Zerg's rumble

ESRI UC 2009 Day 2 update

noreply@blogger.com (Zorko) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 21:42:00 +0000

Day two at the User Conference seems to be quiet or there aren’t many updates yet. A friend of mine, Jithen Singh, already did a hard work of compiling a list of news for upcoming version of ArcGIS 9.4.
Here are some highlights for Desktop:

Extension of layer packages to include tools, models, globes and diagrams
Improved Table Of Content – allows rendering of cartographic representations
Add models into toolbar
Multiple page PDF export
Support for Windows 7
Run geoprocessing in the background

For full list of changes for Desktop, Server and Mobile go to Mandown.

ESRI UC 2009 Day 1 update

noreply@blogger.com (Zorko) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 10:07:00 +0000

Here are most interesting bits from day 1 of the ESRI User Conference. Unfortunately these are not first hand news but compiled from number of blogs and news from the internet.

Plenary session
In first part Jack has described the vision of this conference – Maps and GIS are changing and there are new ways to take advantage of GIS.

ArcGIS Explorer 900 was showed and new features were demonstrated (more on that later).
Second part was about the next release – 9.4. Highlights of upcoming 9.4 version are:

Run in parallel with 9.3 on same machine
New dockable windows (attribute table, ArcCatalog, etc)
Search integrated in ArcMap
Search for symbol by name
Predefined edit tasks
Integration of Python in ArcMap
New Base maps for continuous redraw and panning
Improved 3D performance and SketchUp support
Open geodatabase API

ArcGIS Explorer 900
Information about AGX 900 is know for a while but now the key features were shown and more details can be found on AGX blog. These include:

Toggle between 3D and 2D
Use of layer packages from ArcGIS 9.3.1
Presentation mode
Ribbon interface
Bing data support
Support for all ArcGIS projections and transformations
Customization without programming

Other news

ArcGIS API for Silverlight/WPF released
ArcGIS API for Silverlight/WPF toolkit released on Codeplex
MapIt product released

This is just a very quick pick of most interesting topics. More details coming soon.

ESRI 2009 User Conference starts tomorrow

noreply@blogger.com (Zorko) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 02:52:00 +0000

Tomorrow is the start of User Conference for 2009. As expected there is an official page providing lot of information like featured sessions, on-line agenda, accommodation and other.

Collection of quick links include Facebook, Twitter and Flickr pages. As alternative you can simply subscribe to RSS feeds from this page.

If you haven’t been at the Conference you know it is really busy and spread across very large area. To help you find your way use UC Route Finder. This will show distance and time required to get to the destination and it is also viewable in 3D.

Very soon we are expecting a flood of news from the Conference. I am hoping that ArcGIS Explorer 900 will be released within next few days. AGX blog has plenty of information and photos from specialist events where it will be demonstrated (homeland security, education, etc).

It will be quite hard to keep up with all news but hopefully in next week or two I’ll be able to pick out most interesting news and videos.

Tips for faster caching of ArcGIS Server

noreply@blogger.com (Zorko) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 20:32:00 +0000

ESRI Mapping Center has a post about improving performance of caching in ArcGIS Server (AGS). If you did any work in this area you know this is very demanding and time consuming process. We (Eagle Technology) created cache for several customers and this can easily take full 3 days to create the cache.

From list of recommendations there is one I didn’t really consider but it makes perfect sense - Relocate the server’s pagefile.sys file.

I like the note about checking of available memory:

This is especially important if you’ve got other services running on the server, because these services are taking up memory, too, and you want to make sure the caching process, which will be more demanding of memory usage, is not pushing out of your available physical RAM and into your pagefile.sys (which will result in catastrophically slower caching times!)

Starcraft 2 update

noreply@blogger.com (Zorko) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:19:00 +0000

There are some interesting news and updates of Starcraft II. Some of these mentioned here are not the latest but are still interesting enough.

Here at Press 2 Play TV is an interview with Dustin Browder, lead designer for Starcraft 2 and Chris Sigtay, lead producer. Topics covered include engine development (from ground up) including graphics engine, reasons for splitting up the game in 3 titles. There are some hints about single player missions:

holding off hordes of infested colonists
walls of fire burning across the map
surviving supernova

Soundtrack and music is also discussed, beta testing, release date…
At the moments audio quality is not too good but you get a lot of info for 17:25 of an interview.

