FUSEBLOG

An article on todays bbc news site promises an interesting future for real time gaming:

“It’s clear that the next trend in gaming is going to be bringing real objects into the virtual world; playing not against other gamers but people doing the real thing,” said Andy Lurling, founder of iOpener Media.

Several years ago when a few of FUSE were studying at Nottingham University we had the opportunity to work on a joint project which attempted to marry a basic GPS system with handheld PDA’s, creating a realtime mapping application which could be used for interactive tour guides through to digitally enhanced hide & seek games. We weren’t quite good enough at pulling computers apart, or should i say putting them back together correctly, to work on the latter, though we did develop a flash based interface which functioned as a digital guide for an architectural walking tour.

Satellite navigation systems have improved dramatically over the past few years, partially due to the US opening up part of its military satellite network (not for civilian goodwill you understand, but cold hard coorporate cash), and also due to the advancement of consumer products willing to use the technology - in car sat-nav systems for instance, and handheld GPS systems, one of which saved our bacon while up a cold cloudy mountain in Scotland recently - good work Rob!

But the above progress, dating back from the 1980’s and Reagan’s Star Wars effort, could look relatively snail paced compared to what is in store for the future, thanks to the development of Galileo - a brand new, and crucially civilian run, European Satellite Network:

The system is technically years ahead of the aging US satellites, allowing for faster and much more accurate data to be passed to the ground. No longer will the GPS reading be within a foot or a meter of its actual position - it will be as good as spot-on. And the loss of signal, often feared by those halfway up a munroe, will be a thing of the past.

What is unique here though is that the system is not run by the military. The existing satellite systems reserve their high-end functionality for military use, only dealing low bandwidths and services for commercial / consumer use. Galileo is commercially funded and run, offering a near full service to the commercial sector, if not the general public.

The possibilities for commercial use are endless, sparking a worldwide calls for ideas competition which has generated programs for “intelligent” fishing through to financial control systems in the timber industry. Add these to obvious enhancements to transport systems and a picture of a huge new european industry begins to appear.

Back to the fun bit though, as we here aren’t so interested in fishing..

Games games games!

From live Grand Prix racing through to exercise bikes partaking in the Tour de France, and rowing machines in the boat race, again the possibilities are endless. The new GPS receivers are chips, rather than units so can be placed virtually anywhere, and as they get smaller the technology gets better.

And if this new GPS technology is married with the Nintendo Wii and its future incarnations?

Sat afternoon has a new Grandstand, and its Real-Time-Tastic! A set against Federer? A round with Tiger? A home run in the big league?

Imagine playing Pro-Evo in realtime, ill drag the mighty Posh out of league 1 obscurity with one boot, whilst winning the World Cup for England with the other, all out of my satellite infested front room…

… ok so i got carried away, technology cant solve everything

The Microsoft Live Search team announced today that it had expanded the company’s Search and Give charitable searching program to more than 1 million eligible organizations. The program donates 1 cent for each search conducted by users to the school or charity of their choice up to 500 searches per month (or $60/year per person). Can Microsoft possibly make a dent in Google’s stranglehold on the search market by offering up charitable donations as an incentive to search? (read more here)

3D Web Method 1

Here at Fuse we are pretty used to creating 3D online experiences. The method we’ve used most often has been to create 3D animations using our 3D software (we love Cinema 4D) and then control these animations with Flash Actionscript - for example - Mr Complete:

Being able to interact with render-quality 3D animation is great, but it has its drawbacks - mainly that we, as the producers, determine the way the 3D space is navigated, or the way the 3D character moves. OK, we can create a series of movements that the user can choose between, but they are still predefined to a great extent. What if we could interact with the 3D in an unlimited way, where the scene is calculated as we interact with it rather than pre-rendered by the 3D software? Well, we’ve been doing that for a while too - read on…

3D Web Method 2

For a while now users have been able to interact with 3D scenes in realtime through the use of Java applets. These are little packages of code that need to be initialized by the user’s system (as well as be supported by it in the first place) before they can run. Our favourite software for this is Wirefusion, which we have used to create the likes of Sharpie Buddy:

We built a Flash interface with which a user could draw their design on a 2D page and then, with the click of the mouse, wrap it around a realtime 3D object, which they could then move and rotate to their hearts content. However, this method, as well as relying on Java being enabled on the user’s machine, also uses a fair bit of bandwidth just to load the application files. Really, what we’ve all been waiting for is realtime 3D functionality in the ubiquitous Flash…

3D Web Method 3

Give a big hand to Papervision3D - an open source 3D engine for the Flash platform. Papervision3D is written and maintained by a small core team, and contributed to by its ever-growing community, which Fuse is proud to be a part of.

It has been almost a year since it entered public Beta in July 2007 and has been improving rapidly ever since. It will be a while yet until it can recreate a realtime scene of the quality of Mr Complete but already it can handle reflections, shadows, bump mapping etc. In fact, we believe that it has enough of the core 3D classes now that it has really come of age. But it’s not just us - Audi, Sony, Absolut, Canon and Red Bull are a few of the brands that have adopted this new technology. Look out for a new Fuse website in the near future, and of course, in realtime 3D.