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Converting RSS Feeds To a Dynamic 3D Scene In 120 Lines of Code
descubes writes "Tao Presentations is a 3D presentation tool based on a 3D dynamic document description language. This makes it very easy for developers to create their own 3D shows, illustrate talks in an innovative way, even build small interactive 3D applications. An example included in the latest release grabs RSS feeds from a variety of sources (including Slashdot) and turns them into a 3D scene, all in real-time and in about 120 lines of code. It fetches the pictures directly from the web site and maps them on 3D shapes. And this is only a starting point. Tao Presentations can display 3D objects, drive the majority of 3D displays (including glasses-free 3D displays from Alioscopy, Philips or Tridelity), use GLSL shaders for advanced effects, and much more. Tao Presentations is free (as in beer), and the document description language is based on the free (as in speech) XL programming language."
*sigh* slashdot
but the concept is flawed in that it borders on the ridiculous. What is wrong with just reading the news in a list format? Do we need to see it rendered in 3D?
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I'm getting a strong, familiar VRML-era stench about this hype.
Unless you're a chic. At any rate, wow 3d RSS feeds! Now I can care equally as little about RSS feeds as I did 2 minutes ago. Also, I DOUBT it is 120 lines of code. Maybe like 120 lines of high level coding, from some crazy encapsulated api. I mean, I wrote a HTML Form framework that allows you to create full forms with validation in like 15 lines. Wow.
I am pretty sure we have moved on from individual content viewers. If they were to process https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/ designed applications and use some tagging to define a distance relocating the perspective then this might have a value.
Do I know this?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
It renders a 3D scene from slashdot of a males wide open gaping anal hole?
By urinating in my pants while reading the story
... return RSS to their Mail application in 10.8 with 120 lines of code?
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
So the founder and president [of] Taodyne submits a "story" extolling the virtues of Taodyne's latest program/thingie and this actually makes it onto Slashdot? Am I really expecting too much of Slashdot by thinking that this shouldn't happen? I mean the entire summary is blatantly written like an advert -- perhaps you could say the guy isn't trying to deceive anyone since it's obvious to anyone looking (eg. me) what's going on, but is that really a good direction to go in? Is even the barest of journalistic integrity a lost cause on this site?
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Have gnu, will travel.
3D RSS feed sounds like it'll be the greatest thing since six-speaker stereo surround sound for the morse code coming out ham radios.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Beer is not usually free, sometimes beer is a trick, sometimes beer is home made, sometimes free beer is horrible, sometimes free beer fell off the back of a truck (free as in stolen), what are you talking about?
Remember APL ? You could do an awful lot of stuff in one line using APL
Of course it was totally unreadable by humans
These guys cannot even figure out how to reinstall display drivers on a Win 7 box and they want to sell me a rendering package? Not gonna happen.
The links in the article are a bit ... odd
http :// www.taodyne.com.nyud.net / shop / en / blog / 42-showing-rss-feeds-in-3d
Whereas taodyne actually have their own site, www.taodyne.com/
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
The site is slashdotted at the moment but here is the video on that page when it finally sort-of loaded.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fk39a22wDL0
What sort of pointless nonsense is this? What actual purpose does this have that any normal RSS reader does not have? All it is, seems to be, sticking a list of RSS links on a "jaunty angle" in 3d and adding an associated image on a spinning cube. It's just... pointless.
It's not even much of a technology demonstration is it, I'm no 3d guy, but I'd have assumed that using OpenGL or something one could knock something like this together in no time flat, probably any time in the last 10 to 15 years!
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Is this a blast from the past post from 1998?
I admit I skimmed the Slashdot summary and thought it was compressing 3D information into Twitter-sized bites, similar to the Twitter music notation from a while back. But then I click on the links and see RSS FEEDS IN THREE DEES! Not even really in 3D, just with perspective.
I'm not even going to dig up any of my "Oh, just stop with trying to display text in 3D" rants because everyone has to know by now, right? Everyone but these guys. (Hint: Do a search for VRML.)
And what's with the "120 lines of code" crap? I could probably do the same thing in 5 lines of Processing, or a whole lot more of ASM. But this is a stupid thing that should never have been done. And not "stupid as in awesome" like launching flaming pianos with a trebuchet or "stupid as in a challenge" like getting a toaster to play Oregon Trail, but stupid as in pointless with no redeeming value.
So as much as Slashdotters love to bash on people for not pulling the subtle points from the fine article, don't bother with this one. It was a mistake to have made it to the front page, on top o the much greater mistake of actually doing it in the first place.
New definition of 3D: Stick 2D pictures on a box and spin them.
the 120 lines of code under review actually need a pay version of Tao. The free evaluation version does not work with the example code TFA shows. [Nice although that a linux version is available.]