Battle.net Q&A Batch 52
Theme for this batch was Map Maker. Some of the key points:

support for custom function definitions, including actions and conditions in Trigger Editor
entirely new scripting language called Galaxy. This language is very similar to C.
map makers will have the ability to define any number of custom attributes that modify a hero based on its level

Dev talk
Inc Gamers interview with Rob Pardo, Dustin Browder and Chris Sigtay reveals some interesting features :

Development of new Battle.net
possibility to create mods - "It's EXTREMELY complicated, but it's possible".
No support for LAN
noob friendly game for casual gamers (view of tech tree, detailed replay, challenges)

Technology tree
Yesterday a couple of sites has shown technology tree for SC2. One of sites is Kotaku.
I guess comments are not really required, so here they are.

Zerg

Protoss

Terran

Q & A about 2009 ESRI International User Conference

noreply@blogger.com (Zorko) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:33:00 +0000

2009 ESRI User Conference is near (13-17 July) and ESRI has published the results from survey. Make sure you have plenty of free time if you want to read the full Q & A document – there are 178 questions and answers!

Full list is available here. I will post my pick of most interesting questions from this list later this week.

ArcGIS 9.3.1 REST Services Patch

noreply@blogger.com (Zorko) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:47:00 +0000

Another patch for ArcGIS Server 9.3.1 was released. This patch addresses cases where, under heavy load, adding additional SOC machines does not improve performance when using REST services.

Issue fixed with this patch is:

NIM045052 - Adding additional SOC machines does not improve ArcGIS Server system performance when using REST services.

Even if this does not apply to Desktop or Engine but one of assemblies for Desktop and Engine is affected.

File is GIS931-Server-RestSvcs-Patch.msp and it is 2.1 MB. Full details are available here.

ArcGIS, WPF and Surface in action

noreply@blogger.com (Zorko) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:20:00 +0000

Yesterday Richie posted an article and video about “Police dispatcher for Microsoft Surface” application they (ESRI Application Prototype Lab) ported from Silverlight API to Windows Presentation Foundation and Surface.

Go here for full details, video is also available on YouTube.

If you liked that then have a look at similar example “Cross Country Mobility for Microsoft Surface.”

Creating effective web maps seminar

noreply@blogger.com (Zorko) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 23:10:00 +0000

Eagle Technology is hosting a complimentary seminar about creation and deployment of modern web maps maps and make the most of your investment in GIS data and infrastructure.

Some spaces are still available in Wellington and Auckland.

Location: Auckland, Eagle Technology office
Date: Tuesday June 30, 2009

Location: Wellington, Eagle Technology office
Date: Thursday July 2, 2009

The same seminar will be held in the morning and repeated in the afternoon.
Please advise which session you would like to attend as places are limited.

AGENDA:

Morning session:
9:00-10:15: Design Strategies for Authoring and Publishing
10:15-10:30: break
10:30-12:00: Building Web Applications

Afternoon session:
1:00-2:15: Design Strategies for Authoring and Publishing
2:15-2:30: break
2:30-4:00: Building Web Applications

To register visit - www.eagle.co.nz/gis931

ColorBrewer 2.0 released

noreply@blogger.com (Zorko) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 20:30:00 +0000

Well known ColorBrewer just got a facelift with release of ColorBrewer 2. Just in case you have not used the essence is compacted in a single line.

Color advice for cartography

Driven by this simple idea Cynthia Brewer created this very useful web application. The new version is Flash based but the functionality is the same as in old one.
What I like about ColorBrewer is that evey option, like “pick a color scheme:” has a learn more > link.

Under this link there are descriptions of icons or references to related books or web sites.

The process of selecting data classes, colours is easy and provides quick feedback using a sample map. In addition to this there is a new option to downlad ColorTool for use in ArcGIS directly. If you are not ArcGIS user these colours can be exported to Excel file, Adobe Swatch Exchange or just set of color values (RGB, CMYK or HEX).

This a very useful site and I recommend it to anyone working in GIS or cartographic design.

Layer package patch for ArcGIS 9.3.1

noreply@blogger.com (Zorko) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:51:00 +0000

New patch was released yesterday to addresses issues with downloading secure content from ArcGIS Online when using ArcGIS Desktop. If you are not using ArcGIS Online this is not a critical patch but ESRI is recommending download at earliest convenience.

File to download is gis931-DLL-patch.msp and it is only 1 MB.

