3-D Design for the Masses
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Dryad's new user interface aims to make it easier for novices to create realistic objects for virtual worlds.
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I'm writing this from CES 2007 &#151; the latest and greatest Consumer Electronics Show, where 140,000 attendees crowd 2,700 exhibits packed into 1,660,000 square feet of space in more halls and hotels than I'll bother to count. There's a lot of noise here, and a certain amount of signal; though the ratio of the former to the latter is no less lopsided than it always is. Everybody's not only showing their good sides, but paying millions to crow about it through mass quantities of advertising and PR. \
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As console makers gear up to ship their next-generation boxes, game designers look for new routes to success.
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This week you'll learn about solid software design practices, many of them borrowed from working with Windows applications. The result is the development of a Web based drawing package. By Guyon Roche. 0802
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The final installment of our series on the new design: More proposals from blog readers.
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Using the Nouse in three-dimensional environments, such as design and game software, requires the use of two broadly spaced Web cams.
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Company is working on flexible display technologies.
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In photo land, a new gizmo extreme white balancing than the traditional white paper. David Becker's PMA coverage continues in Gadget Lab.
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Compact kit for the thumb-generation
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The graphics library, an alternative to Microsoft's DirectX, gets new features designed to add razzle-dazzle to PC games.
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Six well-designed products from the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show.
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Asymptote (http://asymptote.sourceforge.net) is a powerful descriptive vector graphics language for technical drawing, inspired by MetaPost but with an improved C++-like syntax. Asymptote provides for figures the same high-quality level of typesetting that LaTeX does for scientific text.   Problems with loading LaTeX packages and slide presentations were fixed. Non-static variables in every loop iteration are now allocated anew. Formatting under locales with nonperiod decimal separators was fixed, along with logarithmic tick labels near the machine epsilon.  Concatenation of nullpaths was fixed. New path markers were added and the perpendicular symbol in the geometry module was improved. The skeleton routines in the solids module were split to provide finer control.  Routines to facilitate drawing 3d contours were added. Reading portable XDR binary data into arrays works again; functions for reading and writing also in native binary formats were added. The TeX preamble is no longer output in inline mode. The TeX pipe is now aware of a previously generated aux file. Memory leaks were fixed. An inline limit is now imposed on old compilers to speed up compilation. Setlocale warnings are disabled unless debugging is on. A colorspace command for extracting the colorspace of a pen was added. An Asymptote introductory slide presentation was added and a user-written Asymptote tutorial is now cited in the manual.
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First impressions: Favorite games benefit from high-definition display.
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The previous article introduced the Doodle drawing application. This week, an application framework is added, complete with a document-view architecture. This powerful programming technique separates the document data from the view. By Guyon Roche. 0929
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Nature is pretty good at solving engineering problems, so designers are increasingly turning to biomimetics to improve their products and ideas. By Rowan Hooper.
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Dutch engineers stitch together hundreds of images to create a photo with 2.5 billion pixels. Photo: Giant digital image
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Gabe: We did a really awesome project (can I say it"s awesome, is that okay?) for Wired magazine. You can either go pick up the most recent issue and read it there or check it out on their site. They asked us to do a piece for them handicapping all three of the next generation systems. We tried to be as fair as we could and hopefully you"ll get a kick out of it.