People are now using the 3-D engines from some video games to make movies.

The fledgling art of using 3-D computer games to make animated movies is coming of age.

Around the world, increasing numbers of would-be movie moguls are utilizing the 3-D graphics engines of games like Quake or Unreal to produce animated movies—at a fraction of the money spent by studios like Pixar.

Known as machinima (“machine cinema”), the relatively new, no-budget genre has yet to produce a blockbuster of Finding Nemo proportions.

However, machinima is maturing so rapidly, some predict it will soon be a major force in animation, especially with the imminent arrival of a new generation of hardware and software promising an era of photo-realistic “cinematic computing.”

I recently built a new game PC with a GeForce FX 5600-based video card.  The software that came with the card included several demos, including one called Dawn, which features an animated pixie that is rendered in real time (in particular, the skin shader is impressive).  Here’s an image from the demo (there’s a video available at the above link as well):

Given this level of capability with today’s video cards I’m not surprised that people are using them to create real-time movies.  I would expect that in a few years we’ll be able to generate Pixar-quality real-time images with equipment that you can buy at Fry’s.

Link via Slashdot.

Update:  Nvidia has release a new chipset, the 5900, with some new demos.  In particular, the Last Chance Gas demo has a pretty good lighting model.

Scientists at UC Berkeley have proposed a system that would prevent airplanes from flying into certain areas.

They propose modifying the avionics in aircraft so that the plane would fight any efforts by the pilot to fly into restricted airspace. So if a plane was flying with a no-fly-zone to the left, and the pilot started banking left to enter the zone, the avionics would counter by banking right. Lee’s system, called “soft walls”, would first gently resist the pilot, and then become increasingly forceful until it prevailed.

An interesting idea, and marginally safer than other proposals (i.e. remote controlled takeovers or automatic landing systems), but not one that I would want to fly with.  But I’m not the only one.  The pilots themselves are hostile to the idea, and I don’t blame them.  However, the scientists don’t seem to understand why.

He has yet to convince the people who fly the planes. “In general, pilots are openly hostile,” he says. “Frankly it surprises me, because of all of the options that they are facing right now – including being shot at or commandeered from the ground – this is their best one.”

First, that presupposes that these options are the only ones available.  He fails to consider the best option: arming all pilots (which will require getting those idiots at the TSA out of the way).  But more importantly, pilots are rightfully reluctant to give up control of the aircraft to the computer.

A perfect example of the disconnect between engineers and (most) pilots can be seen when comparing Airbus verus Boeing commercial passenger jets.  It’s really a difference in philosophy (and in some ways reflects the problems that have arisen between Europe and the United States recently).  The Airbus has hard limits, beyond which it will not go, even if it would be needed to save the aircraft (although they claim that the system tries to prevent the aircraft from getting into those situations to begin with, which is questionable to me).  The Boeing uses soft limits, which means that the pilot will receive a warning when the limit is about to be violated, but can still go beyond the limit.  It has been shown several times that pilots have saved the plane from disaster by going over the limits, or as one pilot put it.

“Although aircraft structural integrity may be compromised by a G-load in excess of 3.8 Gs, aircraft structural integrity is more severely compromised by terrain impact.”

All of which is why I am very wary of getting on an Airbus.  If there is any choice at all, I won’t fly on one.

I’ve had a TiVo for a little over a year now.  This article from Business Week points out some interesting things that they’re learning about what ads people are watching:

Indeed, just like clickable ads, TiVo’s initial data reveal some trends that ad agencies and networks might prefer to bury. For one, a program’s rating—the number of people saying they watched a TV show at a given time—appears to have an inverse relationship with the proportion of ads viewed. On April 11, 2002, ABC’s popular TV drama The Practice drew a TiVo rating of 8.9, meaning 8.9% of TiVo owners watched the show live or recorded it and watched it later. But those viewers watched just 30% of the ads shown. Meanwhile, quiz show The Weakest Link, drew a rating of 0.9, but viewers watched 78% of the commercials. TV news magazine 60 Minutes got only a 2.2 rating, but its viewers sat through 73% of the ads.