Starcraft 2 Battle report #3

noreply@blogger.com (Zorko) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:28:00 +0000

Latest battle report from Starcraft 2 is now available. In this battle you’ll see Zerg vs Protoss.

The battle is played on brand new map, The scrapyard. Map has several interesting features like narrow bridge connecting players but it is blocked with destructible rocks, smoke vents blocking the view, couple of Xel’Naga watch towers and high yield yellow mineral field.

Gameplay is very interesting. Very early in game Protoss (David Kim) took initiative in exploring the map and really annoying Zerg (Yeon-Ho). One Protoss probe successfully stopped Zerg from starting another hatchery (about 2:30 min in game) and scouting entire Zerg base.

Through most of the game Protoss has used Xel’Naga watch towers to his advantage.

About 5 minutes in the video David is using new Protoss units, Nullifiers. They have a very powerfull (and really annoying) Force Field feature used to block terrain. David will use this very successfully during this game.

On the other hand Zerg is using smoke vents quite efficiently to hide Zerglings and other units.

In most cases Force Field is used as defensive method but David has used it to trap some Zerglings inside his own base and destroyed them with Probes (about 6:10 min).

Zerg found effective counter measure for Force Field – using Roach and their Burrow ability. Roaches are able to regenerate very quickly and therefore very efficient units.

In this example (8:05 min) Protoss has blocked Roaches with Force Field and in the same time forced Zerg’s Drones to burrow. This attack costed Zerg very much.

Now Zerg is taking offensive and attcking with large number of Roaches. Protoss is defending with Stalker units with Blink ability (teleport units over short distance). He was very successfull using Blink that Zerg had to retreat.

In counter attack Protoss did a very smart combo using Phoenix and Voidray. Zerg Queen was lifted in the air (where is is helpless) by Graviton Beam and then destroyed by Phoenix (11:00 min in game).

While Queen has been killed Zerg sent a large number of Zerglings to Protoss base and managed to morph four of them into Banelings. These Banelings managed to kill a large number of Protoss probes and two Photon Cannons and damaging his economy.

Protoss then took initiative and attacked the Zerg base. But here there is a surprise when Zerg used Infestor (burrowed in upper left in picture below) and it’s Neuro Paralyse ability (aka mind control) and he used it on Immortal to delete Protoss own Stalkers (about 14:18 min).

has another important ability, to move while burrowed.

This can be very important and effective weapon. In the same time Protoss is building couple of Colossus units that will pose real threat to Zerg. Luckily for Zerg Infestors did work and Colossus were under Zerg control and destroyed all attack force of Protoss. Once that was done Zerglings did a good job of destroying both Colossus.

But this move was just a small success because Protoss has attacked both Zerg expansions. That was the winning move for Protoss. Without expansions Zerg was unable to recover.

Of course, I didn't mention every move in the match so have a look at the video.

This was very interesting match and we saw how to play against Protoss and what may be the coming your way. Lets hope to see more battles and maybe longer ones too.

HRD = Hard Rectangular Drive

noreply@blogger.com (Zorko) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 08:14:00 +0000

While majority of large storage manufacturers are focusing on more or less traditional methods (SSD) DataSlide is taking different approach. DataSlide is developing Hard Rectangular Drive (HRD). What is that?

This image shows basics of HRD.

What are advantages of this technology? From DataSlide:

capitalizes on standard base process technologies
to create a dramatically new way to store and retrieve data with magnetic media:
1. Leverage LCD process
2. Use standard HDD sputtering/plating MEMS process
3. Use HDD perpendicular media DSSC/Oerlikon-Balzers coatings

In addition to this it also features:

1. A piezoelectric actuator keeps the rectangular media in precise motion

2. A diamond solid lubricant coating protects the surfaces for years of worry free service

3. A massively parallel 2D array of magnetic heads reads from or writes to up to 64 embedded heads at a time
According to DataSlide it will produce 500MB/sec with less than 4W for magnetic storage device.
Technology wise, there is one head per secor with symmetric read/write. According to specification HRD is reliable as HDD (or better), can have capacity from 80 GB to 2 TB, 160,000 rd/wt compared to 35,00rd / 3,000wt for SSD.

DataSlilde has partnered with Oracle to embed Berkeley Database into storage drive. Full article is available here.

