November 21st, 2007 — fan, social graph, YouTube, Facebook, PWL
Stay in touch with events, new software, and offer your feedback/insights on how parallel worlds should develop!
On Facebook you can join as a ‘Fan’ at the link: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=7472551362
On YouTube I’m posting many of the PWL old and new videos at the link: http://www.youtube.com/rhoinkes
October 31st, 2007 — PWL, Stacey Spiegel, Rock & Roll, Virtual Worlds, Rockheim, Norway, PwlMMO
The Norwegian government continues to leak more project information to the press. Highlighted in this article is Virtual Rockheim once again - showing an image of the Holodeck-like 3d playlists amongst more information on the whole Museum project itself.
For those who can read Norwegian and wish to know more, see this link.
October 8th, 2007 — McIntosh Gallery, Conference, UofWestern Ontario, Playing the Gallery, PWL, Stacey Spiegel, 2007
While I was busy in Halifax @ ACADIA 2007, Parallel World Labs was involved in another Conference at the University of Western Ontario.
From October 3rd -5th 2007, the McIntosh Gallery at The University of Western Ontario hosted an international symposium called “Playing the Gallery: the art of games”.
Invited experts from creative industries, social sciences, humanities and applied sciences will discuss their current work in computer games with a perspective on what the implications of this dynamic form of cultural expression might imply for social change.
Stacey Spiegel, Co-founder and CEO of Parallel World Labs was the driving force behind the conference and a keynote speaker.
October 8th, 2007 — PWL, Sustainable Cities, ACADIA, 2007, OrbisRT
OrbisRT was featured at the ACADIA 2007 Conference, in the Sustainable Cities Workshop. OrbisRT provided the real-time visualization tools to explore and understand new development alternatives under study in the workshop for an area of Halifax, Canada.
Model data was imported from GIS, CAD, Google Sketchup, and the Polytrim software and explored interactively with different design alternatives from the local area and even from the Halifax Citadel.
As we evolve OrbisRT a little further, we will be releasing it as free and Open Source software to allow more informed design and decision-making in our urban environments, and encourage greater research collaboration in spatial disciplines.
October 8th, 2007 — Canadian Architect, CDRN, PWL, UofWaterloo, UofToronto, collaboration, OrbisRT, PD
I finally got my hands on a copy of the June 2007 issue of Canadian Architect. This issue features a number of articles by the Canadian Design Research Network, of which I am a Board Member. One of those articles is entitled The Changing Face of Practice which highlights the PWL software Poetic Dimensions (which is now merging into the new OrbisRT). Of specific note is the use of PD in an Immersive Media Lab environment, and for collaborative use.
October 8th, 2007 — Attrition, competition, 2007, Vortex, WASD
I am very happy to announce that our WASD Gameworks team not only won the PC Game category award @ Vortex 2007, but also the overall competition award for our game “Attrition.” Congrats to the whole team - it was quite an effort and quite an honour.
Now the next phase begins…the full Proof of Concept development will be getting underway shortly!
September 12th, 2007 — UofWaterloo, UofToronto, OpenGL, OpenSceneGraph, PWL, ICDVM, CLR, PD, Immersion Studios, Polytrim, OrbisRT, 3d, PwlMMO
OrbisRT is a next-generation visualization/game engine. It is a new Parallel World Labs initiative and builds upon prior work in the Centre for Landscape Research (UofToronto), ICDVM (UofWaterloo), and Immersion Studios. OrbisRT is a fully Open Source application (under the Apache license, though some components are LGPL, etc.), based on OpenGL, OpenSceneGraph, and a number of custom tools/modules (including some very nice Shader/Normal Mapping capabilities for terrain).
It is still very early days for this new application but the image here is from a model being constructed for an upcoming workshop and includes data from GIS, a 10kx10k aerial photo texture set, and photogrammetrically corrected (well in progress) models created in SketchUp (a 170+MB dataset), running at over 60fps on a 1920×1200 resolution screen (2.8GHz Pentium D, Nvidia 7950GX2 card not running in SLI mode). Thanks go to the Waterloo team for continuing to model this excellent new dataset!
Network control will be coming in the next week to complete the wrapping of the core PD and NeoPD tools that were used before, then on to all the new Game/MMO features of the previous PwlMMO client based on Torque Game Engine.
September 12th, 2007 — film, Machinima, Futurelab, gaming
Excerpt from: Machinima and education, Diane Carr (Futurelab)
Film and media educators cite similar advantages. Matt Kelland, Creative Director of Short Fuze has been running film-making workshops in schools. Matt argues that machinima offers educators:
“…sets, costumes, stunts and special effects that would be impractical or impossible on a student budget. You can very quickly film a scene many times over, reusing the dialogue and choreography, and see the effect of different styles and techniques. Plus a student can be simultaneously actor, director, writer, cameraman, set designer, lighting engineer, sound engineer, and editor, thus allowing them to appreciate the totality of the film-making process.”
September 6th, 2007 — PWL, Rock & Roll, music, Rockheim, Google Earth
The Norwegian government has officially released some early information on the new Rockheim Rock & Pop Museum and Virtual Rockheim Experience that Stacey Spiegel & I have been working on (well I’ve been focused on the Virtual side). Time to show Web 2.0 what ROCK & ROLL is all about. A PDF of the full-page article in the Norwegian press is viewable: Rockheim in the News! (the article is in Norwegian FYI)
August 28th, 2007 — Virtual Worlds, overview
Well not a comprehensive history but a ‘lighter’ history for those who are uncertain of the evolution of Virtual/Parallel Worlds. Have a brief read.