There are some great innovation going on when it comes to user interface design. I work as a researcher in sweden and here a lot of people are working on new hand healed devises and how to make new user interfaces for small screens(mostly because Ericson and Nokia are nordic, two of the leading cell phone manufacturers in the world). So a lot is happening in that area.
A god place to look for innovation is ACM chi (computer human interaction), a org where you can find a lot of fun stuff. A lot of the research that is going on is about how to integrate computers in to our life's, so that you don't need to interact whit them directly, they them self should be context sensitive to their environment and respond to your needs and filter out the information you need. this is usually called "augmented reality"
So what about regular user interfaces? well in my opinion there is way to little innovation when it comes to computer applications and the open source community has not been as innovative as one would think, but i what to give one link to Alias|Wavefront. If you look at there hi-end cad/animation software you will find so much of innovation that will make you hate most of our common software's interfaces
This is completely silly. its like saying there is nothing left to invent.
But there is a point to it, way to much software is written in a very conventional ways. if you can use one word processor, you can use them all. the same goes for a lot of software.
The main problem is that most software developers try to write software that is easy to learn, and the easiest way is to make it look like other softwares.
I work in the hi-end 3D graphics world where a software license can cost you more then 10.000$ and this means that you don't mind spending a few extra 1000$ to train you staff, just to get them to work more efficient. This means that company's like Alias|wavefron and Avid can create software that look drastically different and works in very different ways then you may be used to, just to gain a little efficiency.
I hope the the Open source community can stop copying and start creating some really innovative new types of software.
I don't think this is about emulation. its more about training future dame developers. sony and other developers have this huge problem that there are very few programmers out there whit experience of console platforms. The amiga used to be a good place to find them, but the amiga is about as dead as Elvis. who programs assembler on the pc? and who has experience programming custom graphic chips?
Ninitendo lets some people hack the N64, and sony used to have Net yarose. so its noting new.
emulation, and copy protection is of course something to be afraid of. but remember that sony doesn't make a profit form selling units, they do it by selling the license to make commercial games for it, so they would gain on some emulation not loose. The only reason they don't like it is because of bad PR, but still no one is going to be able to emulate a ps2 for some years to come.
im sort of from the graphics department, and I see the same problems. Right now, the biggest problem for all the graphics hard ware people is the bandwidth to the graphics cards, and basically there are 2 answers to that we are going to see faster memory types(duh!) and embedded ram. this means that the memory is inside the graphics chip.
playstation 2 has this and that is why it has a massive bandwidth of 48 gigs per second. Bitboys has the same technology for the pc so lets hope they can actually release some thing.
I would like to know if any one is working on a processor whit embedded ram?
An other thing is the AGP bus that is just getting way to slow, and i guess that's up to Intel to do some thing about.
Is this a new thing?, newtek has some thing called a screamer a few years back that did the same things for rendering in lightscape.
There is also an other product that i cant remember the name of that acts like a rendering farm for 3D studio it has some custom rendering chips and an alpha for controlling it all. It actually runs linux...
Hey if we want to go on: the older multi processor Macs, had the second processor acting as a slave to the first one.
Im shore there are lots more examples, the story just made me think back on some cool rendering farm solutions that i have come a cross.
Im working on some thing similar. a "closed source validator" may be a great idea, the only problems is that it needs to be constantly updated, that is why I am thinking about having it connect to some sort of master server that can store info on all "accepted versions". people have been talking about it for quake, and valve has some thing like that to check if half-life binaries have been tampered whit.
But it doesn't have to be a problem, a lot of it depends on the type of game, if enough checks are made on the server side you can kill most exploits of a open source network game, except for things like auto aiming, zoom and things like that, but that doesn't have to affect the game if its not a action orientated one.
Any law is based on the basic idea that, we are all responsible for our actions. That is why the law can hold people account abel for things they do . In affect this means that we all have a choice either to support the law or break it. In some cases we come to the point were we can no longer accept the law and feel the need to break it for moral, political or religious reasons. Democracy is was built by people who refused to accept the system they lived in, and they broke the law.
This is why we must accept that some people break the law
Obviously having people braking the law is something that is bad for society and that is why democracy is such a great thing. Because freedom of speech, touts and religion gives people less reason to break the law to change society. germans who opposed the nazis broke the law but what they did was right. The judges that sent them to consternation camps are accountable for their actions. No one can say that they just followed the current laws and are there are not liable. every one accountable.
I understand if slashdot doesn't what to get in to a legal battle with MS but don't ever think that what you have done is wrong just becouse the current laws may happen to think so.
I think there has ben a bit of a clash at id, Carmack who knows the problems of game development wants to keep the games simple to be able to advance rendering technology, but the rest of id wants to make some thing more down the line of half life.
We must remember that id is a really small development house and the reason they have bean able to keep it small is because they make simple yet fun games. If Carmack had he's way we would most likely se some kind of follow up to q3arena but he isn't the "boss" of id. This tells me that id may have a very difficult time ahead.
