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Domain: metacreations.com

Stories and comments across the archive that link to metacreations.com.

Comments · 8

  1. This is ANOTHER hoax. by karmaflux · · Score: -1, Redundant · on The Dirt On Mars, In Words And Pictures

    We all know the truth. NASA has done this stuff to us before and one day they'll learn.

    Meanwhile, it's clear that these pictures were made with certain software that the government doesn't want you to know about.


    Note: Joke.

  2. Hertz by Animats · · Score: 2 · on Do Games Know The Secret Of UI?
    J.C. Hertz's book "Joystick Nation", is excellent. Especially the part where she visits the automated Nintendo warehouse and meets the "wave planner", who orchestrates shortages of games to build demand. Her day job is at the New York Times, where she covers electronic entertainment.

    "Kai's Power Tools" had a game-like interface. Users started out with a few simple tools. After demonstrating competence using the basic tools, users advanced to the next level and more tools became available. This was hated. Rumors that Kai was going to redo the user interface for Photoshop resulted in a sizable protest to Adobe.

    Game user interfaces work because you can't do much. Move and shoot works well. Nothing else does.

  3. Re:MIT is doing something similar by Animats · · Score: 2 · on Photorealistic, Reliable 3D Mapping For Robots

    Semi-automated model acquisition in urban areas was achieved around five years ago at U.C. Berkeley. The commercial version was Canoma, which MetaCreations is trying hard to sell off.

  4. Re:This is Good News Because... by gopherguts · · Score: 1 · on Corel releases Photo-Paint for Linux for Free

    Corel might not make any money off this, but they will be off the stuff they just assimilated from Metacreations...Corel now owns Kai's Power Tools and Vector Effects, Bryce, and Painter.

  5. Re:Why it won't work in Linux for a while yet by Rodge2 · · Score: 1 · on Minolta 3D Camera

    The file format for MetaFlash Studio, which is the software used by the camera, is called MetaStream and is an open file format, you can get it here.You need to fill out a registration form, but only name, e-mail, platform, and what type of content you develop are mandatory.

    Also on that page is some sample source for a reader viewer. The biggest problem with the sample code is that it does not include any vertex ordering. So it doesn't know what order to draw the vertices.

    But even at that there is nothing keeping someone with some knowledge of Netscape plug-ins from creating a viewer for Linux. Or even a reader/writer to convert VRML to MTS (thier file format).

  6. 3D extraction from video by Animats · · Score: 5 · on Minolta 3D Camera
    3D depth extraction can be done in real time. See Point Grey. [Their site's down today; I hope they didn't go out of business.] They build a nice hardware/software system with three cameras arranged in a triangle. Three-camera stereo works much better than two-camera; most of the ambiguous cases go away. Their hardware is overpriced and their software is closed-source, but maybe somebody will deal with that. The algorithm isn't that complicated, but it's really expensive computationally. Their first implementation used a DSP, a hardware convolver chip, and a Transputer, but they've since moved to more standard hardware

    Canoma is a re-implementation of some work done at U.C. Berkeley in the mid-90s. The Berkeley group liked to do big things like buildings, and modelled the central part of the Berkeley campus. They got their aerial photographs using a camera on a kite; there's an architecture prof at Berkeley who's developed good techniques for doing this. Much cheaper than a helicopter.

    Both Canoma and Metaflash are semi-automatic systems. The user has to manually identify corresponding points and edges between multiple images. This can be a lot of work. One more generation and somebody will have this fully automated.

  7. Price by TheTomcat · · Score: 1 · on Minolta 3D Camera

    https://merchant.metacreations.com/store/product.a sp?registered=0&dept_id=9&pf_id=46

    Camera for Minolta 3D 1500 Windows - $4,495.00 - In Stock

    Ouch.

  8. the point by freakinPsycho · · Score: 4 · on Photogenics To Be Released For Linux
    ok, this is probably flame bait, but oh well, i'm used to being bashed.
    i've noticed a fair number of posts before me that are praising the gimp so much more over commercial software simply because it's free and you have the source code.

    sorry, guys, just because you have the source code, you got it for free, and it IS a decent program, doesn't mean it can so easily replace a lot of comercial programs.
    don't get me wrong, gimp is cool, i like it, it's got some fun stuff, but it's got quite a ways to go until it gets to the level of Photoshop, PaintShopPro, and it looks like even this Photogenics (though i admit i havn't used photogenics).
    if nothing else, the plugins available for the other programs make them worthwhile. when i see metacreations putting out kia's power tools for the gimp, then i'll be impressed.
    point is, these comercial apps do have something that gimp and some other linux apps don't: they are industry standards. as such, they have the add-ons and portability that simply aren't found in many linux apps.
    until the day comes when the adobe suite is ported to linux, the metacreations products get ported, and several other high quality graphic apps get ported, i'm still going to need a windows or mac around. at this point, if i want a server, i set up linux. if i want to do graphics, sound production, and a few other things, i'll take mac or win. i may not like it, but it's what i have to do.


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    "All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal, or fattening."