Friday, July 01, 2005
Looking Glass
Jim Zaun, James Burke and Patrick McKercher used Looking Glass, Sun's new 3D desktop browser to create the first complex nested globe (there's a mockup of nested globes in Activeworlds Education Universe, which has the virtue of being connected to immersive 3D worlds to explore , which can't be done in Looking Glass, but Jim actually had to work with matematicians at the Univ of Arizona to generate the globes).
We demo'd this at the big international Java conference in San Francisco on Weds.
You can see a crude video of an early version here: http://scylla.cse.ucsc.edu:8080/05-06-16.mpg
The nested globes looked fantastic on Sharp's 3D laptop
We'll post a more refined version of the video soon.
Looking Glass also has a new scheduler program that might be a fun approach for k-web timeline:
http://k-www.mickey.ai.kyutech.ac.jp/cosmo/index_e.html#screenshot
Google is also announcing some amazing tools that will big huge boosts in realizing James' vision of k-web. One is Google Earth, which allows you to fly aroind the world and even see 3D buildings (i have just seen my house from space (not 3d) and flown over paris, thru the grand canyon (i could see rapids and rocks!) and Yosemite (not quite so much deatil, but falls are there, and hiking trails). just amazing! http://earth.google.com/index.html you will need a game card to run this.
Google is also hosting video, which givesd us great potential as well. https://upload.video.google.com/
let's get going!
