3d

We've seen the latest iteration of HTC's TouchFlo 3D on the Touch Diamond2 and Pro 2 smartphones. It comes with quite a number of improvements over the last version of HTC's custom interface. Some of them include large menus throughout the Windows Mobile (WM) OS and an enhanced contacts page that integrates text messages, e-mails, and even Facebook updates for each address book entry.

It seems HTC is not quite done with the tweaks, and a future update to TouchFlo 3D has emerged showing further efforts to hide the default WM interface.

According to the screenshots, most … Read more

Sweet Home 3D offers users a chance to see a remodeled room or a brand new home before a single nail has been driven. With a fairly simple premise and impressive results, this slightly flawed program is certainly something to get the imagination going.

The program's interface is very easy to use. The left side of the screen contains a file tree for every room in the house, and clicking on each room presents a list of all appropriate furniture you can drag into the adjacent box. The area is a grid with measurements corresponding to room size. Below … Read more

The rise of 3D technology for movies and television will force a change in how directors tell stories.

Say good-bye to gut-wrenching drops off cliffs and swoops through asteroid fields to call attention to 3D effects. Be prepared for directors to use slower pans, less cutting, and more deliberate camera moves to blend the technology into the story. These new 3D movies may look boring in 2D, but they'll end up feeling more engaging when seen in three dimensions.

"Unfortunately, the history of 3D is bad 3D," says Sandy Climan, CEO of 3ality, a company that makes, as he calls it, "end-to-end technologies from image capture to processing" for three-dimensional entertainment. The technology hasn't been up to snuff until recently, he says. He claims his company's tech is leagues better, naturally. But the art hasn't advanced, either, and no amount of technology can fix that. Directors need new rules.

I talked with Climan about the changes coming to cinematography and television in the move to 3D, as well as to Didier Debons and Isabelle de Montagu, CEO and business development manager of 3DTV Solutions, which makes 3D video recording products, and Tuyen Pham, CEO of A-volute, a 3D audio encoding company. The short takeaway: if you're in the video or entertainment business, forget what you know about directing and editing. 3D changes everything.

Think 3D is a gimmick and that professional cinematographers and television directors don't take it seriously? Financials, Climan says, dispute this. 3D films in 3D theaters gross two to five times what the 2D versions of those films do. Commercials in 3D yield better recall rates. And it's not just the novelty factor, Climan says. If so, the trend would have faded. Grosses for 3D films are growing.

"The family movie business has largely moved to 3D," Climan continues, pointing to films like "Journey to the Center of the Earth," "Coraline," and "Up"--the last two having being taken far more seriously than standard 3D matinee fare. On the grownup front, Climan says that for sports and concerts, there's nothing like the 3D movie or TV experience. The upcoming James Cameron film, "Avatar" is a 3D production and is expected to be a watershed for mainstream 3D entertainment.

For now, the growth of 3D looks inevitable. The next step for the medium, after family films and fantastic blockbusters, is for 3D to move into independent and artisan films. Climan thinks the technology is becoming straightforward enough to make that likely.

… Read more

Live Interior 3D Pro is a full-featured interior-design application designed to help you plan and visualize redecorating and remodeling projects, in both 2D and 3D. The most impressive improvement in version 2 (which also splits the application into Standard and Pro versions) is the ability to edit 3D objects directly in Live Interior 3D using Google SketchUp. You can even export entire projects to Google SketchUp format, with import and export support for Google SketchUp 7.

The 3D models that you can create--both as QuickTime movies and QTVR virtual-reality "walkthroughs"--have gotten better, too, with improved lighting and … Read more

Satisfied that its security underpinnings are solid, Google has promoted its open-source Native Client technology to accelerate Web applications out of its research phase and is taking steps to build it into the Chrome Web browser.

"Based on our experience to date, we believe that the basic architecture of our system is sound and the implementation is supportable. So now we are undertaking a number of tasks to transition Native Client from a research technology to a development platform," said Brad Chen, Google's Native Client engineering manager, in a mailing list announcement Wednesday.

Native Client, called NaCl … Read more

With its realistic graphics and attractive interface, 3D Live Pool makes playing pool on the computer just as fun as the real deal.

The game controls are easy to use, with helpful directions in the bottom left of the screen. Gameplay depends heavily on the use of the mouse, which allows users to adjust their view of the table and cue position. The speed of the mouse movement determines the force with which the cue hits the ball, a feature that does a nice job of simulating the real thing. Users can play against the computer or another player, and … Read more

The future of notebooks added another wrinkle at Computex last weekend: Acer's announcement of an upcoming 3D laptop running Windows 7 raises even more questions than it answers.

According to Campbell Kan, vice president of Acer's mobile computing business unit, the 15.6-inch Aspire 3D Notebook will debut at the end of October, in regions unspecified. Co-developed by Wistron, the same company behind a rumored HP 3D laptop, the screen will require tinted glasses to decode the fuzziness into the impressive pop-out imagery you'd expect. Whether it runs Nvidia's GeForce 3D Vision under the hood or … Read more

Falco Chess offers users an opportunity to play digital chess against a computer or an online opponent. While this game looks great and has many helpful features, one addition makes play slightly annoying.

This program has a top-notch appearance with a three-dimensional board and pieces, and a changeable background. Its added features are clearly laid out and the Help file defines them all, though it does not offer any tutorial in the rules of chess. While the Falco Chess' interface was great, we found the rapidly changing advertisements for other games annoying and actually slowed gameplay a little. Aside from … Read more

A co-worker on Tuesday forwarded me an e-mail from Nvidia with the subject "Coming soon from NVIDIA.....". In the body of the e-mail was only a link.

At the top of the page is the following pic:

After pulling the tab down I got this image:

Under the pic, the caption asks the following questions: "Like what you see? Want to play your favorite games in 3D? Want to watch immersive pictures and movies in 3D?"

My answers:

1. No, but I might if I actually owned a pair of Vision Kit glasses and had them … Read more