I think that Carmack would like to push the no repeat texture idea, but the question is will the hardware people agree to he's ideas on driver texture handling. I talked to some people form 3dfx and Nvidia about it and apparently he has bean lobbying for it.
The mentioning of shadows will most likely be stencil shadows (read more on opengl.org) my biggest question, will he be using all the new hardware specific, register combiner hardware to do per pixel lighting? will he go for subdivision surfaces?
The hardware industry doesn't really know what the next big thing is going to be, And im not shore Carmack knows either but is he does he's got a great opportunity to push the industry in that direction. My guess is hardware shadows, but who knows.
Hey isn't this a bit to late? X-box was shown over a week ago on game developers conference by Gates him self, I was there and i was not that impressed. X-box is over 1.5 year away and nvidia and 3dfx will have released 3-4 generations of 3d hardware before it will be out. The generation of nvidia chip set that the X-box will based on will be in you PC this fall. Shore it looks cool but so will everything else by the end of 2001. compare it whit PS2, ok it not as good as the X-box but it is out now! and currently it kills the PC, in the end of 2001 X-box wont kill any thing, not whit a 32 bit pIII, a year old Nvidia chip set, and only 64 meg of ram. I don't think it will Die, I just think it will be a lot less success full compared to the PS2. And btw, nothing is clear about who gets to develop, marketing, pricing royalties and a bunch of other stuff that we need to know. Sorry Bill but I don't believe in it
according to some people I know, SGI will come out whit a new line of machines early next year. They will be linux only and have the same great IO as the NT machines possibly whit, firewire and USB, they will feature NVIDIA 3D graphics chip set (most likely some type of Gforce) Since it will be a linux only machine It doesn't have to be a x86 processor, it may even be a risc.
I think it is fairly likely that we will see some thing like the above, and I even think it may save SGI if the pricing is right. SGI is the best when it comes to IO, and whit the help of Nvidia and linux they could survive.
Often very true, Most VR projects are either, plain silly or way too over kill, but still some of us are doing some interesting stuff. Last week we attended a seminar were some VR people clamed that to do anything 3D on the net you would need 75 Bit, QOS and no latency. This is why the VR community needs people like carmack. We are currently working on a free, OS platform and we think that VR does have a future but not as something you put on your head. but something you can run like a game and that is free , OS, multiplatfom, lightweight. and built by a community. check out http://www.obsession.se/verse We are still very early in development.
Slashdot Mirror
There are some great innovation going on when it comes to user interface design. I work as a researcher in sweden and here a lot of people are working on new hand healed devises and how to make new user interfaces for small screens(mostly because Ericson and Nokia are nordic, two of the leading cell phone manufacturers in the world). So a lot is happening in that area.
A god place to look for innovation is ACM chi (computer human interaction), a org where you can find a lot of fun stuff. A lot of the research that is going on is about how to integrate computers in to our life's, so that you don't need to interact whit them directly, they them self should be context sensitive to their environment and respond to your needs and filter out the information you need. this is usually called "augmented reality"
So what about regular user interfaces? well in my opinion there is way to little innovation when it comes to computer applications and the open source community has not been as innovative as one would think, but i what to give one link to Alias|Wavefront. If you look at there hi-end cad/animation software you will find so much of innovation that will make you hate most of our common software's interfaces
Eskil
This is completely silly. its like saying there is nothing left to invent.
But there is a point to it, way to much software is written in a very conventional ways. if you can use one word processor, you can use them all. the same goes for a lot of software.
The main problem is that most software developers try to write software that is easy to learn, and the easiest way is to make it look like other softwares.
I work in the hi-end 3D graphics world where a software license can cost you more then 10.000$ and this means that you don't mind spending a few extra 1000$ to train you staff, just to get them to work more efficient. This means that company's like Alias|wavefron and Avid can create software that look drastically different and works in very different ways then you may be used to, just to gain a little efficiency.
I hope the the Open source community can stop copying and start creating some really innovative new types of software.
I don't think this is about emulation. its more about training future dame developers. sony and other developers have this huge problem that there are very few programmers out there whit experience of console platforms. The amiga used to be a good place to find them, but the amiga is about as dead as Elvis. who programs assembler on the pc? and who has experience programming custom graphic chips?
Ninitendo lets some people hack the N64, and sony used to have Net yarose. so its noting new.
emulation, and copy protection is of course something to be afraid of. but remember that sony doesn't make a profit form selling units, they do it by selling the license to make commercial games for it, so they would gain on some emulation not loose. The only reason they don't like it is because of bad PR, but still no one is going to be able to emulate a ps2 for some years to come.
im sort of from the graphics department, and I see the same problems. Right now, the biggest problem for all the graphics hard ware people is the bandwidth to the graphics cards, and basically there are 2 answers to that we are going to see faster memory types(duh!) and embedded ram. this means that the memory is inside the graphics chip.
playstation 2 has this and that is why it has a massive bandwidth of 48 gigs per second. Bitboys has the same technology for the pc so lets hope they can actually release some thing.