...is that a lot? Not enough?
Anyway, my new language has a built-in function to do this, so it needs only one line of code!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
McAfee doesn't like those links. Whazzup with that?
Table-ized A.I.
I kept on getting a "not available in your country" notice.
I'm in Canada - anyone in Europe able to see past the first page?
But then I click on the links and see RSS FEEDS IN THREE DEES! Not even really in 3D, just with perspective.
Use the "View->Display Mode" menu and select your favorite 3D mode, and you'll have actual 3D. Including 3D without glasses if you are lucky enough to own Alioscopy, Dimenco or Tridelity displays.
And what's with the "120 lines of code" crap? I could probably do the same thing in 5 lines of Processing.
Why don't you do just that? But knowing Processing, I seriously doubt this is more than trolling.
But this is a stupid thing that should never have been done. And not "stupid as in awesome" like launching flaming pianos with a trebuchet or "stupid as in a challenge" like getting a toaster to play Oregon Trail, but stupid as in pointless with no redeeming value.
And someone modded this insightful? Ach, Slashdot.
-- Did you try Tao3D? http://tao3d.sourceforge.net
But 3D is the new 2D.
I'm just waiting for some advancements in augmented reality, so that I can see the world around me in 3D! /sarcasm
All sarcasm aside, 3D is not the new 2D, 3D is the new color. Black and white didn't go away, you can still use it to great effect. But most digital content today is in color, just because we can. It looks more natural, it allows effects that you can't do in black and white.
When you print a PDF document on a black and white printer, you expect it to look right. What's the equivalent for 3D today? Taodyne's value proposition is to make it ridiculously easy to create portable, dynamic 3D documents that will show at their best on Mac, PCs or Linux, on 2D, active 3D, passive 3D, 3D DLP projectors, 3D polarized projectors, multiscopic glasses-free 3D displays, 2D+Z, you name it.
Sure, glasses-free 3D displays today are expensive and have limited resolution. But when Adobe launched Postscript, laser printers were prohibitively expensive, and only black and white. Today, you can practically get a color laser printer with a Happy Meal. I'm willing to bet that in 5 years, glasses-free 3D panels with resolutions of 4K or more will be commonplace. Google glasses will be the new iPhone. And you'll want to be able to create cool interactive, real-time 3D contents for these devices.
It's time to learn how to do that now.
-- Did you try Tao3D? http://tao3d.sourceforge.net
Apparently we need a nice high level 3D presentation library but we don't want to work out how to use libxml2. I shall leave http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags here and leave you to consider the error of your ways.
(Also, what language did you base that on? It's surprisingly hard to read.)
But on a computer screen? Naa. Waste of time.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I tried Tao Presentations a while back, and while I personally have no use for the 3D features per se, the ability to easily script a presentation is really useful when conveying ideas that are considerably more complex than a couple of bullet points (in my case, code and algorithms). What otherwise takes me days of mind-numbing work using Keynote (which gradually slows down as complexity increases) I can do in less than a day with a bit of straightforward coding ("scripting"). (The scripting involved here is different from e.g. AppleScripting Keynote. You don't so much write a script to create an opaque document; rather, the script _is_ the document.)
Nice 3D feature ! i will follow your next publications !
I must confess that I also missed the point. The headline of the submission focuses on the RSS feed in 3D, making me believe that it really is the "RSS feed" that is important. Perhaps you should frame this demo differently to convey your intent to the reader. "Create Dynamic 3D documents easily" sounds quite diffferent from "3D RSS reader" as a headline.
You are right I guess. I'll take that into account for my next Slashdot submission :-)
I looked as this tool as I would be interested in displaying my computer network / sysadmin type stuff dynamically in 3D. Stock market performance. That sort of stuff. But I can't see that this tool makes that easier.
Let's try making something like that together. Here's one way to do it:
1) Create a small web server somewhere that returns the stuff you are interested it, for example in CSV format. Say you get lines with X,Y,Z,"label".
2) Read that web server with Tao Presentations, using code that looks like this:
get_url_csv "http://myserver/data.csv", "drawit"
drawit X,Y,Z,Label ->
locally
translate X,Y,Z
text Label
drawit MalformedInput -> false
Of course, your server could also send color, or a sphere diameter, so you could have something like:
drawit X,Y,Z,Color,Radius,Label ->
locally
translate X,Y,Z
color Color
sphere Radius
translate Radius, 0, 0
text Label
If you don't want to access the network to get your data, you can also read that from a local file. For example, you can have a Perl script that munches your input data and writes it to a given local file. Then, your Tao Presentations document does something similar to the above, but with load_csv instead of get_url_csv.
