Exporting Virtual Worlds into the Real World

Just came across a site that I found quite intriguing. We are always taking the world around us and digitizing it through photos, video and audio files....here was a process that brought what we have created digitally into the "real world."

Export to World was designed Linda Kostowski and Sascha Pohflepp and they their aim with this project was to "copy objects from Second Life's walled economy of simulated things. We export those into the real world by transforming them into life-size papercraft models."

What will you need to create the virtual objects into the real world?

• A 2nd Life Account
• Michael Frumin's OGLE free software installed (it extracts the geometry and texture data from your graphics hardware). Cool piece of software that extracts the geometry from other web 3D sites as well such as Google Earth and World of Warcraft (view the "real life" paper models from these sites.)
  
• Pepakura Designer (free software) installed (Japanese shareware unfolding-software)
• Read step-by-step directions for creating your "life-size papercraft model."

School Chat....

I hope I am not the only one excited about this :) Working in 3D, I am going to try this on some of my own 3D models.....keep you posted on that one.

I think it opens up a whole new door for students to access and present research projects. Put this process in their hands and see what they come up with.....it will amaze you! Let me know if anyone uses this in their classroom....I would be interested to see how the students engage with this process.

Web or Print Publishing is so easy for any budding Photographer or Graphic Designer

A colleague of mine at work (Richard Wong) will tell you his photography is only a hobby....but his passion, eye for detail and design sense tells quite another story. Very talented person! Check our his new web album it is constantly updating.

Richard created this web album using JAlbum (see below) and the BananAlbum skin.

BananAlbum can be used on its own and was developed by another photo enthusiast (Rudin Swagerman) for personal use....once other people saw the great potential of BananAlbum they wanted to use it as well. BananAlbum is free to use (although you can purchase a license for $30.00 USD....this will give you a "clean" BananAlbum. No intro, no icon on the bottom right hand corner, plus information on how to incorporate audioPlayer functionality. If you want a great way to add an easy album to your website - the $30.00 is a great deal! Note: when registering, you must give the domain (the URL) that BananAlbum will be hosted on.

BananAlbum can be used for any type of image - photography or original artwork (digital or other mediums).

Back in 2006 I had blogged about JAlbum, it has come a long way since then! BananAlbum is now bundled in JAlbum. "With JAlbum you have full control of the look of the generated album, not just color theme and basic layout, still making an album is just a matter of drag and drop + a button click if you prefer to use one of the many existing looks. JAlbum will process your images, make index pages and slide show pages and even upload the final album to the Internet for your friends to see. JAlbum runs on all platforms and speaks 30 languages."

But wait, there is more.....

You can take your images from JAlbum and publish a book in Blurb. Took some great photographs over the holidays, publish them in a book from Blurb. Prices are quite reasonable starting "at only $12.95 for a 40-page softcover, $22.95 for a 40-page hardcover with dust jacket. The bookmaking software is free." Click this link for further pricing guidelines.

The process is easy. Install Blurb BookSmart, choose the type of book you want to make, play around with the photos, stories, etc...and your book is done.What a great birthday, Christmas (next year), or special occasion gift! Work the cost into a school program. Students take their own photographs all year then publish them into a book at the end of the year....great keepsake. Companies want to tell their own story - to be original.

I am going to use Blurb to tell our story since we moved to New Zealand almost 3 years ago. Some of my family members will probably not ever travel from Canada to New Zealand so if I pull a book together for them with pictures of the people and places they have heard us talk about over the last couple of years.....it will bring our new home closer to them.

Creating better mp3 files....it is music to your ears

A small article in Wired magazine (November 2007) caught my eye. It was about ripping better mp3 files. Ever since the creation of Napster and portable music devices....the mp3 file format has become the choice for many around the world. The good thing is that mp3 compression allows for smaller music files - but the problem with this is that we have become used to listening to (as the music purists would put it) - "crap." We have sacrificed sound quality for small file sizes.

The Wired article states "the audio geeks behind LAME (the decoder) continually fine-tune their compression algorithms so cymbals don't crunch like garbage-can lids, and screaming guitars don't sound like squeaking Fisher-Prince toys."
(Image Reference)

The article suggests 2 mp3 applications to try (they are free of course):

1. Mac users: iLas
2. PC users: Exact Audio Copy

If you are using Audacity (a free audio recording and editing application that most schools now use....for Mac, PC & Linux.) Be sure to download and install the lame.dll file. This will enable you to export your audio files as .mp3 files with a great compression. This is important if you are using Audacity to record Language or English assessments.

