• Supports Automatic crawling and indexing in local machine/network
• Supports Interactive modifications to pre-clustering results
• Rename clusters according to industry standards or custom preferences
• Automatically visualize clusters of similar models
• User enabled search preferences and display of results
• Platform flexibility and can be deployed over PDM systems, CAD, modelers, Standalone application or Web based servers

3D PrintScreen from Dassault is a version of the familiar 2D print screen functionality but applied to 3D models.

It could be described as a TSR (terminate and stay ready) application which remains active, running in the background, until invoked using the F10 “hot” key (this is the default hot-key which can be changed if required) to capture 3D model geometry from another running application.

Models are saved as 3D XML from any application based on OpenGL.

Tested it out with an application used for generating meshed models. Here is the application running:

source application

and here is the resultant 3D XML file displayed in the 3D XML viewer

captured model

3D Printscreen is available for FREE from

http://www.3ds.com/products-solutions/3d-for-all/3d-xml/3d-printscreen/

where you can also download the XML Player to view your captured models.

Teddy is sketch-based 3D Modelling Software from Takeo Igarashi an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Tokyo.

An updated version, SmoothTeddy, is available and combines the original Teddy ptogram with another of his applications, Chameleon, a 3D texture painting program for Teddy.

SmoothTeddy

Both are worth a look, not for what they can actually do, but rather how they do it.

Other interesting projects include “As-Rigid-As-Possible Shape Manipulation” and “As-Rigid-As-Possible Curve Editing”

This demonstrates 2 things:

• The ability to manipulate curves in an intuitive way (forget about control polygons, tangent manipulation etc. etc.)
• Interaction with geometry using touch screen technology

Visit the web-site via the enclosed links to find out more and download the (java) applications to experiment with these concepts.

A recent post talks about the recent release of Microsoft Live – a replacement for the MSN search engine.

I thought I’d find out the percentage usage of the various engines and came across these figures provided by hitwise

These figures are for search only and do not represent hits on popular domains. Following a dip in August, Google is back to more than 60% share of searches in the US, in the four weeks ending September 9.

Other (free) data available from this site includes the most popular website destinations in the US which shows the following results for August: