COLLADA Contest Winners From Siggraph 2009

An anonymous reader writes "COLLADA — the group creating open 3D data standards — announced their latest contest winners at Siggraph 2009. Ordinarily this wouldn't interest me, but the grand prize winner, NaviCAD, really did submit something rather interesting — an iPhone app that lets you explore Google 3D Warehouse models. Of course there's the pinching for zooming in/out, but it also uses the motion sensor to control the view. If you are walking around the inside or outside of a building, as you look around in the real world the view on the iPhone displays the corresponding view."

Comments

Boring.

[pavon]

Ordinarily this wouldn't interest me, but the grand prize winner, NaviCAD, really did submit something rather interesting â" an iPhone app

WTF? This has to be the least interesting thing related to Siggraph ever. I'm sure they did a good job designing it for the platform, but it's just a fucking model viewer.

Re:Boring.

[UnanimousCoward]

Disclaimer: I'm one of the developers of this app.

I tried to submit a story on our app to /. pointing out some of the technical challenges on developing a complex-model 3D app on the iPhone thinking that this angle would be appreciated by the /. crowd, but it wasn't accepted. When I saw this submission come out, I have no doubt that comments would be critical with respect to the contest.

The main challenges included the fixed memory footprint and the relatively slow processor (all of us iPhone developers dream of performance equal to that of the simulator). Perhaps we will try and submit a technical article to the likes of Ars Technica and see how that's received.

Yes it's just a [insert your choice of bad word here] model viewer, but like other technologies, we threw spaghetti against the wall just to showcase possibilities for the platform. We have several 'practical' applications in the works that probably won't merit an accepted submission here :-)