Ivan Southerland
How could you invent all this? "I didn't know it was hard."
Will Wright and Jill Tarter
Will Wright and Jill Tarter discuss how video games can be benefitial to education. Will Wright is the video game designer of the Sims and Spore. I believe Jill Tarter is the astronomer on which the movie and book Contact was based.
Jack's Hydrogen Car
30 years ago Jack Nicholson was promoting a hydrogen car. I wonder what's the story behind why it never came to fruition. Why did the company never build that solar plant to produce hydrogen?
Watershed Vortex
Construction by the I-10 freeway overpasses in West LA. The city is building what looks like large rainwater cisterns at a lot of the freeway overpasses in West LA. Are they for rainwater capture and storage? That could be useful for watering the surrounding freeway buffer landscape. Although, I bet that rainwater draining from the freeway is fairly nasty. Maybe they are part of the City of Los Angeles Storm Water Program. Perhaps they are structures to hold in line netting systems or Continuous Deflection Separator (vortex?)
Wall-E Subway Ad - POV?
I was down in the red line the other day and I saw this ad too. Riding between Hollwood/Highland toward Universal City it appears outside the window as you zoom through the tube. I'd like to get more info on this thing. How does it work? Is it a series of LCD screens or is it something more interesting than that like a persistance of vision (POV) type effect?
Second Star to the Right and Straight on Till Morning.
I can fly! At least inside this verticle wind tunnel at iFly in Universal Citywalk, Hollywood, CA. The video shows my second flight from start to finish. I really start to get the hang of it in this two minute flight. I can move forward and back, up and down and spin around.
3D in Video Games
Johnny Lee is great. He's showing people what's possible. Informing the consumer so they demand video games have cool new features.
What he's showing in this video has been around a long time. I implemented it on a SGI Indy with a web cam in 1996. At that time I had access to amazing virtual reality setups. I was working for the Army Research Institute putting together virtual reality training systems. I wanted to share the experiences that full body tracking with head mounted displays allowed ( I still do ), but it had to be cheaper. So I found this paper called Fish Tank VR. And it worked, just like Johnny's head tracking video.
But who was there to tell? No you tubes back then. So I thought, "I'll join the game industry, spread the word from inside the machine." Thing is, when you're inside a machine you have to act like a fully operational cog of said machine. Finding ways to transform the output of the machine are difficult.
There is hope. The games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band are changing the video game developer's opinions on games that require peripherals. They are seeing that people want, understand and will pay for new methods of interaction. Add that to the pressures of people like Johnny Lee and we might see some VR yet.
On Safari
My Dad is on safari in Kenya. He's been there in Kenya for quite a while now. The ship that he is Chief Engineer on is there unloading grain supplies. He wasn't sure if he was going to be able to get out and around in Kenya because of all of the recent civil unrest, but he finally got to go ashore and on a safari.
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