Tek3D Weblog

Color Cycling Effects with HTML5

nna263 — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 06:48:24 +0000

Color cycling (or palette shifting) is a technology often used in computer graphics from the 90s in which colors are changed in order to give the effects of animation. This technique was mainly used in early computer games, as storing one image and changing its palette took virtually no memory and processor power whereas storing the animation in several frames required much more memory processing.

Most games used the technique to animate water, fire or other environmental effects. Unfortunately the art of color cycling died out in the late 90s as it looks terrible. This demo by Mark Ferrari is an implementation of a full 8-bit color cycling engine, rendered into an HTML5 Canvas in real-time. It can run well on Safari 5+, Chrome 5+, Firefox 3.5+, Opera 10.6+, iPhone with iOS 4+, iPad with iOS 3.2+.

Launch with sound

Launch without sound

Official HTC Desire Hands-on Video

Tek3D — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 14:42:46 +0000

You can search for quite a lot of hands-on videos of HTC Desire around the web, even some reviews appeared before the Desire was released. You can see the first review video of HTC Desire at at Mobile World Congress 2010 here. However, for this video, HTC’s asked Lasse Pulkkinen to take a closer look and give you his take on the HTC Desire. Lasse Pulkkinen (LP) is an avid YouTube video producer on Youtube and also a member of the staff at TechnoBuffalo.

This review once more time reinforces my opinion that HTC Desire is a seriously desirable Android smartphone, a worthy HTC flagship and if there are no extraordinary phones in the upcoming time, HTC Desire absolutely will be the best smartphone of this year 2010.

New Design for My Blog

Tek3D — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 15:35:18 +0000

You are seeing the new design of my blog, I launched a new theme for my blog a few days ago and still doing some tweaks to optimize this theme. If you visit my blog regularly, you will notice that I had used the Tidalforce theme from Elegant for nearly 2 years. Since WordPress is upgraded to version 3.0 and I want to take advantage of new features in this version, I decided to change to another theme of Elegant – Whoswho.

There are 4 reasons leading me to this choice:

I have been a member of Elegant for a while and I love its design style, all of them have great looks, very clean, clear and elegant.
I don’t have to pay more to use this theme. For $39/year, you get unlimited access to 43 premium WordPress themes and every new theme they release.
Every Elegant theme has a great Theme Options Page called e-Panel. This panel make your work much easier, now you don’t have to touch theme’s codes to tweak your blog. It is separated into 8 sections: General Settings, Navigation, Ad Management, Layout, Colorization, Integration, SEO and Support Documents. Take a look at this page:
Whoswho is maybe the lightest and the fastest theme from Elegant. I tested its speed with some other nice themes of Elegant (including the TidalForce theme I used) and realized that Whoswho outperforms all of them and its loading speed is 50% faster than my old theme.

The new design still has some errors and flaws, so I’d be very glad to receive your suggestions regarding the new theme, its look and the easiness of navigation. Thanks everyone!

Introduce Firefox Tab Candy

Tek3D — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 16:56:46 +0000

The web browser war has never received much attention in popular culture and the mass media like at the moment. A few weeks ago, Internet Explorer 9.0 introduced a vastly improved Javascript engine known as “Chakra”. In Sunspider benchmarks, it outperformed the Firefox javascript engine. However, Mozilla never gives up easily. Immediately they announced the next-generation JavaScript engine named JaegerMonkey and then introduced an excellent new feature – Tab Candy which is planned for Firefox 4.

It has been long since the last time I was amazed by a new feature of a web browser like this one. Although Tab Candy is still in testing period, what it showed is really promising and is exactly the feature that all of us need. If you have ever worked and opened dozens of tabs, you will understand why we need Tab Candy to organize them. We can see all of our tabs at once, and focus on the task at hand, this absolutely will save us a lot of time for finding and sorting tabs.

Features of Tab Candy include:

Instant Overview—Never lose a tab again
Lightweight Grouping
Only See the Tabs You Want
Organize Your Space

You should watch the video below for a full overview. Fundamentally, these features allow you to zoom out and get a bird-eye-view of all your opened tabs and you can also arrange open tabs in certain spaces so they’re grouped together. This allows you to find more easily what you’re looking for with so many tabs open.

Tab Candy is still in early development and contains a lot of bugs and performance issues, but if you can’t wait till the November, you can download Firefox 4 beta and try the new Tab Candy feature right now.

Samsung 3D Outdoor Projection

Tek3D — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 05:53:10 +0000

On May 20th, Samsung was the first to introduce a large-scale commercial 3D outdoor projection in Netherlands, at the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam. For three nights, the projection interacted with the architecture of the building, and viewers were treated to an incredible 3D audiovisual experience.