DataSlide’s Hard DB fits Oracle’s Embedded Global Business Units OEM Charter by incorporating BerkeleyDB into the actual storage device itself (essentially a low energy, cool running, high performance. shock resistant hard drive) to make a ‘smart’ storage device. The potential applications are many and varied. Examples are TCP/IP based systems and video applications requiring multiple concurrent streams, media indexing, fast positioning. forward. back. skip. scene/track will have significant perfoniiance improvements with this winning architecture.

Western Digital Solid State Disks

noreply@blogger.com (Zorko) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 07:43:00 +0000

Western Digital has announced their latest product line of solid state disks, SiliconDrive III

Three different drives are offered, 2.5” and 1.8”. Details are listed in table below.

Feature	SiliconDrive III 2.5-inch SATA Drive	SiliconDrive III 1.8-inch Micro SATA Drive	SiliconDrive III 2.5-inch PATA Drive
Interface	SATA 3 Gb/s	SATA 3 Gb/s	PATA ATA-7
Max R/W speed	100/80 MB/s	100/80 MB/s	85/60 MB/s
PowerArmor	30GB to 120GB	30GB to 60GB	30GB to 120GB
SiSMART	Standard	Standard	Standard
SolidStor	Standard	Standard	Standard

PowerArmor feature drive corruption from an ungraceful power-down, brownout, power spike or unstable voltage level.

SiSMART is ability to read and display the remaining amount of a drive’s useable life.

SolidStor technology makes designers, supply chain managers and OEMs confident that their storage system choice exceeds the high performance, high reliability and low total cost of ownership.

At the moment there are no prices announced for these drives and it would be nice to see them in a benchmark.

ArcGIS 9.3.1 Data Interoperability patch

noreply@blogger.com (Zorko) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 19:55:00 +0000

ESRI has released a patch to fix 4 issues with Data Interop extension. Description of the fix says:

This patch resolves an error message generated by Spatial ETL tools that have empty published source dataset parameters as well as removes the inability to specify a new output File or Personal Geodatabase path in Quick Export’s Select dialog box. The patch also includes two additional fixes; one resolves problems converting Oracle Spatial linear feature classes to File Geodatabases and one enables MXD documents to be opened whether or not the referenced data is accessible.

If you want more detailed description of fixes here are the Nimbus issues numbers:

NIM043212 - Using Quick Export to convert linear features from Oracle Spatial (Interoperability Connection) will include features from the first linear feature class in the connection, even if it is not selected in the Quick Export tool.
NIM043860 - "File ' does not exist" error message may be returned when running an ETL tool that has an empty Source Dataset parameter that is published.
NIM045515 - Quick Export's Select dialog does not allow you to specify a new output Geodatabase.
NIM045516 - Cannot open MXDs with Interoperability Connections that reference inaccessible data.

The patch is quite small, 11.5 MB but quite important. I really appreciate the fix for last issue (inaccessible data) because it gets annoying very quickly.

AMD demos DirectX 11 GPU

noreply@blogger.com (Zorko) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 07:58:00 +0000

Earlier this month At a press conference in Taipei at Computex 2009 AMD has demonstrated its DirectX 11 GPU. Main features of DX 11 are:

Down-level hardware and operating system support
Improved multithreaded device
New hardware stages for tessellation
Improved texture compression
Shader Model 5.0
Compute shader

According to the article DirectX was influenced and developed on ATI graphics and they are proud to bring world’s first DX 11 GPU.

AMD has a long track record of delivering pioneering features that have gone on to become mainstays in the DirectX experience, and we’re doing it again with two mature, AMD-developed technologies in DirectX 11 – tessellation and the compute shader – both of which enable a better DirectX 11 experience for consumers.

Here is an example of tessellation that enables modelling with great detail.

To see it in motion check this video.

When they talk about influencing development of DirectX here is the video to support it.

Most interesting part of the video at the end of video showing DX 11 features (but it is very brief) at about 2’03” into the video.
There is another, much longer video showing use of compute shader for various aspects of scene management, AI etc.

All we have to do now is wait until DX11 and these graphics cards to become mainstream. Then we can see some really nice graphics running at full 60 FPS constantly.

3D hypsographic shaded print

noreply@blogger.com (Zorko) — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 20:21:00 +0000

It is interesting how things coincide…

In end of May I was in Wellington teaching “Cartography with ArcGIS” course and thought “I should write a post about that 3D print I did...” And several days later there is a post about 3D prints on Free Geography Tools blog.

