Sophie-Croquet Trailer

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Something went horribly right…

Daniel Lanovaz has sent a message to the squeak-dev mailing list. I’ve reproduced it verbatim below the fold. Fun stuff.

A short animated history book with a Sophie-Croquet theme is here:

http://web.mac.com/iphone2007/iWeb/Sophie-Croquet/Trailer%20HD.html

It is best to have your surround-sound stereo system
ready to rumble.

Enjoy,
Daniel

=======================================================

I created the animation to tip my hat to all the
people who spend their time, talents, and energy
working on Squeak/Croquet/Sophie et al. Keep up
the great work.

The industry is at an exciting time where
graphic arts, Hollywood special effects software,
gaming engines, real-time ray tracing algorithms,
and multi-core (parallel) hardware combine to bring
some amazing advances to not only story-telling and
education, but general purpose computing interfaces.

This animation uses ray-tracing as the rendering
technique, particle emitters and hypervoxels
for the meteor, smoke, and sun flares, and an
inverse-kinematics constraint system for David L.’s
bone movement. Mesh weight maps are used to warp and
curve both the character’s mesh as well as the book’s
pages and stargate.

I generated portions of this sequence for a
trailer of an animation I will be showing at a
fundraising event this October/2007 for Loma Prieta
Elementary and Middle Schools in the Los Gatos
mountains, California (to offset a reduction in
state funding).

David L. is a friend of mine and a Fellow at AMD/ATI
working on the next generation multi-core cpu/gpu
engines. I’m hoping for some interesting products from
AMD/ATI over the coming years, as well as Intel and
nVidia.

It will be interesting to watch the software folks
harnessing this multi-billion dollar investment in
silicon and copper.

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About Stearns

Howard Stearns works at High Fidelity, Inc., creating the metaverse. Mr. Stearns has a quarter century experience in systems engineering, applications consulting, and management of advanced software technologies. He was the technical lead of University of Wisconsin's Croquet project, an ambitious project convened by computing pioneer Alan Kay to transform collaboration through 3D graphics and real-time, persistent shared spaces. The CAD integration products Mr. Stearns created for expert system pioneer ICAD set the market standard through IPO and acquisition by Oracle. The embedded systems he wrote helped transform the industrial diamond market. In the early 2000s, Mr. Stearns was named Technology Strategist for Curl, the only startup founded by WWW pioneer Tim Berners-Lee. An expert on programming languages and operating systems, Mr. Stearns created the Eclipse commercial Common Lisp programming implementation. Mr. Stearns has two degrees from M.I.T., and has directed family businesses in early childhood education and publishing.

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