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.
Popularity: 15% [?]
In my quest for new and interesting stuff for my About C, C++ and C# column I sometimes find little gems of software that I feel are worth mentioning here. This one is, and it’s for Windows 2000/XP (but Not Vista- want to know why- read Brian’s comments on his site).
One of the curses of modern large capacity disks is that you lose track of everything. Well I do! You can’t easily see which folders have lots of stuff in them (Apart from the two obvious- ie the Windows folder and Program Files). My 18 month old PC came with 800 GB of capacity but perhaps only 20% is now free. Where has it all gone?
The utility install in your windows explorer and you just right click to see the Folder Site. I’ve drawn a red box around this in the picture above which is from Brian Oraas’s website on Sourceforge. It also adds a control panel to customise it and you get to see a photo of Brian! It is a handy feature to have.
Popularity: 7% [?]
This is an ambitious project- the ultimate target in AI (Artificial Intelligence) is not to build a better chess playing computer but a working artificial brain. Belgian Mensa (Confession- I’m also a member of British Mensa) member Geert Masureel is behind the project.
I’d love to have a working AI brain- not just to chat to but to be able to enhance my life- play games, search the web for things that interest me, book tickets, or even have it work on this site. The tasks though to get something that can do all that are pretty daunting: comprehension of English, memory, understanding how things relate to each other and much more. To get a feel for some of the difficulty, have you ever tried to explain what the colour red is to a blind person? Human brains are amazing pieces of mushy machinery.
So I’d love to see this succeed and will follow it with interest. If you’re a programmer with a bit of spare time… why not get involved?
Link
Popularity: 7% [?]
One of the big site sof 2007, Joost (pronounced “Juiced”) uses peer to peer technology (like Napster, BitTorrent etc) to stream video content just like a TV station to your PC. Not the kind of thing you can run at work!
This isn’t just another take on Youtube but with licensed content from the likes of Viacom (including MTV Networks, BET Networks and Paramount Pictures) and others there are currently 15,000 shows on there.
I find it slightly awesome and a little depressing that just as there are so many websites in existence that I will never ever see more than a tiny fraction of them. Likewise there are so many TV shows on Joost and videos on Youtube. No person will ever be able to say they’ve seen everything!
Joost lets you mix and match content so as to create your own channel and you can even blog (it includes support for main blog software) while watching content. Ummm, maybe…
It’s a clever idea using P2P to share content. Course that means your internet connection may get used a bit so just hope your ISP’s unlimited traffic limit is really that! Plus it’s another legitimate use of P2P so calls to ban that technology have less chance of ever succeeding.
Link
Popularity: 10% [?]
This is particularly impressive. Wikivid is a collection of free videos that show or teach you how to use Software. The range is very impressive and the links go all over the web. The number of viodeos varies, so something like Flash has a lot of instructional videos from the likes of lynda.com, vtc.com , teach-ict.com. creativecow.net and lot’s more. The open source package nvu for creating websites has 11.
It’s still in “alpha” stage, content is limited to software tutorials only, but their vision is to add video uploads and more. As it’s a wiki, you can add your own video links, edit existing pages, etc!
Popularity: 7% [?]
This looks beautiful. A detailed simulation of flight in space with the Space Shuttle. It includes a detailed virtual cockpit with working Multi-Function Displays and payload bay operations, multiple camera operations, rendering of planet surfaces, realistic physics such as planetary motion, gravitation effects, free space and atmospheric flight are accurately modelled.
Plus you can land your ship at a space port on a planet surface, or dock to an orbital station and view high resolution planetary maps provide some nice visual effects.
I haven’t installed this yet, so this is by way of a preview. I’ll return to this.
Popularity: 8% [?]
Peer to Peer (P2P) technology is what drives the internet. There are many who say that downloading is evil and theft and in some cases it is true, but not only does it have many legitimate uses (e.g. Linux Distributions- distros are often provided in this way) because by its very nature, it takes a significant load off servers, but the Jury is out as to whether it deprives producers of money (from not selling their content) or helps them sell more because it makes it easier for people to try it out.
It’s said that between 1/3rd and 2/3rds of all internet traffic is P2P, specifically BitTorrent. Some people find it a bit hard to use and to provide download information you have to create a torrent seed. There has been a bit of a campaign by organisations like the MPAA against sites which host seeds. They won’t I imagine like Tribler!
Tribler is a software package fom Harvard University’s school of Engineering and Applied Sciences that simplifies using Bittorrent and lets you find other Tribler users without having a central server. The name Tribler (according to Wikipedia) stems from the word Tribe, refering to the usage of social networks in this P2P client.
