Virtual RadioHead

The video of the last single “House of cards” from Radiohead group is online. It is not a video done with camcorders. For this one, no cameras or lights were used. Instead, 3D plotting technologies collected information about the shapes and relative distances of objects with 3D motion sensor and lasers. The video was created entirely with visualizations of that data. The two main technologies used to realize this video are Geometric Informatics, for 3D capture of the group members and close objects, and Velodyne Lidar for the 3D capture of distant objects such as the crowd and the environment around the scene.

Geometric Informatics is also blogging to share how is Life and Work in a Startup.

The most interesting is anyone can explore the data visualization using a 3D Viewer and also download it (pieces of the source code) on dedicated Google Code website to be able to modify and customize your own version of the “House of Cards” video. A youtube of the making-of is also available on the website.

source: MTV

Barak Everywhere

Three weeks ago, Barak Obama asked “how keep the USA competitiveness in the coming years” using “his” Linkedin profile and the Linkedin module Answer.

I submitted an answer to his Linkedin question in order to see what will be the effect of doing that.
So, I received “his” answer this morning at 5.40am.
By clicking on the link for complete details, you go directly on dedicated web page to share your ideas on the competitiveness theme.
By curiosity, I browsed the Barack Obama web site, and noticed at the botton right of the homepage that Obama is Everywhere…

Live in Google 3D World

Google has launched yesterdays is “second life” project named Lively. Obviously, a Google account is needed and it is a beta version as GMail since March 21 2004.

As Google is new in the virtual worlds area and a challenger of Second Life from Linden Research (created in June 23 2003 with approximately 13 million accounts registered all around the world in March 2008).

Lively enhances the virtual universe by integrating some new interesting and some funny features. First, Lively is presented as an Firefox and Internet Explorer add-on/extension. Then, you have around 30 virtual worlds. Like Second Life, you can customize almost everything, from your avatar to your own universe. More, you are able to add some videos using YouTube on virtual TV set or movie theater wide screen.

The stand out innovation in Lively comes through the availability to integrate/export your universe on your blog, on your Facebook profile or on your MySpace page. Then, you can connect and have some discussions with your “friends” or connections or guest visitors on the website.

But, there is ä but. Google Lively plug-in is only available for Windows XP SP2 and Vista OS. The Mac OS X and Linux users will have to wait as usual.

I think it will be interesting to integrate Google Sketchup within Lively to have also the ability to create our own furniture, apparels and accessories catalogs or integrate 3rd application such as SquareClock technology to design our our own “rooms” and “places” libraries. We can also imagine a professional/enterprise version of Lively mixing Google Adsense features to create virtual showrooms of your company and your products such as Sobuzzy is proposing or virtual office like the IBM one in Second Life.

source: Google

Pogo navigation

I received two weeks ago an invitation to beta test the new web browser from AT&T Pogo.

Pogo is based on Mozilla open source web browser. We retrieve most of the GUI, menus, toolbars and options.

However, they modify the approach. It is no more multi-tab navigation but multi-cell navigation. You can reach your cells through the springboard ot the collections. The look&feel is using the fashion effect of the moment such as the “mirror” effect and the “3D” windows layers as we have in Vista. You have also a visual navigation into your bookmarks, or groups of bookmarks. They add a new status bar where you can find the history of your cells navigation.

It is very nice and seems to be as fast as Firefox or Safri or Opera browsers. Unfortunatly, Pogo runs only on windows platform.

source: AT&T Pogo

Xobni, now with Linkedin

This great productivity tool on top of Microsoft Outlook (for the moment) for which I was part of the beta testing session is now integrating Linkedin feature.
So my friend, Hervé, who never stops thanking me for sending him an innvitation, do you notice that enhancement?

source: Xobni