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Virtual Reality: A Search For The Heart Of America’s Game

Eric Betts finds video games convert fans to the beautiful game

By Eric Betts
Apr 21, 2010

One of the joys of being a soccer fan in the United States is the opportunity to convert the unbelievers, to watch as someone who was once indifferent or antagonistic falls in love with the game.

To love soccer is to know it. People can’t develop a life-long passion for the game without a basic understanding of what’s happening on the pitch. Knowing the rules isn’t enough; I mean having a basic grasp of the tactics that drive the play, being able to recognize what each team is trying to do and how the other team is attempting to stop them. This knowledge sustains our interest during the lulls in the game, keeps our attention focused on the play even though teams don’t score every twenty-four seconds or five minutes or however often you like points put on the board in your sport of choice.

For most fans, this knowledge comes from having played soccer, usually in their youth. Others garner it from watching a lot of games. This is why World Cup years are big years for American soccer even when the U.S. team doesn’t do all that well; more games equals more opportunity for potential neophytes to discover that they really like soccer. In today’s world, however, there’s a third way, one that requires neither the physical skills required to play nor the time commitment of watching lots and lots and lots of 90 minute games. Read more on How video games convert U.S. fans to the beautiful game…

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Software, Interfaces, culture

How a Business Can Span the Globe and Stay Close-Knit: Microsoft’s “Telepresence” Project

Gregory T. Huang 4/12/10

Stop me if this sounds familiar. You work in a tight-knit team that has one or two colleagues who are located in a different office—across the street, across the state, or across the country. You’d like to communicate with them more regularly, but phone calls, e-mails, and video conferences have to do. Inevitably, you feel like you (and they) miss out on some day-to-day interactions that help all of you stay fully connected to the company’s goals and culture.

Microsoft feels your pain—and its researchers are trying to do something about it. That’s why a group from Microsoft Research, based in Redmond, WA, is presenting a paper tomorrow at CHI 2010, the big international conference on human-computer interaction in Atlanta. The team, led by senior researchers Gina Venolia and John Tang, has developed a prototype system that gives a satellite colleague a “telepresence” not just in meetings but in the daily workflow of the hub office. They pull this trick with basically a laptop, speakerphone, and webcams on a cart, plus software to coordinate it all. Their project is called “Embodied Social Proxy,” or ESP. Read more on How a business can span the globe and stay close-knit: Microsoft’s “Telepresence” project…

[From CNN's

April 20, 2010

Real fear in a virtual world

Posted by: John D. Sutter — CNN.com writer/producer 

So, I walked up to a virtual pit.

It was maybe 30 feet deep. With a wood plank crossing it.

Somewhere deep down in my rational brain, I knew the hole wasn’t real – that it was a virtual reality scenario in a cramped office at Stanford University, where the floor seemed completely pit-free until I put on a clunky piece of hardware called a “headmount.”

But that headmount changed everything. Read more on Reporter’s experience of Stanford lab’s virtual pit…

[From here; an 8:14 minute Bing demo video is here].

Street View photos used for amazing Google Earth 3D cities

by Daniel Long onApr 14, 2010

Google has combined its wealth of street view data with satellite imagery to create the a 3D city effect, while a Microsoft engineer has given an amazing demo of live video within Bing Maps. See the videos.

3D textured cityscapes are nothing new to Google Earth users: international cities such as New York have displayed this type of imagery for a while now. But now Google has made an important, but critical change to Google Earth – adding high resolution Street View imagery to existing 3D city textures and vastly improving the resolution of the facades.

Now, instead of navigating flat city maps, or greyed out skyscraper blocks, you can literally zoom into a city and hover above ground level and get a sense of the city from a pedestrian or driver’s view. Read more on High resolution street views added to Google Earth 3D cities…

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