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Huzzah: I am finally in California for the wonderful Electronic Imaging conference in San Jose. If you search around on that page you should be able to find a listing of presenters with my name on there was well. I'll be giving my talk on the comparison between PS and PX scanners this Tues. sometime in the afternoon. In a completely unrelated topic: motion sickness is a bitch. Recent testing of our virtual reality lab at work left me yaking over the toilet for a good 10 minutes. According to studies the human brain has a hard time differentiating between a static background (the wall without VR displayed on it) and a movie background (VR). Needless to say a few new metrics need to be developed in order to mitigate future sickness. Plus I'm considered an outlier in that I shouldn't get sick given my extensive gaming background. Recently I decided to go full boar in to the world of public virtual reality. I am currently employed as a contract for PublicVR, the designers of CaveUT (I am not listed in the credits yet as I just started.) One of the more expensive components to a VR system is the motion tracker but thanks to Nintendo anyone can have motion tracking (Click here if youtube video above doesn't show.) for around $50 bucks. The concept I am proposing is not so much a head tracker for a mountable motion tracker that will give a 6 unit feature vector (XYZ position and Normal direction) giving us 9 degrees of freedom. Recently Gwas clued me in to an apparent cult classic for nerds, Snowcrash. Occasionally some books sneak through my radar and I don't hear about them until they are old news. What's truly apropos about the timing is that I am trying to immerse myself in to the world VR, this book obviously being the end game for VR. (Or a very close to end game step.) For anyone else late to the party give the book a read. Sexbox and Sodomy Simulations: This story is a few weeks old but I was waiting until the fallout had cleared before writing something about it. To quickly sum up what happened: A very hardline inconsequential republican blogger raised the ire of many a video gamer by claiming that Bioware's Mass Effect was in essence a "sodomy simulator." Read the whole story here and his retraction. Fast forward to about a week ago when Fox News, in it's constant push for unbiased (*cough* bullshit *cough*) reporting, brought on a so called "expert" and proceeded to bash the game in a similar fashion to the first guy I wrote about. (And the retraction.) Generally I'm all for ignoring sensationalist journalists but I wonder if the time hasn't come to become more proactive. This is a case where the web masses actually did some good. Usually I cringe when my fellow gamers get involved with anything en mass. There is always some 12 year old douche bah who thinks his point is being before made by calling someone an asshat. Yeah that's fucking cute. We're never going to change anyones mind about gamers until we all act like the adults we've become or some day hope to become and it's up to my generation of gamers (the old men) to usher in the youth as best we can. Unfortunately I think sometimes the "kids" forget that us old codgers of the net are also the ones that built all the fun software they employee to be fucktards. I digress. My point is this: We need to fight the media sensationalism with respect and facts. Most of the time these stories are built on heresay. The links above are perfect examples. Anyone playing the game and seeing the "sex scene" would realize you don't actually see any nudity and you are more likely to see some side boob action in Family Guy and Nip Tuck than you are in Mass Effect. Alright time to get to sleep. Apparently my missing luggage won't be showing up today. I'd be remiss if I didn't put this video up, let it play for a minute to watch the 2 old men dancing: Click Here if you don't see the youtube video above. I find myself constantly asking the value of Youtube. It used to be that I'd find a gem every now and again but for the last year or so all I see are more asinine videos of pants on head retarded wastes of oxygen. [ view entry ] ( 92 views ) | permalink |    ( 2.9 / 57 )
"Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write it should be hard to read."
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