A nice use of browser 3D interactivity, follow this link:

The credits list GreenScan3D, a company which uses LIDAR to generate golf course terrain maps.

The result is a very interactive 3D view of some golf greens.

(via papervision3d blog)

Conan's take on some of the twitter nonsense.

Bonus video - Jimmy Fallon and Will Ferrell do a makeover. Nothing to do with Twitter, except that @jimmyfallon posted the link on Twitter. He uses it well, Conan just mocks it.

Someone just posted this to the OpenSceneGraph forums. Evidently Google released O3D a couple weeks ago - it's a plugin for loading 3d content in a browser, and it uses Javascript to drive the interaction. On the surface, it sounds conspicuously like C3DL, another browser plugin for loading Collada models. Read a little further, you'll see there are some technical differences, but even if there were not technical differences, the advantage would go to any product from google. At least until Firefox gets native support.

I tried google's plugin with Chrome on my work desktop, their complicated sample gets about 4 fps, but I don't think my graphics card does shaders very well. The simple cube renders a lot faster.

Here's their demo video:

The advantage over Papervision or other flash-based code is that they can use DirectX hardware shaders. The disadvantage is having to install yet-another plugin.

Just caught a couple videos on Dutch site gerbster.nl - here's one of some Desktop VR using Papervision and WiiFlash to perform head tracking for a flash application -

Virtual Reality Head Tracking in Flash from gerb on Vimeo.

See their entry about it. Also check out their demo video of head tracking with a webcam instead of wii remote - the videos illustrate it pretty nicely.

Both are a little ways away from being widely usable - they use an external program to do the tracking (WiiFlash or gerbster's webcam equivalent) and serve the position through a local web server, but as Flash versions get faster, there's a real possibility of it all being done in the browser.

I just came across TileStack, an online version of the old Mac "natural language" programming tool HyperCard. Their FAQ says it's 95% compatible with HyperCard stacks, which sounds impressive. I never really used HyperCard, but it looked like a great tool for non-programmers to do slick GUI-type stuff, and remember some people who really liked it.

What's interesting here is that they translate the Speak/HyperTalk code into Javascript on their server, which runs native in any browser. I may have to tinker, but here's one of the stacks from their front page:

I've been tinkering with Papvervision3d, based on some tutorials on the Papervision2 site, specifically #6 here. I had to add some activate/deactivate event listeners to one of the generic examples to get it to keep from killing a cpu when not even activated, but I think this is alright now.

Testing this to see if it takes any less load as an embedded flash than direct swf loading:

Click and drag to rotate:

968 vertex (a couple thousand facets) sphere:

Simpler generic cow model:

If you've never been to threadless.com, (disclaimer - this link uses a referral system to credit me if you buy) check them out. They're an ongoing t-shirt design competition, with limited runs of the shirts. Popular ones get reprinted. One of the designs I like a alot, spoilt, has been reprinted:

An updated Wave Generator -

I've been looking at some different waveform generation, and updated the sine-wave generator from last year with a few other functions, using the harmonic series formulae on wikipedia for triangle, rear, and front sawtooth waves. Embedded below is the updated version, tinker with the number of harmonics for the non-sine waves and you should see how they converge.

Full Screen

Wikipedia Entries:
Triangle Wave
Sawtooth Waves

Yes, it's a woot-off over at woot.com today.

Use one of the Woot Checkers to auto-refresh.

I got a BOC in the last wootoff - but nothing usable except as white elephant.

If you've never heard of woot.com, here's a short description, or you can search the web for it - I'm sure there are some much better descriptions of it out there somewhere.

