The people behind AIGameDev.com, Alex and Petra Champandard, are good friends of mine and live about 200 meters from my apartment in Vienna. They spent a lot of time over the last few months preparing for the launch, and it became harder and harder to go for lunch or ice cream with them… Not even tea with freshly baked chocolate chip cookies managed to draw them out in the last two weeks :). But I am highly impressed by what they have done so far, and I wish them a ton of luck!

At the time I am writing this, you have only 21 hours left to join: After that, no new members for a month or two. And prices will go up, so run!

The patented system [iOpener] is developing sucks in real-time GPS data from racing events and pumps it out to compatible games consoles and PCs.
The idea is that you could pit yourself against the top drivers in the world, as it happens, from the comfort of your living room.

Hmmm… groundbreaking? I don’t think so. Back in the late 90s, Kalisto, the now-defunct developer I worked for back then, was approached by people holding the patent to merging real-world real-time data with video games. Maybe these people are the same people behind iOpener, maybe iOpener bought the rights to the patent, I don’t know. All I know is that Kalisto made a deal with them and started development of a number of games around this concept – not just car racing. It was a big, big, big deal. And then the company announced bad results, the stock price collapsed, and the dot-com bubble burst.

I’ve been trying to keep quiet, but I need to get one thing very clear. Larrabee is going to render DirectX and OpenGL games through rasterisation, not through ray-tracing.

I’m not sure how the message got so muddled.

Yeah, gee, I wonder why. Maybe because Intel has been pushing real-time ray-tracing so hard? Take a look at this fair and balanced article called “Rendering Games with Raytracing Will Revolutionize Graphics”. It wasn’t written by anyone from Intel, but it describes Intel’s efforts in that area – note the picture of an Intel poster saying ‘Ray-tracing: The future for games!’.

Ray-tracing for games doesn’t make any sense to me. The visual advantages of ray-tracing over rasterization are tiny and not worth switching to a completely new rendering approach for. Ray-tracing always evokes mirrored balls on infinite chessboards to me, and hey look! Intel’s latest screenshots contain mirrored balls! You need to grab people by the neck and point them at the stuff ray-tracing is better at than rasterization. And I am not the only one who is skeptical: so are John Carmack and Crytek. They should know (more than me, I haven’t done graphics programming in ages), and their opinion counts.

What Intel is trying to do with Larrabee seems awfully transparent. NVidia is moving into general purpose processing with CUDA, so Intel is moving into graphics processing with x86 cores. Let’s not pretend this is automatically good for developers or for gamers. I listened to Intel’s hype about MMX in 1995, and MMX turned out to be completely useless for games. They’re not fooling me twice. I’d be even more skeptical except Kim Pallister is working on Larrabee, and I have a lot of respect for him. Still… Larrabee makes me sneer. I couldn’t care less about it.

Am I wrong? Is Larrabee or real-time ray-tracing the wave of the future? Tell me in the comments. Don’t tell me Tom Forsyth is not responsible for Intel’s PR, I know that. He’s a good guy.

It’s very sophisticated. I’ve done some work on avatar systems and there’s a metric ton’s worth of nasty little issues – mainly related to 3D overlapping. You know, hats on hair and stuff like that. Hoodies were my favorite – a coat that’s also a hat! Doing it right, as Real Time Worlds seems to have done, takes an enormous amount of work.

There’s a cute industry in-joke at the end of the video by the way.

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Swedish graduate student Emil Ernerfeldt created the program Phun, a 2D physics playground, and has made it free to download for non-commercial use.
He demonstrates it in a zenful YouTube video, where he creates devices like cars and piston engines in seconds using simple shapes.

Nice interface!

The singing sounds like a normal human voice modified by digital effects, such as one can hear in some of the music kids listen to these days (and I am assuming here that those songs do not use synthesized singing). Apparently the software is a big hit in Japan (go go user-generated content – the Innovator’s Dilemma at work again).

I wonder if singing is easier to synthesize than speech. I wonder if this is related to the fact that accents are harder to make out in singing than in speech. Further restraining the problem domain to the kind of singing one hears in anime-style songs probably makes things even easier.

Still, a promising step on the way to usable text-to-speech. I can easily imagine an anime-style game using this technology.

(Via Boing Boing.)

I wonder what that means for Havok on non-Intel platforms. Like all current consoles. Is it RenderWare all over again? Well, probably not, but it might have some amusing effects on the middleware market.

(Thanks, Tobi!)

Update: Since I just phrased it so nicely in an ICQ conversation about the similarities between this acquisition and EA buying Criterion: I don’t think Intel will screw up Havok (at least, not in the way EA arguably screwed up the Renderware bits of Criterion). Intel doesn’t need Havok for its own development. Intel needs other people to need Havok and Intel needs other people to buy the CPUs that Havok needs. Intel has a history of buying companies that produce software that requires heavy processing power. Still, I’d worry if I were in Havok’s AMD optimization team.

fix8 combines video, animation and instant messaging that allows users to create their own partial or full custom avatars that mimic human movement.

At the heart of fix8 is H.E.A.R.T. (Human Expression Analysis and Rendering Technology), which digitizes human expressions, gestures, and movements via webcam, enabling users to create, interact, and share their creations across the web, TV, and soon mobile phones.

I am sure we can all see where this is going (step 1: YouTube, step 2: damn kids, step 3: porn, step 4: the uncanny valley, step 5: lawsuits). Pretty cool to see this running on consumer hardware. The demo video is freaky though.

What is interesting about Microsoft Surface is that it combines a huge touch screen with cameras that allow the system to detect objects such as cameras and phones. It looks cool in the video, but I wonder if the system could discriminate between two wireless devices (both using Wifi, say).

(If you’re interested in this: See previous blog posts on the work of Edward Tse, which is somewhat similar, as well as on Sony’s DataTiles. And I thought I linked to a video showing an interaction between a large horizontal screen and physical objects in order to make music, but I can’t find it.)

Update: Aaaaaaand here is a pretty funny parody video of Microsoft Surface. Warning: this is ONLY funny with SOUND. Without sound, it’s just a normal PR video.

The description says it all. Check it out, it is cool.