1) To create a 3D effect you need to show a different view to each eye. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, and glasses is the most common way to get the effect in movie theatres or with monitors.

2) Floating 3D where you don’t have to wear glasses is called “autostereoscopic”. Printed holograms are autostereoscopic. They’ve been around for decades and they don’t look like the princess leia hologram from episode IV, do they? Autostereoscopic monitors exist - but they don’t use laser beams to draw the image miraculously in front of your eyes. Rather, they’re similar to the amusing but bad holograms we’re used to. Try not to think about autostereoscopic technology for now so we can get back to reality.

3) You can buy one kind of 3D television today. They use what are called shutter glasses. They’re heavy, and they alternately blank each eye based on signals they get from the TV. There’s another type of 3D television coming out on the market, that uses polarized glasses, using the same tech in the theatres. You can purchase 22″ 3D monitors using this technology now. A good analysis of the different approaches can be found on the Real-D blog.

4) Movie theatres currently display a pretty good form of 3D using “passive” glasses that are lightweight and don’t have batteries or shutters. They give a different image to each eye. The glasses probably cost less than $1 since they give you one free with your ticket.

5) The easiest movies to make into stereoscopic form are computer-generated animated movies, since they are modeled in 3D on the computer to begin with. Converting existing 2D movies to a simulated 3D (sort of like colorizing a film) is a labor-intensive, manual, computer-assisted process. Shooting good 3D cinema (with stereo cameras) has a tremendous learning curve but a number of major directors are starting to do just that.

6) There’s a huge pipeline of 3D movies. Some of the stats I’ve heard point to there being a new 3D movie every month in the next couple of years. Thus, it’s natural that you’d want a 3D television if you’re the wait-for-DVD type.

7) There has been 3D television for years, in the form of shutter glasses and frame-flipping TVs. There’s a de-facto standard called “field sequential 3D” and you can buy DVDs of this type of content on Amazon.com as well as a variety of hole-in-the-wall specialty e-tailers. The quality has never been that compelling however, because the DVDs are only 720×480 pixels. New 3D televisions and LCDs run at full 1920×1080 HD resolution, so that the frame to each eye is approximately 1920×540 worth of data, because half the lines go to the left eye and half the lines go to the right eye.

The red-blue or red-cyan glasses approach is called anaglyph. It’s great for 3D comic books and short content sent over television. The color variation of broadcast however is so high that it’s hard to get a consistent effect over broadcast TV. Plus, it alters the natural color of the scene. Anaglyph techniques are good demonstration, but will never be a mass market product.

9) You can encode stereoscopic content on a Blu-ray. Candidate formats are side-by-side and over-under. Side-by-side would provide a 960×1080 pixels of image quality to each eye; over under, 1920×540. Depending on the approach used to provide the 3d, these images would be expanded to fit the screen (shutter glasses alternate eyes in time; polarizing glasses provide every other line to each eye).

10) Interestingly, any kind of 3D content on a computer is a candidate for viewing on a stereoscopic monitor. We’re still in the alpha stage, so there are too many bugs and incompatibilities to count, but there are a number of great implementations of specific games. For instance, you can play World Of Warcraft, and a dozen other games, on any 3D screen or monitor. Nvidia makes a stereo driver, and iz3d provides drivers for their 3D gaming monitors.

Instead of damning with faint praise, people are praising the new generation of 3D with faint damnation: “It doesn’t hurt as much to watch 3D anymore”. While hardly a glowing endorsement, if you haven’t tried out passive 3D - in a movie theatre, you shoud.

If you haven’t seen 3D with passive glasses, you really should. I have tried shutter glasses and unfortunately my brain doesn’t buy the trick; it gets annoyed that something is being pulled over my eyes 30 times per second. The passive glasses, however, I find very fun.

The best in-theatre stereo I’ve ever experienced is at Walt Disney World, Magic Kingdom, the Mickey’s PhilharMagic movie. It has Donald duck following a string of Disney Princesses. My 5-year-old daughter literally stood up and reached out to try to grab floating jewels, and that kind of visceral reaction means that the technology is working.

If you haven’t started developing applications for the iPhone and porting your existing apps, you should. As we know, bandwidth gets cheaper and CPUs get more powerful every year, and if you aren’t targeting mobile, you’re targeting the death of your business.

(Did that wake you up? Ok, maybe I’m exaggerating the threat, but I thought that fear mongering was the new leadership. Just kidding.)

Anyway, while I’m still busy finishing off iPhone Hacks for O’Reilly, Jonathan Z. has already published and practically sold out the first real book on iPhone development.

The good thing about his book is that you can develop apps on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X, and that it turns out applications port over to the ‘official’ Apple SDK without significant effort. So the winning strategy seems to be: Develop an app with the current open toolchain, test it on your own Phone with the open tools, simulate it with Apple’s tools, and ship after June when Apple finally lets more people into the club to sell their apps.

And if you don’t want to give Apple 30% of your earnings, realize that according to some reports, over 2 Million people have jailbroken their phones - and thus have Installer.app on their phone. You can already target these phones with your shareware application - today - and make applications that rival Apple’s because they can access ALL the iPhone SDKs, more than the the “SDK Lite” that Apple offers.

