Virtual worlds make it possible for architecture to be constantly changed and modified in ways that are not possible/practical in the real world. With the advent of collaborative virtual world technologies, we now have a way for us to shape our buildings as we use them. In this video, Jon Brouchoud of The Arch blog discusses wikitecture in virtual worlds using Second Life as an example. Wikitecture in virtual spaces has the potential to liberate architects as well as the users of virtual world architectures from the design-then build-then hope that it works paradigm.

A video guide on how you can share Cobalt worlds with others.

Rich White at the Greenbush Labs has posted a video of the collaborative virtual museum that he was able to create in only 30 minutes using Cobalt and free content derived from Google's 3D warehouse. Enabling such rapid creation of free multi-user virtual spaces is exactly what the Cobalt project is seeking to support on a broad scale. What kind of world would you like to create?

What can you do in a virtual world? Quite a bit, although we're still quite far from the answer being, “Anything you can do in the real world.” Here's a baseline list of today's raw capabilities, in the language of virtual worlds. (Th...

Here is the first of several videos from Rich White at the Southeast Kansas Educational Resources Center who recently completed a formal pilot/focus group using Edusim (a stripped down Cobalt) at the Greenbush Labs. The video shows 6th graders collaboratively building an "Eco City World", a "Rockets & Space World" and a "Cells, Organs, and Anatomy World". In this first focus group, the students were asked to create .obj files for import into Cobalt and then to begin using Cobalt navigation, connection tools, and TPainter a away of adding additional content to their worlds.

Say hello to Emily. She's a pretty effective spokesperson for Image Metrics' high-quality facial animation software. Unlike with garden variety mocap, facial rig animation can be developed with no need for markers or special cameras. Instead, the Image Metrics technology uses proprietary software to analyze video and develop data that can then be used to drive any facial rig. The analysis is then retargeted to a CG facial model. The end result is an animation that is incredibly compelling.

This type of technology gives us a glimpse at where we may be going with regard to far more compelling animated avatars than we currently have within today's virtual worlds. Imagine CG Emily's face being superimposed on an avatar frame based on real-time webcam video analysis. Of course, for that to happen, we will need much faster video-camera enabled machines than we have at present. Lets hope that open software and Moore's law will get us there within the next several years.....

Microsofts chief software architect Ray Ozzie recently announced that the company will be offering internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers. The platform is called Azure and will run Windows servers and the .Net framework in the cloud as a hosted, pay-as-you go service. It'll be part of what they're calling Live Services, and it'll run Live apps, .Net apps, SQL server, Sharepoint servers, and Microsofts Dynamics CRM. With these developments, it appears that Microsoft is trying to move in the direction of Amazons Web Services and cloud computing initiatives from other enterprise IT players, including everyone from IBM to RackSpace. It may also be that they are moving away from the OS-on-a-box model in favor of cloud services. The writing is on the wall for Microsoft. They need to innovate quickly. Vista is not what they thought it would be. Instead, its turning out to be a good reason for people and companies to switch to the MacOS. If Microsoft gets any traction with cloud services on a broad market basis, then we may be increasing the world's dependency on ubiquitous network connectivities (and active subscriptions) as a prerequisite for even the most basic of interactions with computers and other devices. Such a scenario has its dangers since users of such services will need to have 'network' available to do anything. I'm not sure that such a scenario would be in most people's best interest.

In The Perfect Storm, a fisherman tries to escape his economic burdens by shooting through the convergence of three massive storm systems. If he survives, he comes out a better man. We have a perfect storm of energy and economic problems, but I ...

This video shows the Cobalt metaverse browser being tested on a 13-foot by 5-foot multi-touch visualization wall equipped with six high-definition projectors located at the Renaissance Computing Institute engagement center at Duke University. The input drivers are being developed by Dr. Xunlei Wu so that users can directly manipulate high-resolution data using both hands and multiple fingers for a more natural and intuitive data exploration experience. In the video, Dr. Wu is using both gesture and touch to navigate through, and rearrange content between, two Cobalt virtual worlds.

The Renaissance Computing Institute brings together computer and discipline scientists, artists, humanists, industry leaders, entrepreneurs, state leaders and educators for collaborations designed to reshape science, the economy, the state of North Carolina and the world. RENCI leverages its expertise and resources in leading edge computing, networking and data technologies to ignite innovation and find solutions to previously intractable problems. Founded in 2004 as a major collaborative venture of Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the state of North Carolina, RENCI is a statewide virtual organization. For more, see www.renci.org.

Here is a prototype of an interactive CAVE unit being developed by Rich White in Kansas. In March of next year, the kids at Greenbush will be building their own very simple CAVE unit to run Cobalt for an even more immersive and engaging experience than they had using by running Cobalt on an interactive whiteboard.

There's a lot of interest in voting technology for the expected record numbers of voters in the US presidential election, and voting widgets have become an expected accessory in social Web sites. But the simplest voting technology is no explicit t...

The importer being worked on by Phua Khai Fong and Aik-Siong Koh is working nicely now. This is a comparison between a model loaded in SketchUp with the same model loaded into Cobalt. There are still some problems with texturing as they are working on getting material properties to import correctly. Its great to see the progress. This functionality will hopefully be incorporated into the next build. Thank you for your contribution!