One of many possible links (if Googled) you can download the lame.dll file (download)

Open Student Television Network

OSTN (Open Student Television Network) was launched in 2005 by the CampusEAI Consortium and Internet2, a 24/7 worldwide channel exclusively devoted to student-produced programming.

"OSTN now is delivered to 41 million users at 4,500 university member campuses and 36 countries around the globe. OSTN can be viewed on televisions and personal computers."

OSTN is accessible at colleges and universities around the world through the following methods:

• Television on Campus
• Televisions in a Community
• Laptop and Desktop Computers on Campus

There is a submission process....no uploads randomly like other video websites.

View information on how to become a member and get involved.....read more.
Information on the OSTN Media Festival....read more.

VectorMagic - a free online vector conversion tool for images

A colleague of mine sent me this link the other day - thanks Robin :) A research project by James Diebel and Jacob Norda out of Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

VectorMagic is an "online auto-tracer converting bitmaps to vectors." Easy, easy....just upload the bitmap image and in a few seconds (or minutes depending on the size of the image) you are returned with a lovely converted vector.

Difference between vectors and bitmaps (aka raster images)? Bitmaps are made of of pixels, so when you try to increase the size of a bitmap it will get fuzzy and pixelated. Vectors are made up of mathematical equations (geometric shapes such as lines, circles and curves) so it resized, it looks just as clean at almost any size.

Input:	JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF
Output:	EPS, SVG, PNG

A great little web-based tool.....give it a try.

Great Resource for Teaching 2D or 3D Animation

Animationmeat has been one of my favourite web resources for several years. The website is by two animators that work(ed) in the industry.

I have used it to develop ideas and resources for teaching traditional animation prior to introducing it in Flash. It is also great for teaching basic character development concepts for 2D or 3D.

This website has gone through some changes over the last couple of years, it is missing some of the documents it used to have, but still has a lot of great content in it. Students love the content from this website and many of my students that have gone onto animation careers have told me they go back to this website over and over again.

Some of the resources you will find here are sample Character Model Sheets (see image top left hand corner). This is an important step for students to visualize how their character will look.

Several items in the Templates area for a teacher to use and modify. Such as a Storyboard TV Panel (shown here).

The Notes area has "animation notes from various artists and various studios in "print ready" format (PDF). " Some of my favourite documents in here are in the Television Animation section: Storyboarding the Simpson's Way and
Brad Bird notes on Composition.

A great book that should be on every teachers shelf that teaches animation (in whatever form) is The Animator's Survival Kit: A Manual of Methods, Principles and Formulas for Classical, Computer, Games, Stop Motion and Internet Animators by Richard Williams.

You will find reference to this book and lots of other great resources on Animationmeat.com

Great website to bookmark!

Free 3D Animation Modelling and Character Animation Software

Anim8or is a free 3D modelling and character animation program for Windows platform. A great little program that has some interesting tutorials that can be easily integrated into a secondary multimedia program.

A great tutorial is available that shows how to create a character and a simple walk cycle. Broken into 3 separate tutorials:

1. Building the Body Parts
2. Making the Character
3. Animating the Character

Another free open source 3D content creation suite (that used to be a commercial product) is Blender. Blender has picked up quite a following in the open source community and especially in schools (due to the support and continued development online and its "freeness").

Blender is supports the following platforms:

• Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista
• Mac OS X (PPC and Intel)
• Linux (i386)
• Linux (PPC)
• FreeBSD 5.4 (i386)
• SGI Irix 6.5
• Sun Solaris 2.8 (sparc)

A lot of interesting features have been built into Blender over the last couple of years, one of these features is the multiresolution sculpting capabilities. Working in this mode is like handling and sculpting a piece of clay (view sample video). Another recent feature is the integration of Bullet - a 3D Collision Detection and Rigid Body Dynamics Library for games and animation.

ANIMOTO - easily create a video from a collection of your digital images

ANIMOTO ia a "web application that automatically generates professionally produced videos" from a collection of still digital images.

Just launched in August, 2007.....


"Each video is a fully customized orchestration of user-selected images and music. Produced on a widescreen format, Animoto videos have the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer."

