Portent

MMO is short for Massive Multiplayer Online and refers to games where lots of players play er online- in games like World of Warcraft, Everquest and many more.

Metaplace looks interesting and I have signed up for the Alpha. The idea is that they provide the technology to let you set up a game, puzzle, role playing game in 5 minutes. Mind you, I don’t expect anything to be brilliant with just five minutes work- call me cynical. But you can reuse others work- inherit from them, with their permission. Metaplace’s technology provides the back end scalability to let lots of players interact in your world with 3D or 2D technology.

Each game is a website but with links to other games, well if nothing else it will provide lots of work for artists. Questions I have are – what are licensing terms regarding commercial use? How much logic can i put in to the backend server? If I make money out of this, what do I have to pay or is it even allowed? But it looks very interesting.

Warning – The site appears slow, I expect it is getting a lot of traffic so be patient!

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Sometimes you come across something so bizarre, you have to think is this for real? Well apparently it is. An email client that that lets you view your email as if its people in a 3d world. Spams are big, slow fat guys. Emails are svelte bikini clad woman rendered in beautiful 3d.

In the creator’s (Robert Savage) words “For movie buffs out there, the entire first level is a near-replica of the opening scene of Goldfinger, the James Bond film. The Bond girls are referenced in a campy way, and Odd Job himself has put on a few pounds since the advent of the Big Mac. It’s the Fontainebleau Hotel, Miami, circa 1964.”

This includes spam filtering and there is a free for life version or a LAX version (emails are Jumbo Jets!) which costs a one off $29.95. Not surprisingly this 3D etc approach has had a lot of people going WTF but it is an innovative and certainly novel email client.

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Over a year ago, there was a Portent Story on turning photos into 3D at Carnegie Mellon. There is a working website at Stanford University where you can upload a photo (it needs registration) then have it processed into 3D and you can view it using Shockwave.

If you haven’t got Shockwave installed, it will do it for you and once it’s in, you can view your photo or others, zoom in, pan. It’s not bad at all, but it depends upon the original photo and landscapes like the one shown make the best images.

It takes about 5 minutes from uploading until your photo is ready to view. If you’re interested you can download and view the source code in C and C++, but it is a 42 MB file. There’s also a neat integration with Flickr so you can search for photos by tag on Flickr and use those.

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A recent phenomena has been instant blogging with Twitter being the main name in this field. People post single messages which pop up on a google map. Personally I’m not too impressed by it- the signal to noise ratio is too low and it comes and goes in a very ephemeral way- there’s little content.

Slightly more interesting is this site Flickrvision which does the same but with photos posted from flickr.com. At the moment the main 2d Google maps view doesn’t seem to work too well but it has a 3D rotating Earth interface which is pretty neat. But ultimately it is something to look at and then move on. Still, as a show case of Web 2.0 with mashups of Flickr and Google Maps/3D world it’s interesting.

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This is a clever application that uses anamorphic perspective with a constant viewing angle (35-45 degrees) and appears to make the object appear to jump off the screen.

This technique draws the image at an angle which when viewed at the 35-45 degrees viewing angle gives it the 3d look. It’s clever stuff and the video looks brilliant. How easy it is to make it into an application is another matter!

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Everyone has got used to the PC's desktop metaphor- dragging Windows around, opening applications etc. Films like Minority report and the Dixon's Advert with a woman operating a virtual screen show one possible way forward. But what if the computer was part of a 3d network in which you could interact with other? No, not Virtual Reliaty circa 1995 but something more akin to the picture above. the Rabbit is a user's avatar. Such as Open croquet.

Open Croquet is a framework that lets users work together in such a space. It is a highly scalable architecture that can be used to develop powerful simulations, and multi-user online spaces. What makes it different from say on an online game (other than not being intended for gaming) is that computation can be done in the workspace. In an online game, servers do the calculations of fights, movement etc and then render that into a 3d world. Open croquet allows you to work in the 3d world, type documents, run applications while others watch or even interact. Its a subtle but key difference.

