I got to visit with an old friend, musician, music producer and uber-geek Jim Ruberto for a bit on Friday.
In addition to talking about online reputation and Drupal’s strengths and weaknesses as a platform to support social networking and rapid development, he showed me some of the next generation graphics toys on the web (Jim was the first to tune me into Second Life, three or four years ago, where he was running an early online casino).
So, enjoy these:
- PicLens – Firefox plug-in that provides a whole new way to surf images from lots of foto feeds, including the big photo sites, as well as Google image search and others. Lets you see entire collections (including dozens of pages of Google image search results) in one ‘photo wall’. Check this out now.
- Photosynth – Microsoft’s newest image searching and matching technology takes a series of images of a particular area (they demonstrate with an ancient city center somewhere in Italy), and places the images in a 3D map of the area, as well as sorting by similarity, and estimating where each photo of the same location was taken from. Very cool, even if it doesn’t run on my Mac.
- Havok – This graphics engine powers some pretty incredible online games and movie special effects. Their new physics engine provides eerily-real effects that is providing breakthrough reality for the way things work in the graphical realm.
Have a good weekend, and don’t spend it all in front of PicLens!
