Thinking inside the box

Not that I have time for this sort of thing right now, but when I saw a post on the NMC Campus Observer advertising the availability of Stephane Zugswang's Virtual Reality Room (VRR), free and copyable for educational or non-profit uses within Second Life, I felt I couldn't miss the opportunity to observe the Tuesday demonstration, which as it turned out, included a whole wealth of attendant information.

The VRR is basically a square room. The nuance is in the application of seamless tiling to create an expansive vista that is not square but which appears, for lack of a better word, global - hence depending on the subject chosen, endless, as if you were standing in a real environment stretching all around you. This is achieved by using Apple Computer's QTVR technology. It is not a true QTVR viewed through the Quicktime player, but done to export textures applied to a Second Life cube to achieve the same effect.

And this effect can be quite remarkable insofar as Second Life graphics, that is as long as you can manage to stand inside the circular boundaries of the floor marker. As you can see if you have occasion to visit the NMC Resource Center to secure your own copy, stepping outside that boundary can sometimes lead to distortion as if you're standing in the sky for instance. Since the location at the NMC is also a working VRR, you'll have an option to judge for yourself by clicking on the HUD to change the setting and see the change render around you. Based on your choice, you can set the HUD on your own copy to be only visible by you or available to be clicked on by anyone as it is at the NMC. Depending on the speed of your computer, you'll just need to wait a bit for the scene to render. Examples ranged from real world vistas such as cityscapes to effectively shrinking one down in size to stand inside of a now larger than life room. And the entire affair can be rez'd or collapsed with hardly any effort.

To create the raw material for his rooms, Stephane prefers a good SLR camera along with a steady tripod. The process of photographic QTVR creation requires rotating the camera to take a series of overlapping pictures which are stitched together within a QTVR application. The pictures can be retouched if necessary using an application such as Photoshop. Stephane uses two lenses, depending on the subject. His Nikon 10.5 mm fisheye lens lets him capture his scene in eight pictures while he uses a telephoto lens that lets him do same in 16.

After capture, the whole affair is assembled and converted into a QTVR image using any number of available QTVR applications. Stephane uses and recommended the RealViz Sticher, which comes in three price options. The unlimited version, which depending on the exchange rate, currently costs just under $600 U.S, has features and options that Stephane recommends will be very welcome and worthwhile for anyone who seeks to create a number of such room textures. There are number of other applications and utilities that can create QTVRs, even freeware like Panotools (see SourceForge link). Given that it's free and has a user and knowledge base to draw from, Panotools is certainly worth more than you paid for it, but Stephane suggests that if you can afford it, you'll find it much easier and far less frustrating to use something like Sticher. A good application and a practiced hand can produce a QTVR in 10 minutes, depending on the subject.

Another exciting option is to create your landscape, even fantastic or otherworldly ones, within 3d applications and export the render as QTVR. Some applications already support this option (Bryce, Lightwave, Terragen) or require a add-on/plug-in (Mojoworld, 3DS Max) or a helper application to post-process (Maya). Post-processing output is sometimes done as well in lieu of internal or add-on methods for better speed to render.

Either photographically or via 3d rendering, the final output is exported as flat images to be imported into Second Life as textures: six, one for each wall, floor and ceiling. The process is described in a tutorial within the VRR Documentation packet. Also, there is a VRR Picture Controller for sale at Stephane's store, the VRR Shop if one would rather opt for that method.

This project is a cooperative venture between Stephane, the NMC, infoisland.org and the Commonwealth Islands to help expand the tools available to educators and non-profits. The particular version in question will only work on a select list of sims, all of which relate to education or non-profit use. Currently there are over a hundred such sims. To be added to this list, the requirements are that the sim must be founded for educational or non-profit use and be tied to a real-world organization. Parties interested in adding their own sim to this list need contact Lorelei Junot in Second Life.

Eight sizes of the VRR are included within the kit, starting at 20 square meters and going up to 120 sqm, which constitutes a near quarter-sim. There is a larger size that is a full sim that is available only in the retail unrestricted version (as in can be placed anywhere). That and all other retail versions, along with more environment textures and an application to help bring your own custom textures into use are available for purchase at the VRR Shop. The NMC has stated that they also intend to make more room textures available at their location as they become available, I assume through the product of community efforts now that this free version of the VRR is available.

I had been thinking that one of the effective uses for virtual world education might be to negate scale and as well place the student inside of a setting for a new perspective. This tool is pretty much an application towards that end. I'm very much looking forward to the novel uses that I'll have wished I'd thought of yet to come.

Windows users go on Safari

The latest version of Apple Computer's Safari browser, now in beta, promises to offer its ease of use and yet another alternative to Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and others for users of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

What's probably more important to Windows web developers who must test their builds against all these is that not having a Mac isn't a barrier to now test against Safari, since the Windows version should render and behave the same way as its Mac sibling. Given that Mac has recently achieved its highest market share gain at 8% and likely to grow further, testing against Safari is now more of a priority for developers who wish to "bulletproof" their builds as much as possible against failure before release and the PC version of Safari should be a welcome tool in their tool-kits.

Warner casts a Blu-pall over high-def landscape

A probably fatal blow in the high-definition battle between HD-DVD and competing standard Blu-Ray was cast on Friday when Warner Brothers announced that it would be, starting in May 2008, exclusively Blu-Ray. Subsidiaries New Line Cinema and HBO Films were excluded from the announcement, leaving those studios free to make their own decisions. However, it is expected that both will follow Warner into the Blu-Ray exclusive camp. Warner Brothers will likely continue to honor any existing HD-DVD promises through May, though HD-DVD releases will lag behind standard and Blu-Ray title releases.

