Shaun Kime's Blog

First PhotoFly Experiments

shaunkime — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 03:59:31 +0000

I’ve been playing around with Autodesk Labs’ Project PhotoFly. It takes a set of images from a digital camera and stitches the viewpoints together to make a 3d model. Scanning interiors is a real pain and I haven’t gotten a good result yet. However, I did get pretty good results with this Greek bust that I had laying around. If you want to try for yourself, check it out at http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/photo_scene_editor/

Activate3D ICM 1.1 – Now Ready to Unite the World!

shaunkime — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 21:14:16 +0000

In February, we released a community edition of our 0.8 release. Although we had a 1.0 release of ICM in April, we did not ship an updated community version at that time. Today, we’re excited to share that we’ve released a new 1.1 version including a refresh for the Free Community Edition for Windows. If you’re impatient, you can download it here.

For the Kinect community at large, the newest and coolest feature is the Unity 3 (Free or Pro) integration. The 0.8 version of the product was much harder to pickup and play with because it really required you to modify the code. There wasn’t a level editor, and there wasn’t even a good file format for modifying a scene. With the Unity integration that problem has been greatly alleviated. Users can now drag and drop features into their level to create a world they can explore and interact with using Kinect and OpenNI.

Take a look at some of the incredible things that we’ve been able to accomplish:

East Coast Game Conference 2011 Is Over

shaunkime — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 04:33:03 +0000

When I was asked to be the technical chair for the East Coast Game Conference, I definitely didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I thought that I’d spend a couple of nights a week on it and call it a day. Oh how naive I was! I really had no clue what hard work went into making a successful conference. It definitely became a part time job, but I was able to meet and work with some really talented and exceptional people. The conference is a fully volunteer-driven event and everyone had their hearts set on making the best possible conference for our development community.

The payoff was huge. The speakers did a great job and the attendees never noticed the behind-the-scenes tiny fires that we put out. Everyone had great feedback and there are tons of ideas for next year.

Now that it is all over and the conference was a great success, I find myself a little saddened that something that became a big part of my life for 5 months and will miss the camaraderie of the team that put the conference together.

Activate 3D Launches New Version!

shaunkime — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 19:46:05 +0000

Take a look!

Activate3D launches Free Community Edition!

shaunkime — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 02:52:53 +0000

We’re tremendously excited to announce that we are providing our technology free for non-commercial use. We’re really looking forward to the feedback that people will be providing to us.

All you need is a USB Kinect camera and a PC and you’ll be able to try out our samples and SDK for yourself!
Download ICM

We’ve already started to get some great coverage from the game enthusiast press. Here are some top threads:
Joystiq
Eurogamer
Kinect-Hacks.com
Kinecthacks.net

East Coast Game Conference Submissions

shaunkime — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 05:10:34 +0000

I wasn’t quite sure what I was getting into when I agreed to be technical chair for the East Coast Game Conference. I knew what I wanted to have happen, namely try to get some really good technical sessions to make this the “must attend” conference in the Southeast. I’m happy to say that I’ve had to extend the deadline due to all of the people that want to present. We have far more submissions than we have space, so the tough part of narrowing down to a subset of such great entries has to begin soon.

East Coast Game Conference 2011

shaunkime — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 04:24:44 +0000

I’m really excited that we’ve announced the East Coast Game Conference for April 13th-14th 2011. In prior years, the conference was known as the Triangle Game Conference, but with the success in prior years it felt like it had grown beyond just the local RTP game industry.

This year, I’ve been put in charge of the technical sessions for the program. I’ve already started reaching out to people in the area and have been really excited by the positive response. I think this year is going to be very exciting and well worth your money to attend if you have any interest in developing games.

I sent out an informal poll to my contacts in the games industry, but thought that I’d open it up to anyone that is interested:

If you’ve never attended, why not?
If you did attend, what did you think?
What sessions worked well?
What sessions went poorly?
What kind of content would make you prioritize attendance?
What kind of content would make your employer want you to attend?
Would you consider presenting a 60-minute/30-minute/15-minute presentation?
Do you know of anyone that might be interested in giving a presentation?

Activate3D on CNN!

shaunkime — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 00:57:30 +0000

The video for the CNN segment is up!
http://newsroom.blogs.cnn.com/2010/10/27/the-big-i-super-accurate-video-games/
The CNN crew was great in getting us set up and ready to go. This is such a great opportunity for our startup!

Activate3D is live

shaunkime — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 09:34:30 +0000

The startup that I’m working at, Activate3D, is going to be on CNN’s the Big I today at 1:40pm. Our website is also live at www.activate3D.com. We are really excited!

Really cool paper from MS Research

shaunkime — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 16:49:46 +0000

A few years ago at TED, MS showed off something called Photosynth. It was an application that discovered correspondences between images submitted by end users and build them into a sort of 3 dimensional point cloud that allowed you to see how the pictures related to each other in 3D space. It was obvious where they were eventually going, which was to create 3D scans of environments from crowdsourced data. This paper has an update on how their research is going.

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=101822