Create a free account, upload your images from your computer or transfer them over from social images sites such as facebook, flickr, picasa, or smugmug. Then decide on your music. Either from your computer or you can choose from selections in the Animoto library. Music and images analysed and then put together in a video. You can then email the video, post on your blog or website or send it through Animoto again to be remixed.

No 2 videos come out the same. Give it a try....brings life to your images and you can still insert the movie into PPT or Flash Animation.

Desktop publishing starts to move to the web....

Web 2.0 is shifting what we did with standalone computer applications to web based applications. The earliest form of a web based application was Web Email....many have moved from using applications like Outlook as their only email source and also use Hotmail, Gmail, etc... just a couple of the many web based email services now available for free.

Limitations to web based applications and the success of these will depend on the Internet connections...which in many countries (sad to say) are still not efficient.

Still need a quick overview of Web 2.0? Watch the video (from YouTube) called: " 'Web 2.0' in just under 5 minutes. " by Michael Wesch (if you don't see the video below your network probably has YouTube blocked).


Tabblo (supported by HP) is a unique website that allows users to upload photos from a variety of sources (within Tabblo, Picasa, Flickr, your computer, etc...). You can create a number of different documents once logged into your free Tabblo account such as:

• online (photo album....a "tabblos")
• comic
• photocube (that you print and cutout)
• a book
• poster
• postcard

Customizable layout and design tools let you swap and resize pictures, add photo effects, customize colors and layouts, and add text to help you tell your story.

The Tabblo community: share your stuff, see what others are doing, see the photo challenges that are available for users to participate in.

Web sites moving to Web Television

Since YouTube, there are more and more websites coming online that are offering users the ability to create their own personal web television channels. There is a movement away from "stupid people trick" videos and a movement now into very specific niches and uses for web television.

The first site is Vator.tv. "It is a professional network and marketplace for ideas and businesses. Anyone, across all industries, at any stage, can share ideas, products, services and businesses with the rest of the world, mainly through video."

Have 3 minutes to pitch your idea, business, skillset or need......What's your pitch?

The hope is that people via Vator.tv can network, exchange knowledge and collaborate with other people who can help those ideas get to the next level. People can use Vator.tv to get their ideas or needs discovered or to find, discover and connect with others in networks of interest.

Classroom....
Interesting idea for young entrepreneur programs.
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The second site is Ourmedia ...."Video producers and podcasters can use Ourmedia to show off their works and create communities of interest. "

You can create your own Channels of interest either as a producer or as a user. Ourmedia allows you to share your user created content, but they'll also host it at the Internet Archive for free as long as you're willing to share your work with a global audience.

Ourmedia also has a Personal Media Learning Center that is aimed to help users create video, audio, and other forms of citizens' media. Presently there are resources for video (how to create a videoblog, video compressions, etc...), audio (how to create a podcast, editing and compression, etc...), multimedia (how to screencast), digital photography tips, and text (how to write for the web.)

Classroom....

A great way to introduce video production for the web. Also teachers will be able to create video tutorials and then create their own channels for their students to view.

The ability to personalize any space on the web is and will become an important factor for the consumers of today but especially tomorrow.

Sharing videos online....

Vimeo is a free online service that allows you to share video with your friends and family. What Flickr did for sharing online photos....Vimeo has the potential to do with video!

Whether you have taken video from your mobile phone, PDA, video camera or digital camera....you can upload your video formats to your free Vimeo account.

As you can setup who you want to share your videos with, you could easily use this for a program such as media or film studies. Create a class log in (teacher as administrator only) and upload any class video for students to comment on.

A second website to look at is heyspread. This beta website has a service that allows users to upload and post their videos "in one shot" to any of the video networks listed below.

• YouTube
• MySpace
• Google Videos
• Yahoo Videos
• Dailymotion
• Blip.tv
• Photobucket
• Metacafe
• Bolt
• Putfile
  

Making Sense of Ads

Making Sense of Ads is a combination of History, Media and Marketing.

Walking through the history of American advertising the website (produced in association with the Visible Knowledge Project) explores questions one should ask about an ad:

• What is the ad trying to do?
• Who is the intended audience?
• What strategies are used to sell the product?
• What do ads reveal or conceal about an era?
• What else do you need to know to analyze an ad?

The last section of the site is full of web resources for further research on advertisements. Great website to explore for lesson ideas for advertising concepts.