For the past few months, I’ve been working on a new product line intended to make VR content creation a lot easier. We realized that a lot of the technology behind our markerless motion capture product is also valuable in capturing just the raw geometry and textures of the person in the space. Since current trend in VR is 360 video with no real sense of depth, this is a substantial upgrade in visual immersion. Here are some videos outlining where we are right now.
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We passed our one year anniversary of being acquired by Organic Motion a month or two ago. In that year, we’ve been up to quite a bit.
Here’s a video of the project that I’ve been working on targeted to engagement training of soldiers.
Here’s a great intro video to our OpenStage markerless motion capture technology.
This is just the tip of the iceberg of the exciting things that Organic Motion has in the works.
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/
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:
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.
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
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.
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?
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!
Shaun Kime's Blog 