As many of you know, I am all about the feedback (and feedforward) in games. I think touchscreen gaming is sorely missing the touch sensitivity, and this has some potential to improve on that, as well as make our current controllers that much better. Have a look at the tech from the Engadget link here.
These are some pretty good numbers. The game is good too. I don’t like it as much as Street Fighter IV, but it is very nice to have good fighting games to play around with. I need to come up with a nice brain scanning procedure to utilize these games with my research.
As reported here at Joystiq.
Mortal Kombat
http://www.joystiq.com/2011/09/07/grand-theft-auto-iv-goes-to-vice-city-in-mod/
Great to see that people are still working on PC mods. I love to see this kind of stuff and can’t wait to try it.
A cute mix of 3D animation and retro video games.
If you are in the New York City Area, and if you are interested in learning how all those cool animations are made in movies, commercials and video games, you should think about signing up for my class. I will be teaching a course showing the pipeline of capturing the data, processing the information, blending sequences of animation, and rending a final character animation this Fall (2009). If you are interested please see the advertisement below and feel free to email me with questions. I will not offer this as a distance course, but if there is interest (please leave a comment) I will think of doing this in the future. The software I will cover in this course is as follows: Vicon IQ/Nexus/Blade, Autodesk Motionbuilder and Maya, and Newtek Lightwave. If you have interest please contact the admissions office at Long Island University in Brooklyn, NY at (718) 488-1011. More information on admissions is available here: LIU admissions.
As I stated earlier, I am visiting Japan for the first time in 10 years this Thanksgiving break. After a couple of days, there are a few things that have really stood out to me.
Electronics are not as advanced over the rest of the world as they used to be. There are still alot of cool things here, but there is nothing I have seen so far that I am just dying to have. 10 years ago, this was very different…
The prices of things have not changed at the same rate here as in North America (ESPECIALLY Canada). The last time I was here, there were many things I wanted to buy, the the prices where prohibitively expensive. Granted, at the time I was a graduate student working on my Master’s degree and money was a bit harder to come by — but — the prices of things here is definitely cheaper. Eating out is now quite a bit cheaper than in New York City (depends on the restaurant of course).
The internet is the thing that is sticking out the most to me. 10 years ago ISDN was a luxury that most people only dreamed of. 128kbps was jsut amazing speed and you could actually download the newest version of Netscape 4 in under 1 hour. It was just great at the time. Now with fiber, cable, and DSL connections being plentiful here, I can watch TV via sling AND Video chat with friends and family through Skype for no cost at all. I spend more than $200 on phone calls the last time I was here!!
With all this good stuff, there must be some bad. The bad part of the internet experience I am finding so far is related to content filtering. It seems that many companies and providers are IP filtering connections and seem to block any connections not originating from the U.S.A. This is lame. One problem that is really bothering me is that Steam is not allowing me to download Left 4 Dead onto my laptop so I can kill some zombies. I already purchased the game and have been playing it on my desktop as well as my computer at work. I forgot to install the game on my laptop before I left, but didnt think much about it since I knew there would be a fast internet connection waiting for me in Japan. Well, to make a long story short, Steam is not allowing me to download any new content while I am connecting from Japan. I have tested this theory using VNC to my systems at work and at home. No problems there. Anyway, this lameness aside, I have found a way around other filters. SOCKS 5 Proxys are great. I installed WinSocks on my computer at home. I am connecting to the computer via Hamachi using a VPN. This allows me to not open ports on my router for this. Makes it very easy. Anyway, using a program called ProxyCap, I can redirect programs running on mylaptop to mask their IP address to that of my home system. This allows lots of things to work now. In particular, I am thoroughly enjoying watching NFL football via DirecTV’s Superfan program. It refused to connect without the proxy, but when I change the settings, I have live NFL football in all its glory right on my laptop. This is very nice.
Anyway, lots of good, and a few bad things (no killing of zombies is pretty bad…) to mention here. I will post more as the trip goes on.
Here is the second in my series of motion capture tutorials. The first focused on setting up a naming template in Nexus. This tutorial will describe the process of cleaning optical data and filling gaps when occlusion of reflective markers occurs. The video below is part one. If you play it to the end, you will see links to the further parts.
My class on motion capture started recently and I decided to post some tutorials for my students and others to watch. You might find them useful if you are learning to use Vicon Nexus or AutoDesk MotionBuilder. The first series is on how to set up a dot naming template in Nexus.
