MyLineRider

Ryan Stuart, an Adobe Evangelist, has came up with his 10 RIA predictions for the year. Besides been an interesting read, I think he has some good points in there. RIA capabilities are improving rapidly because of the strong competition between Adobe and Microsoft. Adobe is very well positioned with the Flash platform and all the products in its portfolio, but Microsoft is a giant with a lot of followers in the development community.

At the end, the competition is good for the development community and for the end users. For the development community because we will have more tools - a better arsenal to produce great solutions, both for the web and for the desktop. For the end-users because, hopefully, there will be better and more efficient and effective web-based applications with improved UI design and navigation.

I believe in 2008 there will be a boom in visualization-collaboration applications. Ryan touches on those tow points in his predictions. I should add, that the integration “collaborative visualization” will be exploding as well. Currently there a few interesting web-based visualization applications like IBM Many Eyes created in Java and Gapminder, a Google product (acquired) made with Open Source Flash tools, and a few others. However, there collaborative capabilities are very basic, and they display visualizations from static data sources only.

Ryan did not mention any predictions about RIAs in mobile devices. I don’t know much about mobile devices, cell phones and PDAs, but I think there computational power, memory and storage capacity are reaching a point were they will be as powerful as basic computers and will be able to run Flash Player 9 and maybe Silverlight. Currently, only a handful of them support Flash Player 9, but I think this will change in 2008.

One thing is for sure, we have an exciting year a head of us…

A couple of years ago, I attended a presentation/demostration by Mok Oh, from Mok3 Inc., about their 3D modeler solution from photographs. It was amazing. At that time there were some other applications that  allow creating 3d models from pictures, like  PhotoModeler. However, the work flow and the power of the Mok3 technologies were unbeatable.

Last year Microsoft made a lot of noise with a different approach to create 3D models from pictures: Photosynth.
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/

There is also an interesting video about Photosynth at: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

However, I just came across a new technology, VideoTrace, which allows creating 3D models from video. VideoTrace is been developed by The Australian Centre for Visual Technologies at the University of Adelaide, and The Oxford Brookes Computer Vision Group,

According to their website, http://www.acvt.com.au/research/videotrace/, “VideoTrace is a system for interactively generating realistic 3D models of objects from video—models that might be inserted into a video game, a simulation environment, or another video sequence. The user interacts with VideoTrace by tracing the shape of the object to be modeled over one or more frames of the video. By interpreting the sketch drawn by the user in light of 3D information obtained from computer vision techniques, a small number of simple 2D interactions can be used to generate a realistic 3D model. Each of the sketching operations in VideoTrace provides an intuitive and powerful means of modelling shape from video, and executes quickly enough to be used interactively. Immediate feedback allows the user to model rapidly those parts of the scene which are of interest and to the level of detail required. The combination of automated and manual reconstruction allows VideoTrace to model parts of the scene not visible, and to succeed in cases where purely automated approaches would fail.”

On the site they have a video showing how it works, and it’s just AMAZING.

Enjoy!