Techno Babble

Developed by Cooliris Inc, PicLens combines a “Cover Flow” style with a 3D Image wall to present a novel way for viewing photos and videos across the web via your web-browser.

Plugins are available for Internet Explorer and Firefox and PicLens works with a number of websites. A search feature is built-in to the viewer which allows you to easily search and browse for images on sites such as Flickr and Google Web Albums.

PicLens is a free download, free to use, quick and easy to install and contains no spyware, adware or malware.

http://www.piclens.com

Additional tools are provided that allow users to enable their own websites for Piclens and there is also a Wordpress plugin available - so watch this space, I’ll be experimenting with these tools on this blog in the near future.

Update 1: this blog is now enabled for PicLens

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Windows SideShow is a technology in Windows Vista that supports a secondary screen on your mobile PC. With this additional display you can view important information whether your laptop is on, off, or in sleep mode. Windows SideShow is available in Windows Vista Home Premium, Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, and Windows Vista Ultimate.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/features/details/sideshow.mspx

Wouldn’t it be great if you could read an e-mail message, confirm a meeting location, or check a flight reservation without turning on your computer? What if you could check the program guide in Windows Media Center by using a display that’s built into your remote control? Windows SideShow puts this information literally at your fingertips on a wide variety of devices that can retrieve information from your mobile PC or desktop computer.

Windows SideShow uses gadgets to extend information from your computer to other devices. Gadgets can run on a Windows SideShow–compatible device and update that device with information from your computer.

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Tagged: SideShow, Windows

I noted that Microsoft has recently announced the first CTP (Community Technical Preview) of the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio.

Microsoft Robotics products and services enable academic, hobbyist and commercial developers to easily create robotics applications across a wide variety of hardware.

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I recently got a new laptop, Dell Latitude D430 dual-core and 32Gb Solid State drive, and needed to install the necessary essential software i.e. the software I just can’t live without.

Here is what I noted installing (but not necessarily in this order)

Closely followed by

Adobe recently announced their intention to acquire Virtual Ubiquity, the developers of the on-line word processor Buzzword and joins the ranks of Google who have a similar on-line word processing capability with Google Documents.

Buzzword is built with Adobe Flex software and runs in the Adobe Flash player. The application will also run on Adobe AIR an environment which enables the ability to work with both hosted (online) documents and local (offline) documents.

Adobe, helpfully, provide a FAQ on the acquisition at

http://www.adobe.com/special/buzzword/faq.html

The original Virtual Ubiquity site can be found at

http://www.virtub.com/

and Buzzword is at

http://www.buzzword.com/

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A recent BBC News article discusses a recent development by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University that enables unwanted portions of photographs to be replaced.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6936444.stm

The technique matches segments from the millions of images available on the web, with the photo being edited, to fill holes or add objects providing seamless results.

The process was recently described in papers presented at the recent Siggraph in San Diego

Photo Clip Art - An interactive system for inserting new objects into existing photographs using a vast image-based object library.

and

Scene Completion Using Millions of Photographs - A method for filling holes in images using semantically and structurally similar scenes from a large internet photo library.

Other links to this story include:

http://www.physorg.com/news103287076.html

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-07/cmu-cmr071007.php

What is it ?

COLLaborative Design Activity is described on its web-site as

a royalty free, open standard for the interactive entertainment industry that defines an XML-based schema for 3D authoring applications to freely exchange digital assets without loss of information

and is supported by the non-profit organisation the Khronos Group.

http://www.khronos.org/collada/

Various presentations made at Siggraph 2006 are available from

http://www.khronos.org/developers/library/siggraph2006/COLLADA_Tech_Talk/

Read the full Collada Specification in the attached document

http://kf12.com/blogs/uploads/collada_specification_141.pdf

A couple of items I noted

COLLADA FX

is the first cross-platform standard shader and effects definition written in XML. It targets high-end systems running OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) and Cg (HLSL coming), as well as resource-constrained systems (OpenGL ES 1.x profile).

It provides:

• Next generation lighting, shading and texturing
• High level effects and shaders
• Support for all shader models (1.x, 2.0, 3.0) under CG and GLSL profiles

Some more detail

This enables authors to describe how to apply color to a visual scene. It is a flexible abstraction for describing material properties across many platforms and application programming interfaces (APIs).

The COLLADA FX Loader project is a sample that was developed to load a basic COLLADA FX document, and to make all of the calls to the Cg / CgGL runtime to create and initialize the materials and effects defined in COLLADA. It also provides an API to apply those effects through calls to set and reset the pass state of an effect. The framework is easily extensible to add implementation for any types or states that are needed and currently unsupported. The sources for the COLLADA FX loader build into a library called libcfx.a that must be linked into the application. The loader uses the COLLADA DOM when loading assets directly out of COLLADA, or the effects and materials can be converted into a binary format native to libcfx.

COLLADA Physics

• Rigid Body Dynamics
• Rag Dolls
• Contraints
• Collision Volumes
• Enables data interchange between Ageia (PhysX), Havok, Bullet, ODE and other game physics middleware

Google has recently added support for COLLADA to the Google Earth KML file format (which is used for importing models into Google Earth).

CB Model Pro was built around the idea that surfaces should be manipulated directly. The result is a very intuitive and highly productive tool for 3D content creation that seamlessly fits into the production pipeline. CB Model Pro was developed by the creators of Cosmic Blobs, the award-winning entry-level 3D graphics software.

Find out more from the WEBSITE

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