Back to the 3D print I did. The print was done quite a while ago, for a NZ ESRI User Group Conferecne in October-November of 2006. About one month before the Conference I got an e-mail with brochure about 3D printers from Contex. One of the vendors at the conference has these printers but they don’t offer print services. Eagle Technology is the main sponsor of the conference so was in contact with vendors. Luckily, there is another company in Auckland that has 3D printer and it is interested in collaboration. That company is 3D Print. When we met they showed me promotional GIS/mapping model they have. It was a standard size (30x30cm) tile with a city in flat area with satellite image draped on top. It wasn’t impressive since tallest feature on print was about 2cm tall. I have suggested that we put something together – I can provide data/model and they would print it. So we started working on this project.

I have access to topographic data for whole New Zealand including the 20m contours lines. The question was what area to choose. One of immediate candidates was Wellington area for several reasons: conference is held in Wellington and terrain has interesting features. It didn’t take me long to create a DEM and hillshade from available data. Then I started experimenting with the colours. I have experimented a bit with elevation colour ramps (like described in this post). Here are some test combinations applied on top of Swiss hillshading. There are subtle differences visible in highest mountain region in southeast.

Here is one of the first tries I liked the best.

This is looking promising and I though it would be nice if I could get bathymetry data for Cook Straight. Luckily, National institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (NIWA) was very interested and I got the shapefile data for Cook Straight. And it was really exciting to work with the data and see the results. Cook Straight has very interesting features as you can see. From supplied data I created the DEM as displayed below.

Next step is to combine two datasets. The result is shown below.

Now it is back to the colour schemas. NIWA has a colour ramp they are using but I didn’t like it that much.

And here is why. On its own I wouldn’t mind using it but it in my opinion it does not work well with elevation tint.

Here are some test screenshots.

After some testing I have decided to go with blue colour ramps and here are most likely candidates.

With colours almost sorted there was a next challenge – what data format will work the best for 3D print? According to printer’s manual it will work with VRML, 3DS and DXF/DWG data. I had a bit of problems with exporting data as VRML (I was using ArcGIS 9.2 pre-release then). Once exported VRML didn’t really give us the result we were expecting. There was lot of trouble reading the file and getting the texture (picture correctly positioned on top of model). In next try, I made a 3DS file and send it to 3D Print. Few days later I have also sent a DXF file and the image file of the final colour separately so they could experiment and choose the best option.

Eventually, the figured out the best data format and the way to print this (I am not too sure what format was used in the end) and they made first test 3D print from supplied data and this was the result.

Looking at this we have agreed that this is nowhere near to what we have expected. To make it better 3D Print made it bigger, to cover 4 tiles and to have a base and side walls. Each tile is 30x30cm and height depends on the features of terrain. The result was much better. The model was in our Auckland office and then taken to Wellington by one of our staff members about two weeks before the conference. Unfortunately, two of four tiles got broken in transport because the box with print was checked in at the airport. And that was under two week before the Conference!

Then the good guys at 3D Print decided to do more tweaking and make another run/copy of the model. The main reason for tweaking were the colours. All colours came out lighter then everybody has expected or liked. To my surprise, new model looked so much better than the first one.

Here are the photos of the second model taken with my Sony DSC P7 camera (old and not very good).

As you can see even new printed tiles broke but this is not visible when put together.
For the print we have included logos of all parties involved. Can you spot the spike under letter A in EAGLE?

There are some nice features of the terrain visible even if I use just two tiles.

Here are some close up shots to illustrate terrain and undersea features.

On the photo above you can see ‘terraces’ result of undersea configuration – large areas with very small slope. The same effect is noted on Free Geography Tools blog.

For this print we decided not to use solid base in order to save time and material for printing. Here is an underside of one tile.

Lessons learned
This was an interesting experience for several reasons. Firstly, working with new printing technology. Using 3D prints can really bring out the characteristics of the terrain (in this case). These are especially attractive for students and for people who can’t easily create mental picture of an area looking at the topographic map. 3D print as a company was very keen to work with us and demonstrate use of this technology in GIS and mapping.

Choosing symbology was quite difficult considering I had to combine bathymetry and terrain in single product. This would not be that difficult if it was a medium with known characteristics, like paper. In the first try colours used looked fine on screen and test print on paper but when used in 3D print they came out pale. To highlight the coastline I used orange colour that was too strong any line symbol was too wide. Lakes and swamp outlines were also too strong and too wide.