Woot.com is a site with one deal on one item per day. Usually it's a decent deal, occasionally I'll buy something. Their bizarre product descriptions and active discussion community really keep the site alive. About once a month, they'll have a "woot-off", where instead of one item all day, it's one item at a time until it's sold out, then another item, then another, for a couple days. Occasionally they'll insert a "Bag of Crap" into the mix, which is their random item, and everybody wants it for some strange reason. And the server dies. When a woot-off is really going, there'll be lots of LOLCats in the comments, mostly saying "Do not Want", and whining about wanting a BOC. The woot servers randomly replace references to BOC with other phrases using the same initials, "Bandolier of Carrots" for example.

I've seen some of the commercials on TV, but this one is silly enough to post. It's just under two minutes - listen to the lady reading the websites at the end -

UPDATE - Looks like youtube took down the video - try this Google result that seemed to work.

Just noticed a story from my Daily Press Daywatch email - I don't know how long we've been live, but the Hampton Roads area Street View is live on google maps. To try it, put in your address at Google Maps and see if a Street View option comes up. I thought I read somewhere that they wouldn't be able to do this area because of security issues with all the military bases around, but if you look closely at the blue lines, you'll notice they don't have street view at certain locations around the bases. It's a nice little feature. I noticed that my house is from before we had our garage door replaced last year, so I guess they've been working on it a while.

I tried to get Reginella's in this picture, but you can't really see it. I may spend part of this weekend looking for interesting people on streetview.

Summer is here again, and so comes the afternoon traffic from the peninsula to the south side. So, here's the annual link to trafficland.com -

Hampton Roads Cameras

Enjoy! It's likely you'll see me in the camera embedded above sometimes during the afternoon commute, although usually I try to find another route through downtown Hampton just to keep moving.

I noticed yesterday that the dilbert site has an embeddable widget, with different sizes for different types of web sites. Nice. check out http://widget.dilbert.com to embed your own (on facebook, myspace, lj, or whatever), or just bookmark the permalink to this post. They said the widget's archive will go back to at least 2005, and the dailies are in color. Sweet.

The office was finally back this week. Super-awkward dinner party that Michael traps Jim into. Embedded below, courtesy hulu.com -

Want more? Check out all of season 4 on hulu, or order DVDs from amazon:

I can't decide if this is cool or creepy, so I'll just call it weird. At first it looked so lifelike that I thought it was just two dudes in a suit or whatever. Be sure to watch long enough to catch it catching itself on the ice - better balance than I would have.

Well, over the next seven years, anyways. I heard Dave Rosenfield mention this the other day on local espn radio, and had to do a web search to verify.

Indeed, a local franchisee who owns six stores (I can't even think of six in Hampton Roads - where are they?) is in talks with the chain to open at least 40 more, according to hamptonroads.com / The Virginian Pilot.

I've heard of the Starbucks Quotient - density of Starbucks is supposed to tell you how trendy your neighborhood is. So, what will the Dunkin Donuts quotient tell you?

They have a new contract that they'll vote on in the next couple of weeks, but the strike could stop today. From the WGA website:

Yay! Another month or two and our shows should be back. Except that I read on cnn that Heroes won't be back till next year.

Saw an interesting mathematical function on populations, showing how it could be normal for a wild population to have seemingly chaotic rises and falls. I thought it'd be pretty easy to adapt the sine function previously posted to this "Verhulst" model:

Try some different growth rates (2.2 seems to work pretty well) to see the population bounce around from year to year.

Right click and download this link to the source if you want to compile it in Flex Builder.

I happened upon a link (via Mashable) that mentioned SearchMash - which is apparently a testing site for google search to try new features. They also have Flash SearchMash. Both pages have some interesting features, like a mini preview of pages so you can scan through your results a little faster.

I've been trying out the latest Netscape for a week or so, it seems pretty nice. I like that it shares a lot of code with Mozilla, so it can use the same extensions that Firefox uses (I really like my firefox all-in-one gestures plugin).

But also, this version of Netscape has a couple interesting features
- you can have a "Link Pad" in a sidebar, and drag links to it for later without necessarily bookmarking them.
- it claims to auto-correct mis-typed urls. For kicks, I tried "gooogle", which it fixed to "google".