Written on 20th April 2009
7 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
The guys over at IDEO Labs were fortunate enough to grab a tour of WATG’s Wimberly Labs and EON Reality’s new immersive 3D room.
The iCube is described as being:
“comprised of three white walls and a floor, all about 10′ x 10′ in size. Onto each surface is projected a high-resolution, stereoscopic image. A viewer stands in the room wearing polarized 3D glasses — like you might use in a 3D movie — with small markers that stick out a bit from the frames.
The markers are illuminated by IR LED floodlights located on the perimeter of the room, and IR-sensitive cameras use those positions to determine the precise location of each eye within the room. From those positions, stereo images for each projector are calculated and rendered on the fly, and the result is absolutely amazing.”
A video demo can be found below but I highly recommend you watch the HD version here.
Remember Shapeways, the awesome Dutch company that introduced us to fabricate 3D items really easy? They improved their service last week.
Since our last post, Shapeways made their services amazingly easier. Check out their latest service called “photoshaper”, a tool that prints your photo’s in 3d. 3d modelling skills are not required anymore.
Also, one can make nifty napking ring poems, with the ringpoem maker. Choose a font and Shapeways will do the rest. Excellent for that special event (marriage, conference whatever), these rings are about $50.
Granted, creating custom mousepads, tshirts or photoalbums can be fun for the family, but Shapeways offers an online service to create your own objects, how cool is that?!
While I was checking out News YCombinator website (a good source of fresh news, by the way), I came across a rather plain page (full specifications as PDF file)
Drawing talent for free
When I was a kid I liked to draw (mostly comics), but I was never very talented. But if I had had software like ILoveSketch then, who knows? Maybe that little passion would have grown and ultimately led to a full time job.
Seok-Hyung Bae, Ravin Balakrishnan and Karan Singh, three students of University of Toronto-Canada (Department of Computer Science), bring a new way to draw 3D curves models.
The system coherently integrates existing techniques of sketch-based interaction with a number of novel and enhanced features. Novel contributions of the system include automatic view rotation to improve curve sketchability, an axis widget for sketch surface selection, and implicitly inferred changes between sketching techniques. We also improve on a number of existing ideas such as a virtual sketchbook, simplified 2D and 3D view navigation, multi-stroke NURBS curve creation, and a cohesive gesture vocabulary.
After watching their video presentation I was sold (even if I am just a lousy amateur). The software is quite intuitive and it seems it does things that haven’t been done before. For hardware they use a Wacom tablet system.
Every product needs a design
Professional product designers will love this new way of working (a professional designer evaluated the system and shows the potential of their system for deployment within a real design process). I think this could be another startup idea ready to go in the wild. Because almost every new product needs to be designed first, the market for such system is already there. Enjoy the video!
Here’s your blogger live reporting from Web 2.0 Expo, New York City – ready to keep you up to date about the latest start-ups and tech news. It’s gonna be an interesting few days, with big shots like Adriana Huffington, Tim O’Reilly, Jay Adelson, and Clay Shirky sharing their views on the next web.
After spending a few hours in the awfully cold and boring Javits center, I’ve already met some interesting start-ups. Like Berlin-based 3D chat service Smeet. Founder Sebastian Funke pitched the service to me this morning. At first I was skeptical, I’ve seen so many 3D, avatar-crazy, Flash 9-based chatting services that they doesn’t manage to tickle my fancy anymore. Yet when Funke mentioned that Smeet is completely web-based and embeddable at different sites, I realized this one could actually be interesting.
Call me on my mobile
Users on Smeet can create their own multi mesh avatar (meaning your character is wearing a shirt AND jacket, they’re the only browser-based service offering that) and join a room for a good discussion or a useless chat with other users. They’re plenty of them, although being able to speak German is quite essential (Smeet has 200,000 users in its home country). Next to text-based chatting, users can also give a ring to their mobile phone – so that they can talk with users who are standing close to them in the virtual room.
