Osmosis Land

I was asked to do the devotion for last Monday's School Council meeting, so I'd decided to redo Earthsuit's Osmosis Land sermon from a couple of years ago. I forgot to bring the shirt though! Billy was after the song for one of his kids, so after googling it up it looks like it's on Rhapsody.


Pretty powerful lyrics to dig into:

Every night and every single day
The sun will rise, the moon it will fade
And in our web idols were spun
Caught up in oblivion

So we come with the song, come with the sword
Come with the image of the Son
Come with the song, come with the sword
What we behold we become

Living in osmosis land
Living in osmosis land
Come on and bring up, bring the swing
Everybody get up
Bring up, bring the swing, let my God erupt
In this land of Osmosis
Come on and bring up, bring the swing
Everybody get up
Bring up, bring the swing,
let my God erupt
In this land of Osmosis

The main thrust of it ties into one of my favourite verses:

Romans 12:2 (The Message)
Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

WCG announces games for 2007

WCG posted up the official list of games for 2007. Looks like there's a fair few new games with 12(!) in total including 2 team games.

Seems a bit top-heavy with 4 RTS games, and no single person FPS ? I do like the inclusion of Gears of War as the 2nd team-based game as it has a lot to offer that is different to CS. Tony Hawk has also been a long-time hardcore game with little recognition, so it's another good pick. The competition format is still being decided for Tony Hawk & various other new entries, so I'm not sure how it's going to play in a one-on-one competitive format.

There's also the Promo video for Seattle up on the site too.

WoW TCG

A great intro to WoW trading card game

Thought controller

VR has always been a step or 2 away from becoming a reality, but at least this looks like sidestepping the interfacing problem. It still sounds like the latency issue is there, but maybe it's not as noticable if it's perceived as an extension.

Chronic Logic - Kingdom Elemental

Thought I'd kept an eye on Kingdom Elemental's progress, but looks like it was released at the start of the year.

Demo for home

eSport week 3

We'll be getting into the 3rd week of eSport @ St Luke's this afternoon and it's now time to start diagnosing how it's going.

The numbers havs slowly dropped from an inital signup of 23 to 17 on the first week, then down to 13 on the 2nd week. Hopefully the dropouts are people who may not be up for the competitve elements of the sport, but I'll start to ask around this afternoon to see if there is anything that needs to be addressed.

The next phase will be to also include other teachers to gauge their opinion on how it is progressing. Ideally it should be a sport that can stand in its own right without my pushing, as it certainly needs to do that once it gets out to other schools and other districts. I 'm also beginning to get some documentation together for how to set up Competitive Computer Games in a school environment so that the process will be as smooth as possible getting it through BDSSS.

EDIT: I guess there wasn't anything to worry about, 20 showed for this week.

Gimme wider ?

Going to have to look at setting the content panel to a ratio. Too much green when maxxed on 1650x1080

Abstract for PhD

Abstract
One of the issues with developing virtual worlds is that the immersive qualities are not fully realised until the world is complete. Many of the tedious features like trees blowing, people going about their daily lives and having conversations away from the protagonist are usually not fleshed out until the main framework is complete. These add greatly to the realism of a scene, so they bring that feeling of 'being there' to life. With more ephemera there is more requirements on processing power and storage, to the point where systems can not cope with the amount of data on hand.

In Computer Graphics there are level of detail (LOD) techniques to limit the complexity of a scene depending on the resources available. These techniques rate the importance of specific vertexes in a 3D model based on their ability to define the shape of the model. The tip of a nose is more important in defining facial features than vertexes representing slight bumps on the forehead. When rendering the model, vertices are drawn in order of importance so that limited resource systems still see the basic shape of the object (like the point of the nose) whereas more powerful systems can view extra detail (like the point of a nose and all the minor lumps on the forehead).

With these techniques in mind, this model attempts to generate worlds based off events ordered by importance. Each event dictates a moment in space-time where an interaction occurs between different objects in the system. Very important events are generated first for large areas of this new world, then as the areas of space-time are broken into smaller and smaller chunks, new events are generated to flesh out the world. Each new event is deterministically created and constrained to abide by other events currently existing in the system. This enables a consistent, coherent world to be created no matter the starting position or the depth of processing available. With the ability to create virtual worlds at a whim, authors can then sculpt the world by placing specific events into the system while letting the event generation framework take care of everything else.

Virtual Reality - H2G2 Style

During a particularly vain moment I googled 'VRBones' to see what the net has to say about me. Looks like QGL is still the main linking spot, which I guess is logical since it was my home for the past 8 years. I did find an old snippet I posted onto the original H2G2 site which I'll replicate here to save it from digital demise:

Virtual Reality: An alternate reality where interactions from the present reality are transferred through to the alternate reality seamlessly.

Although the term has become embedded into society as a phrase defining an immersive computer simulation (Okay, think "The Matrix" if you must), it also can be extended to other concepts.

Consider for a few moments what you do when you are driving. You are sitting in your car and rotating a wheel-like object in front of you and applying pressure to pedals at your feet. Sometimes you might even flick things, pull things, push things, but you do not actually move yourself inside the car. Your interactions through these wheels, levers, pedals and buttons make the world outside your car pass by you at differing rates. Is this a virtual reality? Realising that we DON'T notice this is the heart of what virtual reality is all about. Instead of concentrating on the act of turning the wheel,we seamlessly think of the action as making the car turn in the outside world. (Learner drivers are the obvious exception, and the concentration on the obvious controls in front of them is why it takes a while for them to 'get it'. That and the primal urge of others to honk at anything with an 'L' plate on it)

This immersive behaviour is not only limited to cars and such, as our own minds have been doing it for eons. To pick up a cup we send a signal to our arm to extend and, correlated by our eyes, be guided to the cup's position. Do we notice that we have to tell our arm what to do via electrical pulses? No. It is once again a seamless interaction where we think of the task in alternate reality terms instead of concentrating on the methods to achieve said task.

U touch my Bottom ?

I pulled out a shirt to wear a couple of weeks ago, an old Scripture Union shirt that I picked up from Sonfest a couple of years ago. It was purchased because there was a great singer on at the time, doing her first gig in 'the fridge' (an air conditioned tent; perfect for summer in Boonah) and I grabbed a shirt to get some signatures. After a bit of reminiscing about the great events of Sonfest, I decided to look up Nikki again to see if she'd produced any music yet. Sure enough, Nikkki Kummerow is out there in cyberspace, with the obligatory MySpace account for budding singers. I couldn't find any of the original songs lying around, but some of her new stuff has the same feeling behind it.

Third Day were also in town (well, Brisbane, but close enough) over the Australia Day weekend and I'd snaffled some tickets as a Chrissy surprise for Sandy. Apparently hiding the CD with the tickets in the CD rack wasn't the greatest of spots as she found it 2 days later. Third day were great. In an enclosed auditorium the music shifted up a notch over the other 2 Sonfest appearances I'd seen them at.