Printing in 3D is not cheap. One tile 30x30cm costs around $300 NZ. All together this printing costs were around $3,000 NZ. Once printed you should take care of the prints since there are quite fragile.
If I get the opportunity to do this again I would be delighted and hopefully the process would be less troublesome.

SATA 3.0 specification released

noreply@blogger.com (Zorko) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 08:22:00 +0000

SATA-IO has released specification for SATA 3.0 standard on May 27th. Specification states transfer speed of up to 6 Gb/s and enhancements to support multimedia applications. Some of these enhancements are:

A new Native Command Queuing (NCQ) streaming command to enable isochronous data transfers for bandwidth-hungry audio and video applications
An NCQ Management feature that helps optimize performance by enabling host processing and management of outstanding NCQ commands
Improved power management capabilities
A small Low Insertion Force (LIF) connector for more compact 1.8-inch storage devices
A connector designed to accommodate 7mm optical disk drives for thinner and lighter notebooks
Alignment with the INCITS ATA8-ACS standard

As you would expect it is backward compatible with earlier implementations. Full presentation containing more information can be viewed here.
It should not be too long before we start seeing SATA 3.0 drives around since about 98% of all desktop hard disks today are SATA drives.

Carbon nanotube data storage

noreply@blogger.com (Zorko) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 08:00:00 +0000

One of the major problems with today’s ways of storing data is lifetime of the media. I am guessing that you are making copies of your 4-5 old CDs so you could view or edit your old family photos. I’ve done that few times and will do it few more times before we get something more permanent. Digital archiving methods seems to be of relatively short lifespan – from 5 years ford CDs to 20 for computer disks.
Possible solution is in use of carbon nanotubes. This method is described in an article in Nano Letters site. The technique is briefly described here

…technique of placing a single iron crystal only a few billionths of a meter wide inside a hollow carbon nanotube. Like diamonds, nanotubes are among the most stable structures in existence. Once inserted into the tubes, the iron nanocrystals act as data bits, physically sliding from one end of the tube to the other in response to an electric current and in the process registering either a "1" or a "0" in the binary language of computers.

It is still long way to go before this becomes a prototype but potential is there. For potential capacity here is what the abstract says:

The shuttle memory has application for archival storage, with information density as high as 10¹² bits/in², and thermodynamic stability in excess of one billion years.

All we have to do is wait until someone actually start making these devices.

Sharp LCD screen uses 5 primary colours

noreply@blogger.com (Zorko) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 09:10:00 +0000

According to recent news here and here (I was unable to locate the source for this) Sharp made a full HD LCD display that is using 5 instead of usual 3 primary colours. In this model additional colours are cyan and yellow. According to Sharp this device displays images "identical in appearance to real-world objects."
Display resolution is 1920x1080 with 60.5” screen size and will be demonstrated in San Antonio, Texas at Society for Information Display Symposium.
The main advantage of this display is ability to display almost entire Pointer colour space. Once these displays become common on the market this will make visualization lot better and easier assuming that software manufactures start making drivers for this type of display. According to articles brass, skin tones, petals are really hard ones to reproduce and this screen just may be the solution.
We may see more news about this product after Sunday so stay tuned.

Sony demonstrates Motion Controller

noreply@blogger.com (Zorko) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 08:07:00 +0000

At E3 Sony has joined the wave of new game controllers. At the press conference Sony has unveiled Motion Controller.
This controlled is obviously less radical concept than Microsoft’s Natal. This by no means means this is bad or average controller. It can register whole range of movements including the rotation of the wrist.
Have a look at the video to see how does it work and how accurate it is.

Combination of Eye Toy camera and new controller works quite well and it is fun to see yourself wielding a big sword.
According to video Motion Controller is very accurate – sub millimetre. It was quite easy to write on the “wall” and even better example of accuracy may be the grabbing building blocks and building something quickly.
Obviously, Motion Controller will be most beneficial for gamers and not surprisingly different uses were demonstrated in video – sword and shield, gun (remember the FPS mode), gestures used in RTS to select units and define path, etc. The fun part for me was to use it as bow and arrow.
So hopefully it will not be too long wait until we see this in the stores and maybe bundled with slim version of Playstation 3…

VPlay or having fun with video using Surface

noreply@blogger.com (Zorko) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 08:32:00 +0000

Microsoft has a invested a lot in Surface development and it now we see more and more uses of it. It is now in every episode of CSI Miami, news and other places.
Cambridge research branch is working on a project VPlay. This project is about videos and interaction between users and videos in real time.

