Vision III brings 3D to a 2D screen (sort of)

Vision III appears to have just joined the ranks of those giving us innovative and technological breakthroughs. In essence their parallax scanning technology embeds, into a recorded video, some of the depth cues that your brain normally gets from a three dimensional scene. It's really incredibly cool. Subtle, but there.

The Vision III website ( www.inv3.com ) has some technical descriptions and sample clips which explain and demonstrate the effect. A few good HD examples are Tea Party, Boat House, and George Mason Women's Basketball. The parallax scanning technology seems best suited to shots with a moving camera, because when the camera becomes still you can see the parallax shift on the closer foreground objects. Continuous camera movement seems to disguise the shifting effect.

Take a look at the Boat House clip and you'll notice a couple places, like the chain link fence, where the objects closest to the camera seem to jitter or constantly move in a rotating pattern. If you look carefully you'll notice that it's not the entire frame that is being shaken, but instead it's the foreground objects which seem to have a more exaggerated movement compared to the background objects. The shaking effect is the actually a result of the lens angle being adjusted slightly to simulate the angle difference from one eye to the other. In effect the technology is keeping the camera focused on a single horizon point while moving the view to a different angle. The final result is that images seem to be a little bit more vivid or have just a little bit more POP in comparison to normal video.

It's simply amazing to me that the human brain is able to use that parallax shift on the 2D view of your television screen and extract the extra 3D information about a scene. It even seems to work with a single eyeball. I wonder if one day we will see optical enhancements for people with depth perception impairment.

Dreamfall: The Longest Journey

I recently got my hands on a PC adventure game called "Dreamfall: The Longest Journey". This has been a really great piece of entertainment the likes of which I have not seen in a long time.

When I was growing up a popular PC game genre was the adventure game with popular titles such as Space Quest and King's Quest. At the time there was a company called Sierra Online at the forefront of the category producing some of my all time favorite adventures like Conquest of Camelot, Quest for the Longbow, the Laura Bow mysteries, and Gold Rush. (looking back it's interesting that my favorites were the games that didn't generate a long running series) But anyway...

There haven't been many adventure games in recent years, but a few years ago a daring publisher released a game called "The Longest Journey". It was a traditional point and click game with an interesting story (if a little tedious at times). Then recently they released a sequel called "Dreamfall: The Longest Journey" I'll tell you what, these two games provide for some seriously great adventuring if you are into that sort of time consuming entertainment. It's like a good book you can't put down.

If you want to get your hands on the game in the US, look for the recently released packaging of Dreamfall: Game of the Year edition. It includes the original "The Longest Journey" and the sequel "Dreamfall: The Longest Journey", plus the Dreamfall soundtrack is which pretty decent in itself (as far as soundtracks go).

A word of caution however, the games are rated M for mature. Mostly because of rough or coarse language in characters that you meet along the way.

At the time of this writing, Amazon.com has it for about $25 and considering that it's two full games plus a sound track CD it's well worth the money. And if you are new to the adventure game genre, it's a great way to get your feet wet (so to speak).

Vista SP1 - release announcement

Well it looks like Microsoft has finally released Vista SP1 to manufacturing (as nearly every tech blog on the web seems to be reporting about). If you want to read up on the nitty-gritty specs, go and get a copy of this PDF from Microsoft.

Notable changes in Windows Vista SP1.pdf

Although I haven't had a chance to test SP1 first hand yet, my favorite list of improvements are:

1. SP1 reduces the number of UAC (User Account Control) prompts from 4 to 1 when creating or renaming a folder at a protected location.
   As someone who likes to keep the start menu organized, the constant double prompting to double confirm a copy, create, or rename, just about drove me crazy. If this has been improved the way it is suggested, I will be most pleased.
   
2. Enables support for hotpatching, a reboot-reduction servicing technology designed to maximize uptime. It works by allowing Windows components to be updated (or "patched") while they are still in use by a running process. Hotpatch-enabled update packages are installed via the same methods as traditional update packages, and will not trigger a system reboot.
   Now, I am really hoping this will fix the "middle of the night" reboots from Windows Automatic Updates. One thing that has bugged me about Vista and the auto update was how many times I would come in the next morning and realized that an update had rebooted a system that was in the middle of a work in progress. I eventually just turned of the auto update feature. Perhaps with SP1 I'll be able to trust this again. We'll see.
   
3. Improves responsiveness when doing many kinds of file or media manipulations. For example, with Windows Vista today, copying files after deleting a different set of files can make the copy operation take longer than needed. In SP1, the file copy time is the same as if no files were initially deleted.
   Man, this is another one of those "about time" fixes. There are about four points listed on page 9 that talk about file management and copying improvements. I don't know what my exact problem sources were, but hopefuly this will help the annoying issues I have been having with moving or deleting files that were in the middle of a thumbnail generation. And any general speed improvements (which seem slower than XP) will be welcome.
   
4. Improves reliability of OS updates by making them more resilient to unexpected interruptions, such as power failure.
   Ok, I don't know about anyone else, but this has the potential to make my life easier. I run tech support for a few systems in Africa where they have a tendency to loose power a couple times each day. This of course makes it inevitable that a power loss will occur during a hotfix installation. It has happened with XP a couple of times cause system problem. Maybe this will reduce the long term chances of problems with that issue.

And finally, the simple fact that over a hundred megabytes of hot fixes will be wrapped up into a single download (that can be mailed to Africa, for instance) will be enough to justify the existence of SP1 for me.

I really wish Microsoft would make a habit of issuing a service pack or hotfix roll up once a year. When trying to support multiple systems connected at dialup speeds or (worse) limited cell phone minutes, it becomes a bit ridiculous to require 100+ MB of updates anytime you do a new install. SP1 will be a relief in that area alone (at least for a few months).

My favorite Super Bowl 2008 commercials

Ok. I know everyone is probably making their own lists, but I just wanted to say that the E-Trade commercials from the 2008 Super Bowl were absolutely at the top of my list of favorites this year.


E-Trade Baby



E-Trade Baby II



I think I may actually laugh out loud every single time I watch these. And I've watched them ten times already.