The decision of the last major studio to support both formats to change its stance to be now exclusive to Sony Blu-Ray forced a quick cancellation of Toshiba's planned CES announcement for HD-DVD, since Warner Brothers was said to feature prominently in that press release, being touted as one of the success factors for HD-DVD and one of the most prolific studios to release high-def titles.

HD-DVD supporters, Toshiba, Microsoft, Paramount Pictures & subsidiary Dreamworks, and Universal Studios remain the only significant backers of HD-DVD while the Blu-Ray camp includes not only major studios Disney, Fox, Lionsgate, MGM, Sony Pictures-Columbia Studios and now Warner Brothers, but most of the smaller studios and distributors as well as most hardware and PC vendors. The Warner move gives the Blu-Ray camp about 70% title share, according to the Financial Times; with more to follow IF Paramount (and Dreamworks) exercises an alleged clause in its HD-DVD switch agreement that allows it to reverse its exclusive move if Warner were ever to drop HD-DVD. Even prior to the Warner announcement, a number of smaller studios that had been HD-DVD exclusive announced that they would be supporting Blu-Ray as well, indicating growth for Blu-Ray, while no such defections occurred from amongst the exclusively Blu-Ray supporters. Even the controversial decision last year for once-format-neutral Paramount and its subsidiary, Dreamworks, to defect to the HD-DVD camp excluded any Dreamworks films by Steven Spielberg, who was said to be either a backer of Blu-Ray or someone who favored supporting both formats.

Warner Brothers executive, Kevin Tsujihara, specifically mentioned that Warner Brothers did not take any money from the Blu-Ray group to come to its decision, contrasting the decision last year of Paramount and subsidiary Dreamworks, to switch from format neutrality to be exclusive to HD-DVD, a move the New York Times later revealed to have been motivated by a payout from the HD-DVD group for $100 million and $70 million respectively to make the switch. Warner Brothers was said to have been courted with a similar deal to switch to HD-DVD exclusivity, which had it occurred, would have likely ended in a format stalemate.

This move by Warner Brothers was said to reflect industry concerns that the format war was hurting the overall adoption of either format since consumers were both confused and wary of purchasing product that could at one point become obsolete. This has kept high definition disc sales stagnant at a minute fraction of potential sales compared to standard DVD. Director Michael Bay, who was highly critical of Paramount's decision to switch to the HD-DVD camp and who was initially furious that his blockbuster Transformers would only appear on HD-DVD, openly stated his opinion that the money used to essentially bribe Paramount and Dreamworks came from Microsoft and that Microsoft's true motives were not to back HD-DVD but to ensure that the format war would continue until Microsoft could develop a high-definition digital download service, undercutting both. Apple Computers, which does continue to expand its own digitial downloads service for movies, was a backer of Blu-Ray and recent news has indicated that Apple intends to offer Blu-Ray drives in its computers at some point soon.

There has been no news on how this might effect the third format, VMD, which unlike either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, uses a red laser and is said to offer a much cheaper alternative for high-definition content for vendors since it does not require the same level of retooling to produce the discs. It seems likely though that the Warner Brothers announcement will spell doom for this late-comer on the high definition scene.

Update: Apparently New Line Cinema made the expected move to Blu-Ray exclusivity. This will bring the impressive New Line catalogue over to exclusive Blu-Ray distribution, expected to include the Blockbuster Lord of the Rings trilogy whenever that anticipated title makes its high-definition disc debut. There is no word yet that I've seen about HBO Films.

Also, the purported reasons that Michael Bay assigned to Microsoft support of HD-DVD may well come to pass at some point, subsuming movie disc sales to those of digital downloads in the same fashion that CD sales, though still strong, continue to give way to digital downloads. In addition to Microsoft X-Box Live, the pairing of Apple iTunes & Apple TV, and those already available through cable and satellite, Netflix is intending to offer a streaming downloads service as well, premiered at CES. Sony has hinted at much the same for the PS3 with movies and other media potentially available through portals such as Playstation Home. Given that Sony is the only hardware vendor that actually owns their own extensive movie catalogue, competing services might find themselves starved for certain titles or scrambling to lock up exclusive deals of their own. If such fractured availability should occur, I would think it could only harm the adoption of digital downloads in the same way that the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray battle harmed mass adoption of either format.

Update: HBO Films have moved to Blu-Ray exclusivity as well. There is some rumour that Paramount/Dreamworks is mulling a move away from HD-DVD according to the Financial times, Universal possibly as well according to Variety, despite statements to the contrary made by both studios. Both studios have declared support for HD-DVD but Paramount's only move so far is to delay two forthcoming HD-DVD titles by three weeks. And further questions have been met with a no comment response.

In any case, I think the final summation of all this is that it's too bad that the studios could not have made a compromise forestalling this format war. This see-saw battle not only hurt themselves and left both standards in jeopardy of being preempted by direct downloads, but seems likely to have left over a million adopters of HD-DVD bereft of future title releases and having to hope for after-market solutions to keep their HD-DVD high-def title investments viable down the road. Apparently corporate memories are short and the lessons learned in the debacle that occurred between VHS and Betamax that helped lead to universal adoption of a single CD and DVD standard had since been forgotten.