According to Raymond Mesterom – Marketing Manager of Samsung Electronics in Netherlands, outdoor has always been an important medium for Samsung. With the projection on the historic Beurs van Berlage building in Amsterdam, this medium has been employed in a thoroughly new and innovative way. The additional use of numerous social media and mobile has made the Samsung 3D Event and its corresponding viral video a global success. It fits Samsung’s innovative character to now make these viral videos interactive with the YouTube game-take-over, thereby adding a fresh dimension to the Samsung 3D campaign.

Lagoa Multiphysics 1.0 Demonstration Video

nna263 — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 06:36:45 +0000

The Lagoa Multiphysics 1.0 engine has been developed by Thiago Costa, who currently works as Lead Technical Director at Ubisoft Digital Arts in Montreal. It is a particle physics framework that gives control over high friction granular materials, incompressible fluids, elastic structures and plastic deformations.

The effects of this physics engine are amazing, and even though its current use would be more in the realm of 3D animation, it gives us a glimpse of how in-game physics could look in the not so distant future.

Steve Jobs – the Dark Lord

Tek3D — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 04:57:58 +0000

Apple founder Steve Jobs has been busy defending the iPhone 4, which has been proved to have problems since before its launch. The poor antenna design is the biggest flaw that affected the iPhone 4.

After Apple’s press conference on Friday, a Taiwanese news station felt that it is necessary to summarize the events of the last four or five months with the following funny animation.

Here’s the video with English subtitles so you can understand what the narrator is saying.

Super Mario Bros on Street

nna263 — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 03:58:30 +0000

Released over 20 years ago, the classic video game Super Mario Bros is still continue kept fresh with creative ways like in this clip. Andreas Heikus has put this together for his thesis in “Matchmoving” which involves matching CG elements into live-action footage.

Whilst it feels a little difficult to follow at times thanks to the hand held camera, it’s absolutely a cool way to watch a full run through of Super Mario Bros, which probably hasn’t been done before.

Technology Highlights – Week 28

Tek3D — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 12:54:00 +0000

Happy Sunday! Again today is the time we sit and make a round-up of the most important technology news of the last 7 days. This is the week of Apple, iPhone 4 and Apple, all the eyes were paying attention to Apple’s news and conference in this week.

Earlier this week, Apple received a very bad news as Consumer Reports, the leading US consumer magazine, recommends that users should not buy the iPhone 4. The magazine’s experts tested 3 iPhone and confirmed that the iPhone 4′s antenna problem is due to hardware. The Consumer Reports‘ reviews led to a serious decline in Apple and iPhone 4′s prestige.

Here is the video from Consumer Reports.

Later on July 16, Steve Jobs addressed the iPhone 4 antenna disaster at a press conference held at Cupertino campus. At the beginning of his speech, Steve Jobs stated that Apple’s not perfect, there is not a perfect phone and Apple just want to make users feel happy. Much as we predicted, Jobs then demonstrated how other phones including Blackberry 9700, HTC Droid Eris, and Samsung Omnia have the same reception issues when gripped tightly. “We haven’t figured out a way around the laws of physics. Yet.” he says. And to remedy the situation, Apple will give everyone who buys or has bought an iPhone 4 a free case.

For those who want to see the footage of Job’s conference, you can now view it here: iPhone 4 Antenna Press Conference Video.

The Verizon Wireless website shows that the Droid X is sold out until July 23 when devices ordered now will be shipped. Droid X is considered as a big rival of the iPhone 4, especially after iPhone’s serious antenna flaw. The Motorola Droid X has more latest features like 4.3-inch, 16:9 multitouch display with 854×480 resolution, a 1GHz OMAP processor, 512MB RAM, HDMI-out, DLNA support, GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and Hotspot tethering. Motorola Droid X is also equipped with an 8MP camera with 720p HD video recording, three mics, 8GB on-board memory and a 16GB microSD card and a 1570mAh battery.

Compare iPhone 4 and Droid X.

At the conference WPC in Washington, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said the company is trying to regain what was lost at the hands of Google and Apple on the mobile market . He confirmed that in the upcoming time, Microsoft will release a series of smartphones and Tablet PCs running Windows 7 Phone. Ballmer also said that before the end of 2010, Microsoft expects to sell 350 million devices based on Windows.

iPhone 4 Antenna Press Conference Video

Tek3D — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 05:21:01 +0000

Steve Jobs took the stage to explain the issues surround the iPhone 4 antenna in a press conference held at Cupertino, California. Jobs says the issue only affects 0.55 percent of all iPhone 4s, return rates are only 1.7 percent and while the iPhone 4 does drop more calls than the previous iPhone, it is only 1 more out of every 100 calls.

Below are the videos from this press conference: