Web

The 2nd International Workshop on Blending Physical and Digital Spaces on the Internet will be held in conjunction with the Future Internet Symposium 2009, September 1-3, in Berlin. From the OneSpace 2009 website: "One of the most important effects of the Internet and of the Web has been to relax spatial and temporal constraints on human activities – the so called “space-time collapse” – allowing fast global access to information as well as to physical resources and services.

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.

This Science Daily article talks about the starting shape of the world wide grid. From the article: "The dream of using the Internet to allow people to access as much computer processing and storage power as they need, when they need it, is a step closer thanks to European researchers.

Although a World Wide Grid running on top of the Internet is still probably years away from being a reality, the grid, like the web before it, is starting to take shape between academic and scientific institutions.

Where the Internet is a communications channel between computers, the grid goes beyond this by not just using the Internet for communications but also as a means of sharing computing resources. Every computer and user can access and make use of the combined resources of the grid.

Latest Version of Free, Online 3D Modeling Software Allows Users to Reuse or “Remix” Models from Other 3DVIA Users

Concord, Mass. – September 15, 2008 – Dassault Systèmes (DS) (NASDAQ: DASTY, Euronext Paris: #13065. DSY. PA), a world leader in 3D and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, today announced 3DVIA Shape 2.0, the latest release of its free 3D modeling software featuring an all new and expanded 3D remix capability. This latest update will make creating and publishing online 3D content amazingly easy by allowing users to construct or “remix” complete 3D scenes using models contributed by other users on the 3DVIA.com content library.

My blogs:

Interactive Multimedia Technology
http://interactivemultimediatechnology.blogspot.com

Technology Supported Human-World Interaction
http://tshwi.blogspot.com

TechPsych
http://techpsych.blogspot.com

A virtual character, or avatar, for all the virtual worlds in which people play is the goal of a joint project between IBM and Linden Lab.

Read more at:

BBC News

Once upon a time, 3D for the Web promised to be as easy as building a Web page. Unfortunately, 3D -- even simple 3D -- is more complex than displaying scrolling text and pictures. Each VRML vendor implemented a different subset of the spec, and it never gained traction. And so 3D on the Web faded away. Or did it? It turns out that VRML lives on in its XML flavor, X3D, which has grown to encompass VRML's siblings H-Anim (Humanoid Animation) and GeoVRML. Can 3D on the Web finally be used for more than virtual shopping malls? The latest installment of this mini-series on XML media shows that it can. This article focuses on a couple of uses that X3D is ready for now, and takes a look at where it might go in the future.