I would like to know if any one is working on a processor whit embedded ram?
An other thing is the AGP bus that is just getting way to slow, and i guess that's up to Intel to do some thing about.
Is this a new thing?, newtek has some thing called a screamer a few years back that did the same things for rendering in lightscape.
There is also an other product that i cant remember the name of that acts like a rendering farm for 3D studio it has some custom rendering chips and an alpha for controlling it all. It actually runs linux...
Hey if we want to go on: the older multi processor Macs, had the second processor acting as a slave to the first one.
Im shore there are lots more examples, the story just made me think back on some cool rendering farm solutions that i have come a cross.
Good point.
Im working on some thing similar. a "closed source validator" may be a great idea, the only problems is that it needs to be constantly updated, that is why I am thinking about having it connect to some sort of master server that can store info on all "accepted versions". people have been talking about it for quake, and valve has some thing like that to check if half-life binaries have been tampered whit.
But it doesn't have to be a problem, a lot of it depends on the type of game, if enough checks are made on the server side you can kill most exploits of a open source network game, except for things like auto aiming, zoom and things like that, but that doesn't have to affect the game if its not a action orientated one.
Any law is based on the basic idea that, we are all responsible for our actions. That is why the law can hold people account abel for things they do . In affect this means that we all have a choice either to support the law or break it. In some cases we come to the point were we can no longer accept the law and feel the need to break it for moral, political or religious reasons. Democracy is was built by people who refused to accept the system they lived in, and they broke the law.
This is why we must accept that some people break the law
Obviously having people braking the law is something that is bad for society and that is why democracy is such a great thing. Because freedom of speech, touts and religion gives people less reason to break the law to change society. germans who opposed the nazis broke the law but what they did was right. The judges that sent them to consternation camps are accountable for their actions. No one can say that they just followed the current laws and are there are not liable. every one accountable.
I understand if slashdot doesn't what to get in to a legal battle with MS but don't ever think that what you have done is wrong just becouse the current laws may happen to think so.
Me in john cage mode
I think there has ben a bit of a clash at id, Carmack who knows the problems of game development wants to keep the games simple to be able to advance rendering technology, but the rest of id wants to make some thing more down the line of half life.
We must remember that id is a really small development house and the reason they have bean able to keep it small is because they make simple yet fun games. If Carmack had he's way we would most likely se some kind of follow up to q3arena but he isn't the "boss" of id. This tells me that id may have a very difficult time ahead.
I think that Carmack would like to push the no repeat texture idea, but the question is will the hardware people agree to he's ideas on driver texture handling. I talked to some people form 3dfx and Nvidia about it and apparently he has bean lobbying for it.
The mentioning of shadows will most likely be stencil shadows (read more on opengl.org) my biggest question, will he be using all the new hardware specific, register combiner hardware to do per pixel lighting? will he go for subdivision surfaces?
The hardware industry doesn't really know what the next big thing is going to be, And im not shore Carmack knows either but is he does he's got a great opportunity to push the industry in that direction. My guess is hardware shadows, but who knows.
Eskil
Hey isn't this a bit to late? X-box was shown over a week ago on game developers conference by Gates him self, I was there and i was not that impressed. X-box is over 1.5 year away and nvidia and 3dfx will have released 3-4 generations of 3d hardware before it will be out. The generation of nvidia chip set that the X-box will based on will be in you PC this fall. Shore it looks cool but so will everything else by the end of 2001. compare it whit PS2, ok it not as good as the X-box but it is out now! and currently it kills the PC, in the end of 2001 X-box wont kill any thing, not whit a 32 bit pIII, a year old Nvidia chip set, and only 64 meg of ram. I don't think it will Die, I just think it will be a lot less success full compared to the PS2. And btw, nothing is clear about who gets to develop, marketing, pricing royalties and a bunch of other stuff that we need to know. Sorry Bill but I don't believe in it
There is already a cave in stockholm and we have been hacking for it for some time now
you will find some suff at:
http://www.pdc.kth.se/projects/vr-cube/
according to some people I know, SGI will come out whit a new line of machines early next year. They will be linux only and have the same great IO as the NT machines possibly whit, firewire and USB, they will feature NVIDIA 3D graphics chip set (most likely some type of Gforce) Since it will be a linux only machine It doesn't have to be a x86 processor, it may even be a risc.
I think it is fairly likely that we will see some thing like the above, and I even think it may save SGI if the pricing is right. SGI is the best when it comes to IO, and whit the help of Nvidia and linux they could survive.
Often very true,
Most VR projects are either, plain silly or way too over kill, but still some of us are doing some interesting stuff.
Last week we attended a seminar were some VR people clamed that to do anything 3D on the net you would need 75 Bit, QOS and no latency. This is why the VR community needs people like carmack.
We are currently working on a free, OS platform and we think that VR does have a future but not as something you put on your head. but something you can run like a game and that is free , OS, multiplatfom, lightweight. and built by a community.
check out http://www.obsession.se/verse
We are still very early in development.