Virtual Environments for Collaborative Visualization and Experimentation.

Josh's blog

realXtend

Posted Fri, 03/12/2010 - 14:40 by Josh

The realXtend Open Source Platform for interconnected virtual worlds.

RealXtend, also known as Rex,  is a fork of OpenSim that incorporates the open source graphics rendering engine Ogre into it's viewer to give better particle effects and enable mesh files. The biggest advantage to RealXtend is that it extends the features of OpenSim to surpass the features offered by Second Life. For example users can import mesh files to use as avatars and the avatar editor in Rex has an extended feature set.

The Sun Microsystems ex-CEO blog.

Posted Wed, 03/10/2010 - 11:09 by Josh

Jonathan Schwartz, the one time CEO of Sun Microsystems, has a blog about what he couldn't say as CEO.  His post entitled "Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal" is a description of his encounters with sinister forces like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Steve Ballmer.  

He's an interesting guy.  The first CEO of a major company to post his resignation on twitter.  He posted it in the form of a haiku.

What in the World is WoW?

Posted Tue, 03/09/2010 - 11:40 by Josh

For those that don't know World of Warcraft or WoW, as it is often referred to, it is a virtual world.   It is classified as an MMORPG it has more than 10 million subscribers worldwide. It has won many awards and is considered to be one of the best video games of all time. 

Rendering Tools

Posted Fri, 02/19/2010 - 10:00 by Josh
Rendering is the process of generating a photo realistic images from a 3d model.  Rendering tools are used on models produced in Blender, Maya, Max, and pretty much any other 3d graphics program. Many applications will have their own proprietary rendering tool built in, but the external rendering tools that were built to do nothing but render can achieve better results.

Sirikata

Posted Fri, 02/12/2010 - 18:06 by Josh

Skindigo: The Indigo Plug-in for SketchUp.

Posted Fri, 02/12/2010 - 12:28 by Josh
Indigo Renderer

Indigo Renderer has a plugin for Sketchup that can turn your model into a realistic image that is nearly impossible to distinguish from a photographic image.  There is a free version with limitations and also an expensive version.  The limitations: Size is limited to 0.7 megapixel, or 1000x700 pixels, a watermark in the corner. 

Google, the ISP?

Posted Wed, 02/10/2010 - 16:29 by Josh

Google is planning to offer a broadband service capable of 1-gigabit-per-second data transfer rates.  It will be an experitmental service available only in select areas.  It is about 83 times faster than a Comcast broadband connection, to give an idea of speed.  This would open up a lot of doors for streaming media and higher quality interactive entertainment, (virtual worlds/mmo).