Tribler’s purpose is a step in bringing internet TV closer to being an everyday occurrence, not only making it easier to find content but also quicker to download. There are versions for Windows, Linux and Mac.
Popularity: 9% [?]
This is a lovely collection of puzzles (I counted 27) by Simon Tatham. Not only are they cross platform, running on Linux, Mac and Windows (I’ve only tested them on Windows) but they also include full source code in C. You can download a 2MB archive file with all the source code files in them.
Of course they’d be even handier still if they were written in Flash and you could play them online! Any takers?
Popularity: 6% [?]
These days, in 3D computer games, the visuals of the game are not generally created a new for each game but use an engine, basically a library that developers have put together.
We take it for granted but it’s only 15 years since PCs were fast enough to support 3D games- now much of the work is done in hardware chips called GPU (Graphical Processing Units) but how these are used depends upon the development teams. Crytek had an instant hit with their game Far Cry, one of my favourites and for the next version of that they have developed CryEngine2.
This is a very impressive demo with real time detailed shadows, time of day lighting, gorgeous vegetation with soft shadows and long fields of view. Buildings can break and you can even shoot vegetation! Not to mention very impressive character animation including facial expressions.
The ultimate aim of course is true photo realism and each new engine pushes closer to that; this demo gives an idea of where the state of the art is in 2007.
Popularity: 15% [?]
Hard to believe but this came out in 1995, 12 whole years ago. If you’ve been stuck in a cellar since then or are not into computer games then you should know that this was the first (more or less- there was Dune 2 before it) of a whole new genre. Real time Strategy. Many other games have followed and also other EA Command & Conquer games but this was the first one.
Building bases, tanks, ships, infantry and aircraft you have to defeat the enemy- whether you are playing the goodies (GDI) or the Baddies (NOD).
It’s available as a free download that works under Windows XP.
Popularity: 7% [?]
The latest version of Google Earth, the free downloadable software for Windows and Macs has a secret flight simulator built into it. Activated by hitting ctrl+alt+A you can fly in one of two aircraft over the surface of the earth.
There are instructions here on the key combinations. It’s not a combat sim, all you can do is fly but it makes nice use of the Google earth scenery and you can add all the layers- you have to view the sidebar then enable things.
Note, even with a fast net connection, if you want to see everything (I had roads and 3d buildings turned on) you have to hit the space bar now and then to pause it so it can play catch up and I have a 20 MB ADSL connection!
I spent a while flying over my part of London (East) and the screen shot above shows me approaching Canary Wharf from the south. Very nice. One or two minor bugs (this is beta) like closing the sidebar if you try to change location. But as a free toy this is superb and you get more accurate scenery than any other flight simulator out there!
Popularity: 6% [?]
The map shown was generated by Autorealm, a piece of open source software (for Windows). It is currently being rewritten to use a cross platform windowing library called WxWidgets so will eventually run on Mac and Linux.
It’s a credible piece of software, only a few MBs download and installation is very easy. There are a number of examples and it’s very easy to use. So if you’re a fantasy author needing to draw maps or a role playing game designer doing dungeons etc, or even just a game designer this is excellent. It even generates names.
To give you some idea of the power- consider the humble grids- ie the type of paper you would have drawn this on. There are Square grids, Hexagonal grids, Triangular grids, Diamond grids, Polar grids, Rotated Hex grids, Half-Diamond grids or none. The grids can be of any colour or size and are fully scalable and designable with secondary grids. Styles for the grids as well for the secondary grids. Grids can be drawn on top of objects. There is a list of features as long as your arm
The present version is 2.21 - but use the downloads link for 2.00, not 2.1 as that’s broken.
Popularity: 10% [?]
I used to have to some of the Robert Harbin books on Origami and was quite a paper folder aged 12. I’ve got a black belt in Origami- made it myself! (Boom boom!).
But these days, those waterbombs and flapping birds would not cut the mustard. Instead of the typical 20 or so steps needed to produce the figures, very complex patterns, up to 100 steps are needed and the results speak for themselves. The origianl rules apply- one sheet of paper, no tears or cuts. The dragon picture above illutrates this. Clicking the picture takes you to an article on Discover.com
These days, as with much else, software is used to design the shapes. Treemaker is an open source application written by Robert Lang and this is what makes these amazing shapes possible. It takes design complexity way what past man alone can produce.
Popularity: 17% [?]