Games

This Dayton Daily News article talks about the Virtual Army Experience at the 2009 Vectren Dayton Air Show. From the article: "The Virtual Army Experience was one of the most popular attractions at the air show this year. After all, the huge grey tent holding nearly 20,000 square feet of virtual reality entertainment was hard to miss.

The attraction launched in 2007, said Public Relations manager Amy Lindstrom, and this is the second time it has been featured at the Vectren Dayton Air Show.

This Science Daily article reports the Nintendo Wii may enhance Parkinson's treatment. From the article: "The Nintendo Wii may help treat symptoms of Parkinson's disease, including depression, a Medical College of Georgia researcher says.

Parkinson’s disease is a degenerative disease that impairs motor skills. Dr. Herz theorized that the popular computer game console, which simulates various sports and activities, could improve coordination, reflexes and other movement-related skills, but he found additional benefits as well.

From this New York Times article: "Uh-oh! Another big bank is the subject of a depositor run amid charges its chairman has run off with customers’ money. Thankfully, this scandal is taking place in Eve Online, a space-age virtual reality created by CCP, a games developer and Iceland’s coolest company. But these troubles in the ether may offer some valuable lessons for earthly banking and regulation.

Eve is one of the more successful multiplayer online games. Some 300,000 people — as it happens, nearly equal to the population of Iceland — pay $15 a month to navigate characters that pilot intergalactic spaceships, manufacture and trade goods, mine resources and enter into big alliances, or bloody battles, with one another.

Visualization Library is a cross-platform OpenGL-based C++ visualization toolkit dedicated to visualization professionals. This new release brings an enhanced volume visualization engine implementing realtime Blinn-Phong lighting with the OpenGL Shading Language, isosurface extraction via marching cubes, DICOM file support to read and write medical images and volumes, plus many other enhancements. A set of volume visualization screenshots can be found at: - http://visualizationlibrary.com/docs/html/pagguideslicedvolume.html - http://visualizationlibrary.com/docs/html/pagguidemarchingcubes.html - http://www.visualizationlibrary.com/jetcms/node/4

For more information on Visualization Library features visit: - http://visualizationlibrary.com/docs/html/pagkeyfeatures.html - http://visualizationlibrary.com/docs/html/pagchangelog.html

From this BBC News article: "The 3D web moved closer to reality as Mozilla, the developer of the Firefox browser, joined forces with graphics consortium Khronos. Khronos has set up a working group to create a standard for what it calls accelerated 3D graphics on the web. It could lead to widespread browser-based gaming as well as creating 3D environments in social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. The aim is to produce a first public version within a year.

From the OpenSceneGraph website: "PERTHSHIRE, Scotland - 12th February 2009 - OpenSceneGraph Professional Services announces the release of OpenSceneGraph 2.8, the industry's leading open-source scene graph technology, designed to accelerate application development and improve 3D graphics performance. OpenSceneGraph 2.8 written entirely in Standard C++ and built upon OpenGL, offers developers working in the visual simulation, game development, virtual reality, scientific visualization and modeling markets - a real-time visualization tool which eclipses commercial scene graph toolkits in functionality, stability and performance. OpenSceneGraph 2.8 runs on all Microsoft Windows platforms, Apple OS/X, GNU/Linux, IRIX, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and FreeBSD operating systems."

From this Telegraph.co.uk article: " Sony has announced that its online virtual community, PlayStation Home, is coming to all PlayStation 3 owners on Dec 11.

The Second Life-like virtual world will provide PS3 users with a three-dimensional social gaming space in which to interact and communicate with other players.

Sony said the service would deliver "overwhelming visual graphics and rich gaming social experiences only possible on the PS3 platform."

This NewScientistTech article reports Nintendo has unveiled a new motion sensor for its Wii controller and a number of new games to show off the capabilities of the device. From the article: "The controller more accurately tracks the position and orientation of a player's arm and should allow games to be more sensitive to player movement.

At the E3 video game industry trade show in Los Angeles yesterday, Nintendo said the motion controller will come boxed with a new title called Wii Sports Resort, which includes Frisbee throwing and sword-fighting games that show off the controller's abilities.

This research project's objective is to explore the use of the Wii Balance BoardTM as a low-cost input device in virtual reality (VR). A video is also available. From the project abstract: "In this work we explore the use of the Wii Balance BoardTM as a low-cost input device in virtual reality (VR). We combined and extended existing communication libraries such that the balance board's four separate pressure sensors can be used as input to a VR application. We provide a brief technical overview of obtaining and working with the sensor input. By processing the sudden and gradual changes in the sensor input values caused by pressing on the board, we are able to use the balance board for both discrete and continuous input.

This NewScientist Technology article reports a Microsoft researcher has told an academic blogger the Surface may become an additional controller for their games console, the Xbox. From the article: "Microsoft has so far spoken near-exclusively of Surface appearing in places like hotel lobbies and retail stores - the first Surfaces in the wild are being used to sell phones by AT&T (video).