Light Saber Wii Remote

This is just the coolest thing -I just had to post this to my blog too. I know some of my friends (some of which already have life size light sabers) will be drooling when they hear of this!

During a demonstration of LucasArts latest Star Wars video game - LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga for Wii, there was news that slipped of perhaps a motion-sensitive lightsaber action Wii remote in the offing. Could it be that gamers all over the world will be able to take their jedi fantasy up a new notch in the future? Lucas Arts has already admitted that internally, they’ve tested the possibilities. And this would seem like a natural step in the development process for Lucas Arts, who are currently engadged in creating an all lightsaber battle game for their faithful who will buy just about anything with the Star Wars logo on it.

Course, one could just take one of those cheap $7 Hasbro lightsabers and modify it by incorporating the Wii remote into it. I bet someone started working on that about 5 minutes after the Wii was released. It’s already been hacked for PC versions by the same guy who created iSaber for the MAC. But wouldn’t it be cool to have a WiiSaber to take on Darth Vader? Talk about “if you build it, they will come.” Just don’t go on some “damn fool idealistic crusade” once they do.

LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga is due for release on the Wii, Nintendo DS, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, and comes out on November 7 – just in time for Christmas.

From: Adele Chaplin Published: 13 Sep 2007, Newsbytes

TV Goggles, 3D Video and Augmented Reality

I was recently at the Edinburgh TV Festival and from this it seems alternate realities, anything to do with GPS/Geo, and 3D video glasses are the next big multiplatform thing.

Video Glasses
I won a pair of the video glasses at the festival and they are amazing http://www.icuiti.com/ They give a "virtual 72 inch feeling" like watching a big TV for a few metres away - so your eyes focus into the distance. Based on military technology they don't appear to strain the eyes and I've been watching the girls aloud videos for the past few weeks... on the bus, on the beach - they are great. I've also connected them to my PC when playing games like Doom3 and they really provide for a more immersive gaming experience.

Because they operate on two screens they have the capacity to deliver 3d stereoscopic content and also allow an added level of interactivity with augmented reality - several companies are selling these video glasses in the states and Asia and they are just about to be launched in a big way in the UK. I wouldn't be suprised if they became as popular as ipods during the next couple of years - particularly as they can take your mini-ipod screen and turn it into a virtual 72inch TV screen (I used my video specs with my archos but I can also connect it to my DV cam and get a live feed).

These extend the potential for delivering natural history in 3D, really allowing landscapes and animal behaviour come alive to the viewer like never before. What's more, as was being preached by Vint Cerf from Google at the TV festival, delivery of video over the web trhough services like the iPlayer allows for multiple layers of content and data to be delivered and hidden behind the video - each layer activated by different technologies, or methods of viewing.

3D Filming
The age of digital media has allowed for a development of products which can take 2D material and convert it to virtual 3D. IMAX and Warner Brothers did exactly this with Superman Returns in 2006 with 20 minutes of 3-D images converted from the 2-D original digital footage, and George Lucas has announced that he may re-release his Star Wars films in 3-D. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was also released in IMAX theatres with 20 minutes of 3-D content.

James Cameron is planning to shoot his new films Avatar and Battle Angel (planned for released in 2009) in digital 3-D. Filming will use HDTV cameras and the Sony Fusion Camera system.



21st Century 3D provide the worlds smallest and lightest, HI-DEF, stereoscopic 3D camera system and they have just announced the released of 3DVX–H and 3D-SSR which are solid state stereoscopic recorders. http://www.21stcentury3d.com/



The 3DVX–H is particularly useful for long-shot natural history as it had a "modular hyperstereoscopic camera system" that allows maintains a strong stereoscopic 3D effect and high quality at long distances. "With ordinary camera separation, discernable stereoscopy diminishes as the camera’s distance from the subject increases. The 3DVX–H compensates for this by allowing users to increase the interoccular distance to as much as three feet or more."

Augmented Reality

I am going to be playing around with this - the way I see it working is if you strap a webcam to your forehead with the image playing through an augmented reality application and into the goggles you can create the illusion of projecting virtual 3d graphics into the real world whch you can then interact with. Cool!!

My New Gadget: Geo-Tagged Photography

I was so excited by a gadget that I recently bought that I wanted to let everyone know about it.
If your interested in the potential of using Geo-Tagged Photographs then please read on...

The gadget is a small GPS sync device (25pounds on ebay!) which allows me to geotag my photographs (taken on most digital cameras - I use a Cannon 350D) with GPS coordinates.

There are many other simple methods by which a photograph can be tagged (the longitude lattitude information entered into the images metadata) with the geographical location in which it was taken. You can even use your in-car GPS device to help you.

Navman have a range of in car navigation devices that include a digital camera. These generate geocoded photos that can be copied off the device, shared and used as navigation targets. Also see the NavPix Library a site for sharing geocoded photos: www.navman.com/navpix

Once they are tagged we can view photographs much more dynamically, and navigate them via maps online such as through mappr, or through an application like Google Earth. You can create and export a Google Earth KML file and share your photos and geo-tracks with other people using Google Earth.

See an excellent example from National Geographic where they represent features of the Zakouma National Park, such as elephant sitings or locations of camps.

Manually Geo-Tagging
(if you dont have a GPS device you can simply geo-tag your images using a combination of Picasa http://picasa.google.com/ and Google Earth. From within Picasa you can select to manually geo-tag your photographs by pin-pointing the location on the Google Earth globe (not that specific if your in some of the more uncharted and remote areas).


www.mappr.com. Current online photomaps are general and consist mostly of people’s random holiday snaps.

What cool things could I do with this...
There are many ways you could use Geo-tagging from help during production (i.e. revisiting exact locations) all the way through to new and interesting ways of delivering content to an audience. I've drafted a few of my ideas below, the best ones i'm keeping for future development, but I would encourage everyone to experiment with new gadgets and try doing more with GPS than just plotting your car journey.

- Paul Williams

We could build a user-generated photographic map of British Natural History. The interface would allow the user to filter the images he is interested in, peeling away layers of images, to show a a bird watchers photo map, a geological map, a habitat map... the list is endless and all created from User-Generated-Photographs.

Track an Adventure
* Create a GPS photo-diary of an adventure, more dynamic and exciting than a regular blog
* The exact route of an expedition or filming trip could be tracked and uploaded to the map.
* The audience can see the trail that the crew followed and the exact spot on earth where the crew took photographs. This can also be linked to daily diary entries and even video clips.

Geological Photo-Map
As a Geologist one of my first thoughts was to create a Geographically accurate Photographic Map of the Geology of Britain - to show people where the best sites are - a geo-accurate photographic field guide! Quite a step on from the original 19th Century William Smith Map.
This would tie in really well with an online field guide map (something iv'e already been working on by plotting my field visits on a Google Maps http://ironammonitepalaeontology.blogspot.com/)

Because geological exposures change very little the images on this map would correlate very well with what could be observed in the field.