You could obviously send data in other formats and parse it with regexps (XML and JSON are coming soon, hopefully). But at the moment, CSV is by far the fastest way to read relatively big amounts of data for Tao Presentations. In this 3D star map example, we use that very technique to show about 15000 stars from the Hipparcos catalog, and it runs smoothly on a modern laptop.
-- Did you try Tao3D? http://tao3d.sourceforge.net
We use it (among other things) for rendering simulations of asteroid collisions (4k frames of 250k particles). I am not sure of what tools could have been used before but our local rocket scientists used to spend the night producing a flat movie that they inserted in their PowerPoint (and back to step one if the movie wasn't good enough). Now they just need to load the data and they can manipulate the thing (rotate, explore, filters particle etc...) in real time in their presentations. Would be beyond their hopes even without the 3D (the optional aspect of witch should remain quite important in real world for some time).
From my perspective, just having the possibility to code the thing (in a general purpose language, meaning that in the yet to happen worst case scenario, I would not be stalled) without wasting time with a wysiwyg interface that some very helpful person thought would be just what I needed would have been enough to justify the move: if I'm in a hurry and just want to package some pieces of existing sample code for a training, I can do it quick a get a descent result (at least better than what I could get before, (I hate doing slides)). Basically, it is a simple effective tool that can adapt to the amount of time and energy I can/am willing to put on the job at hand.
ok, so I've been playing with the thing a bit. you should look at the various demos. the one that has 6 scrat movies on a cube made me laugh, you can't get enough of scrat... the pastebin is here http://pastebin.com/TjXu2vdt. got that from the video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-rNUlgNiI0. interesting how they adjust the sound based on whcih video is in the front. and that demo grabs the videos straight from youtube, which is cool. made me wonder if you could do something like that with html5 and css3d and have something that runs as smoothly.
some built-in demos are surprising, like their water demo, where you click on the slide background and you see water ripples. not sure if i like it, but i like that they can do something that crazy. the mandelbrot example is also interesting, because it shows how you can use glsl (the opengl shading language) to do mathematical stuff. glsl can be used for really cool effects. i can't wait to play more with that.
a few things i noticed. there's a kind of user interface, menus to add shapes. but it seems like an afterthought. tho having the code self-modify when you insert a shape or move it on the screen is interesting. i think i saw apple do that with javascript. they're probably on something there, but it needs more work. i discovered that the menus are all defined in a config file called tao.xl. interesting. so you can actually change the menu layout if you want. not sure why you'd do that, but it has a kind of emacs-lisp feeling to it that i like.
when they say it's free, it is more like adware, but not overly annoying. it basically pops a dialog box or two about missing licenses. then it seems to jsut work. i think you need to pay to get rid of the logo in the corner of the screen. makes sense for them to place an ad each time someone uses the free version. i suppose they'll sell ad-space unless you pay, is that their business model?
rendering of 3d or video or 3d objects is actually quite good. i couldn't find an example with 3d video, but the site implies they support it, there's even a module called stereodecoder. i had a bit of trouble with my 3d tv. once i selected the over-under mode on both sides, it worked well. that mode is annoying because when you quit the app, the tv doesn't revert to 2d mode, so it strains the eyes. better pick a black background. i also tried alternate rows, but on my tv it's blurry. i think it has something to do with overscan. at any rate, the 3d effect is definitely there. looking at the tao.xl file taught me that i could adjust the depth with control+ and control- and a few other useful keyboard shortcuts.
on the language side, it's really... different. nothing like xml in sight, despite the xl name instead, a kind of pattern matching that makes a lot of sense once you get the hang of it. you write a->b and it means 'a becomes b'. you can define variables or functions that way. say you have a collection of names, you can do name 1 -> "joe" and name 2 -> "jane", and then iterate on name i. you have to get used to the lack of parentheses and punctuation, tho the language seems to accept them. so you can type if (x>y) instead of if x>y, it still works.
but the execution model is strange, with parts of the documents executed at different times. i can see a lot of complexity lurking in the shadows. having bugs in my powerpoints? another way to make life interesting. on teh plus side, writing slides with a kind of wiki-like language is really interesting, and having arithmetic or math functions or loops in that wiki language is a definite plus.
one thing i find really useful is that you can edit the source code with whatever editor you like, and as soon as you save, the thing updates automatically. not a new idea, preview on macosx has been doing it for a while, but still useful when you edit source code. the problem is that this seems to break down when you have errors. it shows error messages, and then more often than not i had to restart the app. also, you can't get to the source
We created a Gitorious project to share sample code. The first sample shows the location of earthquakes in real-time.
-- Did you try Tao3D? http://tao3d.sourceforge.net