VPlay allows users to manipulate video in real time. Digital objects representing video clips, effects and mixers are displayed on the surface and can be easily arranged to create an ever changing video output.

This video show how this works quite nicely but the background audio noise is quite strong.

Here is shorter video illustrating input and output windows connected with a series of effect/modifiers.

This would be a nice application for a multitouch laptop with
Windows 7 maybe…

Microsoft’s Natal – the future of gaming?

noreply@blogger.com (Zorko) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 08:06:00 +0000

At this year’s E3 Expo Microsoft has demonstrated a new way to interact with Xbox 360 console. Project Natal is current culmination of development in several different areas. The first one may not seem relevant, at least not directly, and that is multitouch sensor. Microsoft has done this a while ago as well as other companies. Multitouch offers a whole new area for usability and application design in ways hard to imagine before that.
There is another example that is in the infancy stage right now. This is 3D user interface without use of any controllers.
And then there is Nintendo Wii with it’s revolutionary Wii Remote. As a console Wii is no match to Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 but “Wiimote” makes it fun to play. If you haven’t played Wii games yourself just ask anyone who did. It is not a rare case to have more than one of latest consoles. I have Wii and the Playstation 3. Wii is absolute hit seller in Japan and everywhere else. All thanks to Wiimote.
Microsoft has realized the potential and figured out they can get in that game too. Result of this plan is Project Natal. Natal is taking the idea of Wiimote one step further – you don’t have a controler but you use your body as the controller.
So, how does it look? How does it work? Does it work? To answer these questions have a look at these videos.
Introduction video

In the video you see use of voice commands. I would take this with grain of salt. If you remember Vista’s demonstration I guess you will agree. I am not saying it is impossible but may need a bit of setup and training the machine to recognize your voice. Or Microsoft has something amazing and managed to keep it a secret during development of Natal. The technology seems to be quite well refined and working quite well. The best proof is this video of stage demonstration.

It is obvious that Microsoft was working on this for a while and worked with partners. At least one of the partners is Lionhead Studios. In Milo Project they are demonstrating use of Natal technology to create immersive, highly interactive world.

This is really impressive demonstration and would really like to see more of it. I expect to see more videos and information released in next few days as E3 kicks in high gear.

ArcUser – now as an electronic magazine

noreply@blogger.com (Zorko) — Mon, 18 May 2009 01:51:00 +0000

Being New Zealand distributor for ESRI means we get the publications like Arc User from USA. Because of that I don’t often go to the News section of ESRI’s home page.
Today I went there to check of of the article I saw before. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that ArcUser is available as electronic flipbook magazine. To view this you must have Flash player installed.

You can flip the pages like with real magazine or use the arrows at the bottom of the screen.

Going to the first page also shows how to use 3D Issue publications (and ArcUser is published using this technology). Quick start explains Quick Start, Icons options and also includes FAQ section.

As expected there is a search functionality built in.

If you don’t want to view on-line the magazine can be downloaded as an off-line version (this didn’t work for me this time) or you can resort to good old PDF.
PDF version has a slightly sharper text rendering while graphics is the same. PDF may take longer to download than the flipbook. The latest issue is just over 10 MB.
Content of the ArcUser is as it always was – great with range of articles from introduction to developer level.

ArcGIS 9.3/9.3.1 GDB replication patch

noreply@blogger.com (Zorko) — Thu, 14 May 2009 23:14:00 +0000

A new patch is released for ArcGIS 9.3 and 9.3.1 and it addresses issues with simple relationship synchronization issues. Full description of the issue:

NIM045076 - Deleting an origin feature in a simple relationship automatically sets the destination's foreign key value to null. If you synchronize more than one such edit to a child, only the foreign key value for one of features is set to null in the child. For example, if you delete 4 records in the origin table of a simple relationship, and synchronize these edits to the child replica, only 1 of the 4 records in the destination table in the child replica would have their foreign key value set to null.

Note that SP 1 for 9.3 must be installed prior to installation of this patch. Patch is 1 MB and can be downloaded from this page.