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Archive for August, 2008
Meet Jess Coburn – Heavy Weight Boxer!
Aug 14th
I give you Jess Coburn, Heavy Weight Boxing Championship fighter… 6′ 6″ and 255lbs of pure ripped muscle.. On the XBOX 360 anyway…
EA Sports has a new video game coming out called FaceBreaker. What’s innovative about this game is that it’s going to allow you to upload your own faces and then build your own boxer. I know you’re thinking: “Great, I’ll get to put my ex-wife’s face and box her”. Well yes you will! Or you can upload McCain and Obama and let them slug it out old school style.
Anyway, what’s interesting is that the game developers are allowing you to upload your own images through their social networking website www.easportsworld.com, then the video game downloads the pictures, allows you to select some key points and then renders your face based on those points you selected. I find it interesting for several reasons:
- They’re making you register for a social networking site and introducing you to other games they have there and they’re trying to build an online community site ala facebook/myspace for gamers around their games. Very clever.
- They’re using a sort of web service integration with the game bringing a new level of interactivity to the game. In fact, NBA Live 09 is doing something similar, throughout the season it will update the game’s players and stats from downloaded web content and even let you replay last night’s games.
- We get to see the processing power of the XBOX 360 as it appears it’s rendering it directly on your XBOX and then uploading your created character. (it’s slow btw)
- C’mon just the fact you get to see yourself in a game is pretty awesome.
I think this is the next new twist we’ll begin seeing in video games. People are bored with playing as master chief and now they want to see themselves in the game.
Finally, here’s a close up of my face. When it renders your character it’s bald and hairless. So I added the hair and gave myself a bit of a 5 o’clock shadow as I hadn’t shaved that day.
Playing with the new Deep Zoom Composer
Aug 6th
Microsoft released another update to Deep Zoom Composer on August 3rd. The latest build of Deep Zoom Composer includes a feature that generators the silverlight code for you and also support photo-stitching. Photo-stitching is where you take multiple pictures and stitch them together to create a panoramic photo. Deep Zoom is the seadragon technology from Microsoft that allows you to pan and zoom in an image and the browser downloads only those pieces of the image in detail that you’re looking.
Add an 8MP Point and shoot and Deep Zoom Composer and what do you get? The cool stuff ofcourse!
So recently I went to San Francisco and found a little time to took a few pictures. If you’re wondering what a Florida boy takes pictures of in California, it should be pretty easy to figure out… Bridges and Mountains ofcourse!
So here’s the good stuff: Deep Zoom from the top of Mount Diablo. Deep Zoom of the Golden Gate Bridge.
You can open those files and if you have the newest Silverlight 2 beta installed you’ll be able to pan and zoom all through the images by either using your mousewheel or doubleclicking on an area. Cool stuff.
So That’s Cool, But How’d I do it?
So here’s the coolest thing about this whole process. The pictures of the golden gate bridge aren’t actually in order and in fact they were taken with the camera at 90 degrees so I could get more landscape in. What’s cool about that? Well deep zoom composer (we’ll call it DZC) figured out the order of the pictures and did the best job I have found yet for photo stitching. I don’t use a tripod or any fancy fish eye lens so it’s got some work to do but it does it faster and with better accuracy than anything else I’ve used yet.
Here’s what the pics looked like in Picasa2 (you can see I went left to right and then back to the left to take two more pics of the fog rolling in)
Here’s another cool thing about these pictures. This effected is created using 770+ different smaller images and it only streams to you in detail the area you’re looking at. So instead of downloading 7 images that are all 3MB each you’re downloading bits and pieces needed for that area you’re viewing. Pretty cool stuff.
Well is that really? Yes it is.
Okay you’re probably thinking right now “big deal it’s just a photo stitching application with some flashy zoomy-zoomy stuff”. But here’s where it really shines. Look at the first Golden Gate Demo app I created. You’ll see this picture:
Yeah it’s a nice picture. But then start to zoom into that little light brown weed bush:
Yeah that’s a little more detail right? But Zoom in some more…
Oh look it’s got some other leaves… But zoom in some more..
Now the details really start to come out… Okay you want to zoom some more don’t you? I don’t know if it’s a good idea but go ahead, indulge yourself..
EEK!! You went too far! But now you get the idea of just what can be done..
What else?
Alright here’s a few more pics:
And one more Deep Zoom of the Golden Gate Bridge (taken from the other 5 images in the screen capture above and it’s 1500+ smaller images).