Lest you consider this just a fanciful exercise, one of the team behind this is Alan Kay, who is famous in the world of Computer Science for his work on Smalltalk, and is considered the architect of the present day GUIs with Windows, icons Mice and Pointers. You can read his bio here.

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The use of tricks, whether it be mirrors or light or paintings to make a room look bigger is well known. But these wall paintings are pretty clever. My favourite is the one with the scroll and the chest.

If you like these then you might also like this set which are different but also 3D.

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This is reminds me of the 1990s PC remake of an 1980s Apple II game Wolfenstein, though that had Nazis and this has Mummies. It’s remarkable that it is all done in JavaScript running in a browser.

It does use a lot of CPU and your PC will probably slow down when it’s running! Still, an amazing piece of work- if you are learning JavaScript, take a look at the source code.

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This has been around for years (hah appropriate!) and lets you select a year then postscript or pdf output, in a variety of languages and regular or rhombic shaped output.

It then generates a calendar kite (shown is one for 2008) which you print, then cut and glue together. You can see what one looks like (if you know 12 sided dice in Dungeons and Dragons then you know what a regular dodecahedron looks like).

It also works for any year so you can use it as a quick way to check what day of the week a given date was on.

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This remarkable video shows a 3Dprojector in action, it looks like windows etc are opening in a window or bouncing off the car (pictured). Quite amazing.

Even something like the fish swimming along the pavement; that would freak me out if I looked down and saw that. Very clever stuff!

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This site has more than just a massive collection of information about great buildings. It includes lists of places, architects.

It is though, more about the buildings than anything else. As well as the search and a very long alphabetically sorted list you can also browse by building type, architectural style, time period when constructed, construction types, climates, contexts, construction elements and you can even see by popularity which buildings or architects details people are looking at.

And there’s more. You can view and download free (or get the lot on CD-ROM) 3d models of many of the buildings. There’s free software (or pay a small sum for a more professional version) which lets you view the 3d models.

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This is possibly not the greatest way to visualise data (in this case US House Prices adjusted for inflation) but it is a somewhat visceral method, where you feel every drop!

The last few years were a long steady climb but in the US, house prices have plummeted over the last few months. The video stops before this happens but it’s obvious that the continual climbing has plateaud out just before the end. This was made using Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, one of my favourite games.

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Warning- don't click the start button until you have selected a location or you'll be sat there for ages waiting while nothing happens.

Goggles is another Web toy- a simple mash up of Google maps plus a 3D aircraft using Flash. Using the cursor keys you can climb or dive and bank, all the time scrolling around the location. If you dive too low, you'll crash and burn. You are equally limited in how high you can go- this is not surprising as Google Maps doubles up the distance with each level as you zoom out. As the plane's on-screen speed is constant this would effectively make it fly twice as fast as on the previous level.

It's well done- by developer Mark Caswell-Daniels to showcase what he can do – he is available for development work.

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If you want to show an iPhone application to impress your friends then this is it. Back in the early 1990s Solitaire tile games (aka Mahjong) were very popular and you could even get all sorts of tile sets for them. Now it’s here for the iPhone as both a commercial version and a free taster which I’m reviewing here.

This is in 3D and the iPhone touch controls let you rotate, slant and zoom in or out. It makes very nice use of the touch pad and works at all angles. Just touch both matching tiles and they fly upwards. That’s a clever bit of work to have the touch display work for tile selection at all viewing angles through as you’d suspect it can be easy to hit the wrong tile when you’re zoomed out.

The free game comes with 4 boards and 2 backgrounds. The commercial gives you 25 plus a layout editor and 5 backgrounds with more promised. Everyone I’ve shown has been impressed with this; you will. The only misgiving is that many people will probably be happy with just the free version- it’s that good! Released September 6th 2008.

Link (to the game in the App Store)

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This is a very polished game with beautiful graphics and excellent sound track.

You have to reposition tiles by clicking on them and then clicking the destination, within a time period. It’s pretty frenetic, as there are big piles to reduce and holes to fill in. Each level has a jump code so after completing it you can get straight back to it in the future. It’s very well done; nice backdrops as well.

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