So get started now!

-damien

Voila, you can. Here’s the link

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/t_trace/20071125/p2

1) the democrats are fighting each other

2) the republicans are fighting the democrats

Oops. That’s not good.

So in 2004 we had 50.0000001% bush, 49.9999999 Kerry

Now we have 50% McCain, 25.0000001% Obama, 24.9999999 Clinton

So after the brutal Democratic nomination saga, how on earth are either of them they going to have the energy to fight the Republican army?

You have to hand it to Republicans - they know how to work as a group, quell dissent in the ranks.

Where does that leave the Democrats when the dust settles? Soft on terror? Underqualified to lead? Clouded in vague unsubstantiable but nonetheless damaging scandal?

The democrats aren’t going to make history, they’re going to be history if they don’t get their differences settled.

I tried these instructions:

http://code.google.com/p/iphone-dev/wiki/Building

which i think are the same as these

http://iphone-dev.org/howto:toolchain_on_leopard

But then, hopelessly typing my error messages into google, i ran across this

http://kevinchiu.org/blog/archives/iphone-toolchain-for-leopard-version-030

his command ‘curl http://kevinchiu.org/leopard_toolchain.sh|sudo bash’ did the trick. Who knew?

McCain will fight - and I don’t like war - but he will fight with practicality. He’s a real soldier, not a G.I. Joe doll like bush. Something will have to improve.

I don’t think he’s as bought and sold to the current Republican party as it is made out. He pays his dues. Try being a part of a group like that some time - at a top level - and you’ll see how much you have to bow down and pay your dues. I think he’s a pragmatist.

I think the venom against Clinton is strong. I remember going to an old person’s house and seeing some Bill Clinton expose book of innuendo they were reading. They also ranted once or twice about Clinton (the male, philandering one). I imagine some of that carries forward. I don’t know, this was anecdotal.

I would absolutely love it if Obama could go the distance. We all want him to.

The battle is going to come down to “experience” if he’s running. Which is ridiculous, because usually the president has a cabinet. The cabinet is made up of other people who also have experience. It’s not like the president makes every decision - he/she puts together a good team, like a CEO or any other kind of boss.

What i’m beginning to like…

1) it knows what’s on my network, without searching, without flashing a flashlight icon for several minutes.

2) It seems to have integrated screen sharing! Whoa! did not realize that! Found it by accident…

3) now that i’ve shared to my TV imac, i can show you what has completely made it all worth it

Yes, that’s what I’m talking about…

No more hacks, it’s built in…

Yup, it plays DVDs right off the hard drive…

Or 1.5TB fileshare full of kids movies, if that’s how you roll (which as a matter of fact is how I roll).

$199 for the OS X family pack. Family pack, indeed.

Thank you Apple. It (finally) “just works”.

Technorati Tags: leopard, OSX

1) try not to buy generation one, but if you must, just buy extended warranty.
2) max out the CPU speed, if they offer several models, because you’ll never be able to upgrade that
3) leave the ram stock. don’t buy the extra ram. You’ll be able to upgrade it from kingston or crucial later for much less
4) leave the hard drive stock. you’ll pay a premium now, but in one year you’ll be able to upgrade beyond the original.

Basically, this way, I get the laptop, use it for a while, then it ’starts to feel slow’. I upgrade to the latest OS, it gets a bit slower. But then - I max out the ram for cheap, and I pop in a huge hard drive - whatever the latest and greatest laptop drive is. Voila, new feeling computer.

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the OS itself is great. And if you buy a new computer - or do the “archive and install” (replacing, not upgrading your old OS) everything is rosy.

but for guys like me who’ve been carrying the same /Users/myname folder for years, it can be a little hard…

My brother upgraded from 10.4 to 10.5, which resulted in an unbootable system - ironically, it reverted to a stable Windows machine because he could only boot to XP.

I said “Pshaw, bad karma, brother - it’s not that unstable”. I installed over my 10.4.

Just highlights:

1) on first boot, finder routinely crashed. Wouldn’t start. Had to force quit finder to open a window.
2) Mac mail crashed 5 times trying to import my mail. I had to use webmail. Anticipated 2 hours importing my mail. Finally i started it holding down option or something - now i have all my new mail on my imap servers, but none of the archived mail, which i’m going to have to manually import. No end user would know how to do this.
3) iCal - oblivious to my calendar. It’s gone. No where. At least it didn’t crash; on the other hand, i’m now trying to make appointments and … I have no idea when i’m available. I’ve tried importing some calendars strewn in ~/Library - but there’s a bunch from 2 years ago, and then a bunch of folders filled with hundreds of .ics
4) iCal forgot all my calendars AGAIN on last boot. A day later, now, they’re back. There were NO calendars listed. A reboot fixed it - but not after i had pretty much given up on using the calendar feature.
5) increased multi-lingual-screen-of-death (the OSX BSOD) - if i run parallels, spend 10 minutes booting it and getting word going, then close my laptop (sleep) and then wake it up, it almost always crashes the machine hard.

Sad huh? Besides quick-view, I’m not seeing much in the way of killer features.

Help me believe!

Technorati Tags: leopard, OSX