3D

Correction made on October 27 at 9:40 a.m. PDT: See details below.

SAN FRANCISCO--Google already has customized some of its Web sites for display on the iPhone, but now the company also dived headlong onto Apple's highly regarded mobile phone with a full-fledge application, a handheld version of its Google Earth geographical software (download for Windows and Mac).

Google Earth lets people virtually fly around a 3D view of the world made from satellite and aerial imagery mapped onto the planet's mountains and valleys. The iPhone version reproduces this core experience, downloading imagery from Google's … Read more

I'm a big View-Master collector, but even I never sat back and wondered aloud, "When will they come up with a Webcam that does 3D?" Then arrives the Minoru 3D Webcam.

The Minoru has two discrete lenses spaced at roughly human eye distance, but unlike a View-Master reel, it doesn't deliver two discrete images, rather it mixes both together into a blurry-looking mess that requires the goofy two-color glasses that have kept 3D on the launch pad since Day 1.

More encouragingly, you don't need a special Web platform or software for viewing: standard video … Read more

A group of the biggest Hollywood studios said Wednesday that they will invest more than $1 billion to upgrade 20,000 North American movie theaters to digital projector systems.

According to Reuters, Disney, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Pictures, and Lions Gate Entertainment have reached a pact with investors, including Blackstone Group and JPMorgan Chase. The work would begin in 2009 and could take as much as 3 and 1/2 years to complete.

For some time, the studios have wanted to embark on the upgrade project, Reuters wrote, but have been unable to nail down the financing. But … Read more

CHIBA, Japan--Sony has an entire wall of its 11-inch XEL-1 OLED TVs set up here at Ceatec 2008, but in contrast with past gadget shows, it's not the only company showing off OLED prototypes.

Panasonic may have said earlier this week that OLED is still far from becoming a mass-produced mainstream technology for use in big-screen TVs, but other electronics makers are plowing ahead with their own research on the organic, thin film technology: NEC, Sony, and KDDI showed off what they've been doing with OLED in their research labs.

Sony, of course, continues to press ahead its … Read more

ExitReality is the latest virtual world to come onto the scene and is launching out of private beta tonight. Its big bold feature is the capability to turn any site you're on into its own 3D world with interactive elements created from content found on the page. This includes photos, videos, and music files.

The service requires a small system plug-in that currently runs only on PCs. I was told no Mac version is planned, but may come into the picture if there's enough of a demand. Once the plug-in is installed, you just need to click a button in your browser and it will take you to the 3D version of that site. The tool will automatically scan any page you're on and make a "default" world where bits and pieces of content are pulled together and organized within a giant room. Site creators can put together their own creations, complete with a developer toolbox that lets people create some Second Life-esq environments using open-source 3D modeling standards.

In a demo earlier this month co-founder and CTO Danny Stefanic walked me through something that looked like the Ewok village from Star Wars. Unfortunately Webware.com did not look as lush, although my byline has never been bigger. Stefanic says site owners can put together their own worlds that would become destinations, or companions to their existing sites, and offer yet another place to monetize their content.

To that end, the entire Exit Reality platform is tied to two important things: a social and ad network. Users can have their own Exit Reality specific profiles that come with them from site to site, and there's a built-in directory and search tool used to browse some of the best creations. The advertising side is a little more vanilla, with contextual ads that layer on top of your site's content. There are also special branded 3D elements such as a Carl's Jr. moving bull which was shown off to me in reference to a 2-year-old TV advertisement, which can be found when visiting the Carl's Jr. site in Exit Reality.

Ultimately my only beef with Exit Reality's approach is that it's not offering a whole lot more than something like Me.dium when it comes to the social side of browsing. Me.dium doesn't try to re-think what site creators have come up with and makes the discovery process no different from the experience everyone else on the Web is having. Exit Reality seems to be focused on the 3D attraction, which is certainly not a bad thing, but the experience you get coming to a default version of a site is just not up to snuff with the handful places that have been meticulously created to be immersive. It's a classic chicken and egg problem, with users bound to get bored of it unless there are plenty of interesting places to visit.

Another problem is that the 3D virtual world space is getting crowded fast. Last week at the TechCrunch50 conference we saw the launch of Hangout.net which looks a little more visually impressive and includes things like VoIP chat and a really neat physics engine that lets you throw things around with some level of realism. There's also the Home service coming to Playstation 3 owners in the next few months, alongside the other myriad online choices like Doppelganger, Kaneva, and There.com which also partially compete with gaming heavyweights like Second Life and World of Warcraft.

The one thing that's really going to keep people coming back is something different, be it the people there or the available activities once you're on a site. Whether the open-source creation tools (which I think are one of the strong points) are enough to make that happen is anyone's guess.

… Read more

Scientists at the University of Rochester have created what they say is the first true 3D processor--and it's running at 1.4GHz.

Unlike past attempts at 3D processors, which were simply a number of processors stacked on top of one another, the "Rochester Cube," as it is being called, was designed from the ground up to optimize all key-processing functions vertically, in the same way ordinary chips optimize functions horizontally.

So while there are other 3D chips, this design is supposedly the first to integrate each layer in a seamless and efficient way.

Eby Friedman, a professor … Read more

From the makers of the popular scene-rendering program Bryce comes DAZ Studio, a powerful 3D-modeling and CAD program for Windows and Mac that looks great but is a resource hog and can be sluggish for the average user.

The publisher recommends having at least 256MB of RAM, but that's wishful thinking. The program runs choppily on anything less than 1GB, although some of the more complex rendering was processed more slowly than others. It also requires an OpenGL-compatible graphics card with at least 128MB of RAM onboard, so machines built before 2003 will certainly struggle. This isn't unusual … Read more

Cooliris for Firefox (formerly PicLens) is an add-on for Firefox that makes viewing images much more elegant and fun. Once installed, you can simply perform a search for images at a Cooliris-enabled site--like Google, Flikr, or Amazon--to bring up a full-screen 3D wall of results. Grab the bar at the bottom to watch your wall of results scroll by smoothly on your screen. When you find an image or movie you like, click on it to get a larger view. Cooliris also lets you search from within the interface by category or by site with its Discovery tools.

For more … Read more

Viewsonic showed off a 22-inch, 120Hz desktop LCD display prototype at NVISION 2008 on Monday in San Jose, Calif.

While most computer LCD displays refresh at 60Hz, the Viewsonic prototype achieves virtually double the refresh rate, which can be beneficial when watching a movie. Since the 24 frames per second (fps) framerate that film is shot at can be evenly divided into 120Hz, it makes for a smoother framerate than what you get with a 60Hz display, especially during action scenes.

In my experience, movies running at 120Hz look like video as opposed to film and takes away from that … Read more