What is it with skilled engine programmers and their ability to turn thousands of cubes into an impressive beauty? Though not entirely voxel-based like, say, the Atomontage Engine, the VoxelFarm Engine from creator Miguel Cepero still does a perfectly fine job rendering amazing landscapes on the fly.
VoxelFarm harnesses ambient occlusion and a special block coloration system for a subtle and natural appearance. Removing chunks of blocks leaves softened edges affected by light and shadow instead of harsh angles. The procedural generation of the terrain means distant mountains and other landmarks take on a wonderfully smooth color gradation. It almost makes me not want to think about the possibilities of plundering such an exquisite environment in a Minecraft-like sandbox game.
Though VoxelFarm is little more than an ambitious tech demo for now, Cepero’s website offers an abundance on the intricacies of procedural graphics, voxels, and polygons. It’s definitely work checking out.
In the new DC Comics issue of Superman #13, Clark Kent (Superman’s alter ego) quits his day job as a news reporter at The Daily Planet (the Metropolis newspaper), where he’s worked since the character’s creation back in 1938, to eventually become a community journalist / blogger. Images from issue #13 of Superman can be seen below where the change of career for the Man of Steel takes place as well as a broadcast on the subject matter by ABC News.
Superman comic book writer Scott Lobdell told USA Today:
This is what really happens when a young man of 27 years behind a desk and have to take instructions from a cluster along with concerns that are not necessarily their own. Superman is the most powerful person on the planet, but how long you can stand to be sitting at his desk with someone who treats it as the least important person in the world.
Chris DiBona, the open source and public sector engineering manager at Google, was recently interviewed by Slashdot. He had a few interesting things to say about his job and his tasks at the search giant, but we found his comments about Google Summer of Code (GSoC) to be particularly noteworthy.
DiBona was apparently asked to create the program by individuals very high up at Google. The company’s executives even let him hire more people so he could quickly ramp up the number of students participating (in 2012, Google accepted 1,212 proposals for 180 organizations).
Here’s the money quote:
During a strategy meeting, where you announce new websites inside the company, I said to Larry [Page], “We need to put compliance stuff up, but I’m also going to put up information on file formats and interfaces into the company.” We had a couple of APIs at the time. They’re said, “Okay. Sounds good. Oh, we need you to do us a favor.” I’m said, “Oh. Name it, sir. You say, Jump, I say, How high?” They go, “Too many students are taking the summer off, or they’re not doing computer things over the summer. Can you fix that?” They gave me some numbers, how many students they’d like to see in such programs, and some money. I left the room going, “Gosh, I have to fix computer science now?” I asked some friends in Open Source, “What if I gave you some students? What would you do to them?” We talked it out.
I went back a couple of weeks later, “We’re going to do this summer code thing. The first pass on Summer of Code was only going to have 200 students, and Larry Page, in his inevitable way said, “That’s nice. But what about 1000 students?” I’m said, “Unfortunately, I’m only one guy.” He’s like, “Why don’t you hire somebody?” So, we doubled it to 400. We were at 1000 in about two years. And that program still persists. When you look at our contributions to Open Source, we’ve released under Open Source licenses, about 55 million lines of code.
Going forward, DiBona says he wants to promote the fact that Summer of Code has been so successful and that so much code has been released. A Slashdot interview seems like a decent way to start. Read the whole thing here.
If you’re not familiar with GSoC, here’s the background: every year Google awards stipends ($5,000 as of 2012) to hundreds of students aged 18-year-old and up. To qualify, you must request for, and complete, a free and open-source software coding project during the summer.
The point is to keep geeks at the computer and stop them from venturing outside (I kid, I kid). Google’s philosophy is that if it can help the open-source community, it will help the search giant in return.
Most of us, including Bruce Springsteen himself, have thought it: there’s nothing on TV. This is despite the fact that many people who pay for cable or satellite subscriptions have constant access to hundreds of channels. Many of us lament, or perhaps are overwhelmed by, choice. While channel-surfing and looking for something new, you could consult a paper TV Guide, or its modern-day equivalent, the on-screen “grid” interface.
But now, a new Silicon Valley startup wants to change all that by harnessing a feature that most channels already output—closed captioning. Boxfish captures all closed-captioning information, indexes it, then makes that data searchable in a Twitter-style interface. All in real-time.
The company was founded in January 2011 and launched its “beta” search interface in March.
“We thought that this is a fantastic way to discover television,” said Eoin (pronounced like “Owen”) Dowling, who hails from Ireland, in an interview with Ars on Tuesday.
“Most people discover television using this grid. We turned this basically TweetDeck-like feed for television into a remote control for TV. So you’re at home and you tell us what you’re interested in, and we pop what’s happening in real time and then you can control your TV with it.”
Apple continues to consider ways to enable easy user switching and control for iOS devices using facial recognition, which may eventually lead to facial unlock features in the iPhone or iPad. A recently published patent application details an automatic user-switching system which can lock, unlock, and reconfigure a device for unique users based on face detection using a front-facing camera.
Beyond the use of a facial recognition to enable the system, however, we think the concept of multi-user iOS devices has been a long time coming. Furthermore, the same system could be easily adapted to desktop systems, making it easier to share an iMac or even a MacBook among family members or coworkers.