Microsoft: new 3-D viewing technique requires no special glasses
Posted by Graeme on Friday, January 23 2004
Noted at Business Weekly: Microsoft researchers have unveiled a new technology that fools the human brain into processing 2D images – on movie screens, TV screens, computer screens in magazines or newspapers, or even photo albums – in three dimensions.
“All the technology requires is two slightly displaced images of the same object and it will trick the brain into thinking that it is looking at a 3D model,” says Antonio Criminisi, of the company's Cambridge-based research group.
MSR Cambridge recently uploaded the first publicly available demo of the technology onto its website, using images beamed back by NASA’s Mars Lander. NASA had itself published the images as ‘anaglyphs’, designed for viewing in 3D with red-green glasses, and therefore ideal subject matter to prove the effectiveness of the technology.
An online demo of the technology can be found here
View 3-D data from Mars
Posted by Graeme on Friday, January 16 2004
The Maestro team has released the first dataset acquired on Mars by the Spirit rover. Details at http://mars.telascience.org/softwaredownload/datadownload
Sketching in 3-D
Posted by Graeme on Wednesday, December 17 2003
If you're not a fan of complex 3-D apps with hundreds of controls, requiring complex procedures to build even the simplest shape, you might want to keep an eye on http://www.curvy3d.com/. The program, currently in beta testing and due for general release in Feb. 2004, is being acclaimed by testers as remarkably fast and easy to use. Another, simpler app is SoftTeddy, the topic of a recent slashdot.org discussion on the topic. (A BitTorrent link to a cool demonstration video is here.) Also mentioned by numerous sources as another simple sketch-oriented 3-D solution is SketchUp.
Discreet ships 3DS Max 6
Posted by Graeme on Sunday, October 19 2003
Noted at Digit Magazine: 3DS Max 6 ships this week, with new features including an advanced schematic view for complex scene management; integrated mental ray 3.2 renderer; a new event-driven particle system; reactor 2 stuntman dynamics; support for .DWG file import/export with ObjectARX support; vertex painting; enhanced modelling and skinning tools; HDRI support; and, says the company, improved reliability and performance. In related news, Discreet is also shipping the Windows version of Combustion 3, with a a Macintosh OS X version slated for release in early 2004. Read more...
MS Patch leads to Max Mayhem
Posted by Graeme on Tuesday, August 19 2003
A thread on slashdot.org suggests that the recently released Patch MS03-026 from Microsoft may cause compatibility problems with 3D Studio Max, leading to corrupted scene files. Uninstalling the patch fixes the problem.
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