There’s where the business model comes in, as the German service makes some money out of the calls users make. Another source of income is the virtual goods shop. Habbo Hotel proved this can be a solid way of making money.
Embed a room in your site
The development team of Smeet is now working on embeddable rooms, which Funke hopes to release next week in alpha mode. This could be really exciting, as you can drag your avatar to every Smeet-supported site and start a riot. You could even watch a YouTube movie together (see screenshot).
Funke presented an impressive list part of partners that will include rooms on their site. It consisted of major media companies like RTL, EMI, Universal, and Big Brother. He told me Smeet is looking for similar partners outside Germany, namely in the States and the larger European countries.
So in the end, just another chatting service turns out to be a company with a good userbase and healthy ambitions that will probably become reality one day.
I’ve showed this video to a couple of friends in Berlin (where I’m staying for a few days), and they all freaked out. Maybe because I left the “illusion” part out of it, I don’t know. But one thing is for sure, it’s a really cool effect. David OReilly is responsible for this hologram. He used “the Cat” from his award-winning but unfinished cartoon PSS and gave it a 3D effect with Anamorphosis, the same technique used in Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors (the one with the skull).
I wonder when the holograms become reality, Starwars style. On the iPhone it would probably look a bit like this:
Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views. Well, actually six questions, since we also ask the start-up to who he or she is passing the mic to.
This week we’re interviewing Fabrice Levy, founder of Web2Wave. This service proposes ‘a new way to surf the Internet’, this would be a cover flow browsing experience. And although the design of the site is sooo nineties, it could be a handy service for people who don’t use Mac’s Leopard (yet). And when you think about it: why not integrate cover flow in the most important application of your computer? If only Levy would hire a designer, so that the design matches the new approach on surfing.
How did you come up with the idea of Web2Wave?
“The idea came up when I was planning holidays using multiple web sites (book hotel, plane, rent a car…) and I thought it would be great if I could have all these sites in a single window to quickly switch from one to an other and moreover to store all this context for the next time I will have to plan holidays.
It’s easier to find what you’re looking for by flipping through pictures than by scanning a list of text entries. Cover Flow-style interfaces provide an easy and fun way to sort through large volumes of information and find the piece you want at any given time.” (more…)
Youtube has an alternative way to browse their content called the ‘Warp Player’. You can access it directly on http://youtube.com/warp_speed or via a small button that you only see when you watch a Youtube video full-screen. It’s that strange icon, with three dots, bottom left, on the right side of the Play button.
Although there is a link on the front page to the Warp Player I can’t seem to find any other information about it. Nothing on the blog and nothing on the dedicated Warp Player page. Not even ONE mention of ‘Warp’ in the extensive Youtube help files.
Maybe Youtube isn’t very proud of their Warp Speed player or they just think it is so self explanatory, like the Play button, that it doesn’t need any further introduction. I can image some people missed it so here is a Youtube Demo Video of a Youtube Video feature
If you want to experience it for yourself click this move, then click the full screen button and then click the Warp Player icon.
I remember downloading the first VRML browser in 1999. It promised to show me the web in 3D fashion. Unfortunately it never went anywhere. Until now, maybe.
Check this video of a 3D browser built by SpaceTime and demonstrated during CES yesterday. It shows an Apple CoverFlow like interface to many popular websites. In this example eBay is used. The first 10 seconds are boring but don’t look away:
Can you imagine browsing the web like this? What would your site or this blog look like in 3D? What would be the advantage of browsing like this? One thing is for sure; don’t try this on dial-up.
Want to try it yourself? Download SpaceTime 1.0 (Windows only, for now) and let us know how it worked for you.
By the way, have you checked out this 3D post as well? It allows you to search through the web cover flow style.
Written on 20th April 2009
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“The idea came up when I was planning holidays using multiple web sites (book hotel, plane, rent a car…) and I thought it would be great if I could have all these sites in a single window to quickly switch from one to an other and moreover to store all this context for the next time I will have to plan holidays. 
Written on 10th February 2008
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
