| 3D printers…coming soon to geek homes?
Plane rides from Europe are long, so I usually pack a small library of things to read. Among that group was "The World in 2008″ by The Economist, a special edition of the magazine where writers put on their pointed hats and try to predict what will happen in the coming year. One of those predictions was that 3D printers would escape the design house and start to appear in regular consumer homes (which seemed a bit optimistic to me, as the "tipping point" to them was that the price tag would fall below $5000). 3D printers "print" three-dimensional objects by taking an object model passed in some format to the printer and laying it down layer by layer until complete. It's not exactly a rapid process (yet), as it proceeds at about 2 inches an hour. Then again, in college, I used to head off to the cafeteria while long papers were spooling on the dot matrix printer in my dorm room (I'm sure some of my younger readers are scratching their heads and wondering "what is dot matrix?" No, I wasn't friends with Neo.).
Jack Shafer
Don't pity the poor pitiful striking screenwriters—let the major daily newspapers do it for you. Perhaps not since the air traffic controllers' strike of 1981 has the big press lavished such intense and generally sympathetic coverage on a labor dispute. Both the Washington Post ("it hasn't been easy for movie writers") and the New York Times ("my greed is fair and reasonable") have run op-eds by screenwriters demanding that the entertainment industry compensate Writers Guild of America members for digital use of their work on the Web, iPods, cell phones, etc., the sticking point of this strike. In the opinion pages of the Los Angeles Times, writer-producer Marshall Herskovitz lectures about how corporate domination of Hollywood inconveniences him, and a nonscreenwriter laments the powerlessness of today's scribes ("there is nothing without the writer").
Stage debuts as markerless motion capture system
Organic Motion on Monday announced commercial availability of Stage, its markerless motion capture (mocap) system that works with Macs and PCs running Autodesk's MotionBuilder software. Stage was first introduced publicly at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco this past March. The system works differently than other motion capture systems as it does not require users to wear a body suit or tracking device in order to capture their motion. At $80,000 or so to start, Stage costs about half of what traditional motion capture systems typically run, according to Organic Motion. Stage works using a series of FireWire-connected cameras that are plugged into a processing box of Organic Motion's own design; the system is capable of recording body motion without generating occlusion errors or requiring long set-up times.
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