Certain genres are “stickier” than others, TiVo’s research shows. Big-budget situation comedies and dramas tend to have the lowest retention and commercial-viewing rate because couch potatoes tend to record them and skip through the commercials rather than watch them live. Reality TV, news, and “event” programming such as the Oscars do significantly better at getting viewers to see the commercials. Just 39% of viewers watched ads during the highest-rated network TV show, Friends, vs. 75% for the 45th Annual Grammy Awards and 58% for Fox reality show Fear Factor.

In my case, I generally use the TiVo to record shows that I really like and watch them later.  I do this because it’s convenient (i.e. I don’t have to rush home just to catch the show), but also because it allows me to skip the ads.  This isn’t necessarily an intentional thing to skip the ads, it’s just because I want to know what happens next on the show and the ads are getting in the way (although I will admit relief at being able to skip some of the really obnoxious commericials, like that Oxyclean guy).  With other shows, I’m just as likely to put the show on while I’m doing something else and I don’t think to fast-forward the commercials, unless they’re really annoying and they break my concentration.  On the flip side if I see an ad that looks interesting I may even stop fast-forwarding and go back to watch it.

I’m not exactly a cat person, but I’ve always viewed the practice of declawing cats as somewhat cruel.  The human equivalent would be the amputation of the first joint of your finger, which you could imagine would be pretty traumatic if it happened to you.  Even so, I never made much of a stink about it, since the cats usually recover from it and it allows for many people to keep cats who otherwise wouldn’t.

I was very interested when I read about Soft Claws in the comments to this post by Denny Wilson.  Soft Claws are vinyl nail caps that glue over the cat’s claws.  They’re not permanent, so it does require some work on the cat owner’s part to keep up with them.  The makers claim they last from four to six weeks per application (Denny’s experience was four weeks), so a $17.95 kit would last from four to six months.  I guess it would also depend on your cat’s personality with regards to being handled.  I probably wouldn’t try this with my mother’s cat, who has a really bad attitude about being handled (imagine a hung-over wolverine).

I don’t know if this is a practical solution for everyone, but it seems like it would be worth a try before taking the irrevocable step of having a cat declawed.  You can even get them in colors (blue, purple, red, and pink).  Your cat will be stylish as well as being safe for the furniture. 

Since my cellular contract expired at the beginning of the month, I’ve been contemplating a new phone.  The one I have now is two years old and I’ve abused it quite a bit in that time.  Since it appears that cellular number portability isn’t going to be implemented any time soon (and I didn’t find any other carriers that I liked enough to hassle with getting a new number), I went to the Cingular kiosk in the local mall to renew my contract so I could get a new phone and a new rate plan.  Cingular doesn’t have a very large selection of phones available, but after a bit of consideration I decided on the Nokia 6340i.

One of the things I was glad to see among the phones that were available is that the race to build the smallest phone is finally over.  My previous phone was a Nokia 8260, which was technically a good phone.  But after spending two years with it, I learned that something that small isn’t really practical in everyday use.  My fingers were too big for the buttons, causing me to misdial numbers or make mistakes entering passcodes.

But what really inspired this post is the fact that the new phone has an IR feature that allows it to exchange information with computers and handhelds.  I usually dread having to enter all those numbers from my old phone into the new phone using the cumbersome alphabetic entry method that is required on cell phones (since they only have a numeric keypad).  However, with this one I just turned on the IR receive feature in the phone, pointed it at my Palm Vx and selected the “Beam address” option in the Palm for each person I wanted to add to the phone.  Further, the people at Nokia got their act together and created true address book entries for the phone directory.  This means that I can have several different numbers for the same person and they’ll all be subentries under their name.  In the past I was forced to create separate entries for each number for a person.

It’s the small things that make really make a difference in my experience of a product.  So far, this has been fairly pleasant.  If I get really adventurous I may enable internet access on this phone just to see if it lives up to all the hype I’ve been hearing about it (it’s only $3.99 per month).