TechThisOut!

Click Here!

You’ll need a .net/windows live passport, and the answers are:

1. Vista
2. Clarity
3. November 2006
4. True
5. Aero
6. All the above
7. All the above
8. 512 MB

Now you can, as Microsoft is to offer a consumer version of professional tools used to develop videogames for the Xbox 360.

The software will let non-professionals develop titles and then share them via the Xbox Live online service.

Microsoft executive Peter Moore said: “It’s our first step of creating a YouTube for videogames.”

The program will seek to complement a trend that has seen videogames becoming more like film blockbusters, costing up to £20m to produce.

Users will need a PC running Windows XP - or Vista in the future - to operate the tools program, called XNA Game Studio Express.

The tools will be available in trial form from 20 August and there is a $99 (£55) annual subscription.

Mr Moore said the program was basic compared to the pro tools, which cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Some basic program skills were still going to be needed for the consumer version if successful titles were to be developed, he said.

Mr Moore said the games users would be able to make would be rudimentary.

He said future plans may include additional software packs that consumers could buy to tweak their games.

Microsoft would regulate the content for appropriateness and intellectual property issues, but users would own their work, Mr Moore said.

“I’d love to send a royalty cheque to a kid,” he said.

YouTube has become an enormously popular website for video clips - many of which are filmed by users themselves.

Last month YouTube reported that users watched more than 100 million videos per day.

Microsoft said more than 10 US universities, including the University of Southern California and Southern Methodist University, will include XNA Game Studio Express and Xbox 360 development in their curriculum.

Recently, the internet giant handed out to researchers, the serach terms that over 650,000 of its subcribers used, in what was apparently an “innocent attempt to reach out to the academic community with research tools”.

Whilst the terms could not be linked to specific individuals, they could have contained personally identifiable information. This has upset many subcribers as it has not yet been made public who the researchers were, and why they wanted the data.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, after AOL removed the file that contained “information on 19 million queries and included information on what search terms were used, when the search was conducted and whether the user clicked on any of the results”, copies started spreading about the internet for all to see!

AOL is said to be treating it as a very serious incident (although they did it on purpose!) so meanwhile, be careful what you search for!

Technology that transforms digital images into 3D models will be unveiled at a conference on Thursday.

Microsoft’s Photosynth takes collections of images, analyses them for similarities, and then displays them in a reconstructed 3D space.

The system, to be previewed at a computer graphics meeting in Boston, will allow users to walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.

Microsoft says Photosynth should be available for use later this year.

Richard Szeliski, principal researcher at Microsoft Research who developed the technology with Noah Snavely and Steven Seitz, of the University of Washington, said: “The system builds a 3D model just from a raw collection of photographs.”

Geometry problem

He said the technology works by scanning collections of photographs, which can be taken from different cameras at different times.

It picks out distinctive features in each image and cross-references them against the other photographs, checking for similarities.

This allows it to pinpoint a feature’s 3D position and to also calculate where the position of the camera would have been when the picture was taken.

“Then basically, it is just a geometry problem,” explained Dr Szeliski.

“You are simultaneously adjusting the position of the camera and where those little pieces of images are until everything basically snaps together.”

The prototype can use as few as two pictures, but, said Dr Szeliski, it becomes a lot more exciting when several dozen images are used.

The 3D model will enable people to move through a scene, looking at pictures from any angle, click on specific photos, zoom in or out of a feature, and see where snaps were taken in relation to other images.

Dr Szeliski said: “I think the photo-sharing websites will be early-adopters of this technology.

“Wherever people share photos, instead of just seeing a gallery of unorganised photos, now you can pull everyone else’s photos together and make a rational sense out of it.”

The other obvious application, he added, would be for tourism and property, where a city could provide a virtual tour or a hotel could potential visitors walk through its lobby.

The researchers will be presenting a research paper detailing the technology at this week’s Siggraph 2006 conference in Boston, which looks at the latest developments in computer graphics and interactive techniques.

Microsoft have said they believe the technology will almost certainly be web-based, and people should be able to run the application later this year.

“Within the next year we hope to see this in wide usage,” added Dr Szeliski.

Source

Can’t wait for it to be released to the public! Sounds good, and very useful.