UnitZeroOne

Ok, so I wanted to post this one earlier; an extremely realistic looking 3D interactive portrait of a girl....it's kind of weird looking and a bit spooky, don't look at her too long It's impressive though.

So, what is this ? Well, a bit of simple research (read, firebug) led me too motionportrait.com. Unfortunately, that's in japanese. That site has the same girl on it, as well as links to several other implementations of the technology...including this hilarious one : hige-chen (love that tune). But also, to the still very cool Rec-You campaign. I'm betting we'll see a couple of more implementations of this in the near future.

Another thing that caught my attention today was a mail from the creator of the isometric engine ffilmation. Very nice work indeed! The name is derived from the old-skool filmation engine, used to create various gaming titles for the old 8-bit platforms. Looking forward to see progress on it. Related : also, make sure you check out the Alternativa3D engine which was previously isometric only also, but now "full 3D"..impressive stuff.

A bit late, but I didn't see any MXNA post on this; the first beta for Gnash is out. From the release post : "Gnash is a GPL'd SWF movie player and browser plugin for Firefox, Mozilla, and Konqueror. Gnash supports many SWF v7 features and ActionScript 2 classes.".

Gnash already made the news last year, but this time they've got a beta...

Honestly, I'm not really impressed. One of the goals for this release seems to be to make youtube work on it. I don't think this means that good to the Flash community. Even if Gnash grows up (and eventually supports SWF9 / AS3), I don't really like the idea of "another" player. In my opinion, if it becomes a broader supported version of the player, it will just cause rips in the ubiquity and cross-platform nature of Flash....something which is undeniably one of the biggest strenghts of the platform.

What Gnash might provide is a deeper insight of the workings of the Flash Player, which might eventually enable us to optimize our code for it more and more. It might also inspire Adobe to make the Flash Player available on more os'es ? Let's hope so. Maybe someone will port it to the Iphone

Over the last months I spent alot of my time developing with and on Papervision3D. Most notably alot of the new features of Papervision3D 2.0 have been part of daily work and development. Now I have yet to see someone uncover all of the posibilities with the current alpha, next to people as mr.doob and zeropointnine (and many more, yes).

It's incredibly inspiring to me to see that the goals and purposes I personally had intended with the Papervision3D 2.0 source code is being picked up this well. Don't get me wrong, there's still alot to do...but in essence it seems to work for people ! I guess seeing your work being put to use by others in ways you wouldn't or would've expected is a big part of the pay-off in OpenSource development. It's both educational and inspirational to see how people are using the architecture.

(As a side note...in the FITC Amsterdam video on Lee Brimelow's blog I'm noted as aformentioned zeropointnine...which is wrong....obviously, I'm that other three word number like dude....UnitZeroOne...Lee....)

Anyway, I stumbled upon note.x when I got my traffic report. It's all in Japanese but I'm really astounded by the quality of code and work. It's a very nice blog indeed, go and check it out.

Some other very good resources on pv3d 2.0 include : pv3d.org, papervision2.com, actionscript architect and of course fellow team member Andy Zupko.

This years Assembly demo party had a very strong browser demo contest up and running. 2 Entries really stand out, and if you want to be blown away, have a good look.First up :ADHDTV by Evoflash & BombSquad (download)Evo and Bombsquad have done an awesome job here. When I was in Finland at the beginning of this year (-22 degrees celcius...damn), I met up with Jalava, and he told me about this demo they where building...based upon a modded version of Papervision3D. As it is now, this has become a demo which is built on top of Away3D, which was in turn based on Papervision3D (although, honestly, it's an engine in it's own right)Awesome job guys.Our second place competitor :Continuum by Minority (download)WOW! This one made me lose my bragging rights as the only one who did bumpmapping, phongshading and cellshading in Flash 3D. Also, they got realtime shadows in there! WOW WOW! WOW! Good job guys, looks fantastic.We better speed up in getting all our new stuff in Papervision3D, before these guys surpass us even more.Speaking of which; people have been complaining a bit about us not getting the materials out yet. We are still working on it hard, and we are on the virge of getting the new materials (which are now not materials anymore, rather then shaders in). Biggest problem ? Time. I need to finish some commercial work, then go on vacation this Saturday. But hey, they'll get there, and then the entire community can enjoy shader goodness.Now, back to work.(btw : the last 2 official browser entries : 1 silverlight demo, and 1 js demo. Spots 1,2 and 3 are Flash Go Flash).[UPDATE] Also spot 4 is taken by a Flash Demo. Thanks Jac, sorry for not posting it earlier.