Linden Lab has announced that its now going to be moving into the enterprise 3D collaboration space. It recently announced a new product called "Immersive Workspaces" which is basically an area in Second Life set aside for corporate meetings. That more secure area represents "a completely exclusive and secure experience, with no connectivity to the Second Life mainland." Their intent is to develop a complete collaboration experience for the enterprise. I guess that is Linden Lab's attempt to try and ensure that business meetings are not disrupted by griefers or by unwelcome barrages of flying penises. Looks like the enterprise virtual worlds space is getting a bit more crowded. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

Another test of the new KMZ importer from Aik-Siong Koh. Note that the textures are mapping nicely onto the relatively complex model! Soon we will be able to import lots of content from Google's 3D Warehouse into Cobalt. That will be nice...

Aik-Siong Koh and his team have been successful in creating a KMZ file importer for Cobalt. Here is a screenshot from the first successful load of a rubber ducky with textures. This means that we will soon be able to import into Cobalt a wealth of 3D content from Google's 3D Warehouse. We will also be able to use the free version of SketchUp as a primary content creation tool. The importer will be included in an upcoming release. Stay tuned.

The Amelia Project is an effort by Portugese graduate student Filipe Santos to leverage Croquet/Cobalt as a way of helping young children to become empowered to collaborate, negotiate, and make decisions about the configuration of the real world spaces that they inhabit (playgrounds, classrooms, theatrical sets, etc.). The philosophy behind this project is to help enable a new culture of childhood in which children are more active participants in societal decision-making. Based out of Lisbon Portugal, the project takes its name from the primary school in Lisbon, Portugal, where the project originated. The video shows how the researchers are beginning to use Cobalt as a means of exploring the use of version control to help in managing various configuration proposals that are developed by the children who are proposing various configurations of a space. Using these versions, an instructor can help structure discussion and facilitate debate among the children.

I wanted to post a quick response to John's link to a new book on IT management. But the site wouldn't let me because my reaction didn't fit in the 5000 character box. So I'll have to do it this way...

The UK's Tech Radar has a preview of a nice piece that will appear in PC Plus. It overviews Intel's Miramar work on 3D and collaboration. Meanwhile, there's a nice discussion of much more of the history of Miramar on this blog.I think the...

TurtleGeometry by Harold Abelson and Andrea diSessa has a lot ofinteresting examples of turtle graphics. Especially I was fascinated"inspy" program. The basic structure of inspy is same as spiral. Butinstead of the side, value of the angle is changed in each step. Ihave explored a bit for a demo of Chalkboard projecthttp://tinlizzie.org/chalkboard/#Inspi.

To make the study easier, I made a trick to connect an eventhandler and an inspy program. You can play with a dynamic version ofinspy program with it (Please move the mouse on next rectangle). Andyou may find various patterns even from such simple program. Here Ipresent stand alone version (Only Firefox and Safari are supported).

if (window.Element && !Element.prototype.getBoundingClientRect) { Element.prototype.getBoundingClientRect = function() { var coords = { left: 0, top: 0, width: this.offsetWidth, height: this.offsetHeight }; var element = this; while (element) { coords.left += element.offsetLeft; coords.top += element.offsetTop; element = element.offsetParent; } return coords; };}turtleInit = function() { if (window._watcher) return canvas = document.getElementById("canvas"); _watcher = document.getElementById("watcher"); source = document.getElementById("source"); ctxt = canvas.getContext('2d') ctxt.lineWidth = 1 canvas.onmousemove = canvas_onmousemove Turtle = { x: canvas.width / 2, y: canvas.height / 2, angle: 0, color: "black", } move(function() { inspi(15, mouseX(), mouseY()) })}forward = function(n) { ctxt.strokeStyle = Turtle.color ctxt.beginPath() ctxt.moveTo(Turtle.x, Turtle.y) Turtle.x += n * Math.cos(Turtle.angle) Turtle.y += n * Math.sin(Turtle.angle) ctxt.lineTo(Turtle.x, Turtle.y) ctxt.stroke() ctxt.closePath()}back = function(n) { forward(0 - n) }right = function(n) { Turtle.angle += n * Math.PI / 180}left = function(n) { right(0 - n) }clean = function(n) { ctxt.clearRect(0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height) Turtle.x = canvas.width / 2 Turtle.y = canvas.height / 2 Turtle.angle = 0 Turtle.penDown = true}color = function(aColor) { Turtle.color = aColor}// Register an event handlermove = function(func) { _whenMove = function() { clean() func() }}// Utility functionsmouseX = function() { return _mouseX }mouseY = function() { return _mouseY }_whenMove = null_mouseX = 0_mouseY = 0canvas_onmousemove = function (e) { var rect = this.getBoundingClientRect() _mouseX = Math.floor(e.pageX - rect.left) _mouseY = Math.floor(e.pageY - rect.top) _watcher.innerHTML = "mouseX: " + _mouseX + " mouseY: " + _mouseY source.innerHTML = "inspi(15, " + _mouseX + ", " + _mouseY + ")" if (_whenMove != null) _whenMove()}// if (window.addEventListener) window.addEventListener("load", turtleInit, false)inspi = function(side, angle, inc) { for (var i = 0; i inspi = function(side, angle, inc) { for (var i = 0; i inspi(15, mouseX(), mouseY())