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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."
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.
Do I know this?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
... 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"?
Remember APL ? You could do an awful lot of stuff in one line using APL
Of course it was totally unreadable by humans
"Free as in beer" is a concept generally associated with Richard Stallman. He was trying to explain his concept of free software. The basic idea is that when you say free beer, you mean that you don't want to pay money for it. When you say free speech, you mean that you don't want it to be restricted. Stallman's concept of free software was for it to be free like speech should be, not free like we wish beer was.
Links (from googling "free as in beer"):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FreeAsInBeer
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/31717/what-do-the-phrases-free-speech-vs.-free-beer-really-mean/
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.
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?
I hadn't heard the "free as in beer" term used that much recently but I didn't think it was _that_ long ago... maybe i'm just old :(
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?
I think this should be fixed now. Thanks for reporting. Believe it or not, Canada was not listed in the "known countries" in our database. Sorry...
-- Did you try Tao3D? http://tao3d.sourceforge.net
*sigh* slashdot
And we had tried to use Coral to minimize the load. Silly Slashdotters who actually follow links :-)
-- Did you try Tao3D? http://tao3d.sourceforge.net
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
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.
There are frameworks such as Reveal.js or Impress.js that try to present things nicely using CSS3, HTML5, etc. Taodyne didn't use markup languages on purpose. From that article:
Standard markup, yes, but still a new language
On the surface, this structure is well known, so that you can leverage what you already know about HTML.
But notice how the two examples above don't use exactly the same syntax. There's a reason for that: in both cases, the power of that code really lies in additional definitions using Javascript and CSS 3D. We no longer use a really standard language, but some kind of dialect. We still need to learn this dialect before creating presentations.
It's not like the required code is extraordinarily big. For Impress.js, we are talking about 700 lines of CSS and 800 lines of Javascript. Reveal.js is slightly more extensive, with 1238 lines of CSS and 1039 lines of Javascript, not counting a few libraries.
However, that still means that you need to learn new semantics on how to build animations. The benefits of using a "standard" language are somewhat mitigated. More importantly, it means that what makes the presentation really different, the interesting 3D animations and transitions, are not in the document description itself.
A new kind of programming language designed specifically for real-time, interactive documents has a number of benefits. For example, we don't have a linear execution model. Parts of the document execute in response to events, transparently. That way, if you have a document that refreshes only once per second, we use practically no CPU. And if only this or that part of the document executes. See Execution and Drawing Model on this description of Tao documents.
-- 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.)
Because Javascript isn't event driven? Excuse me?
Not transparently event-driven, no. For example, consider the following Tao Presentations code:
color "red"
rectangle 320, 200
locally
rotatez 20 * time
color "blue"
rectangle 400, 100
Because we used time in the inner block, we will re-evaluate that block more rapidly than the rest (roughly 60 times per second in that case). So we transparently detect that this or that part of the document needs this or that event. I don't think Javascript does that, does it?
-- Did you try Tao3D? http://tao3d.sourceforge.net
But on a computer screen? Naa. Waste of time.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
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 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