All posts by Sterling Ely
About Building Virtual Worlds
Building Virtual Worlds is the class at Carnegie Mellon started by the late great Randy Pausch that brings people from all majors together to create immersive virtual reality worlds.
Students are either modelers, painters, scripters, or “intangibles” and are arranged in groups of 4 for 2 weeks during which they create their 3D worlds. They are then regrouped to do it again 4 more times during the semester.
I’ve taken this class twice because, despite the gargantuan workload, it is an incredibly fun class, and a great experience working with others to create great things. In 2001, I was a modeler, meaning I created all the 3D objects that make up the virtual worlds, and in 2002, I was a painter, which means I created all the colors and textures that bring detail to those objects. I also did some animation, and created most of the start screens for the worlds I worked on.
Local Projects in Print Magazine
The company I work for, Local Projects, is featured in the latest issue of Print Magazine.
Click the images above, download the PDF, or go to printmag.com to read the article.
Believe it or not, there are actually 3 pictures of me in this spread, but they are all blurry, tiny, or of the back of my head 🙂
Google Earth just keeps getting cooler
I’ve been in love with Google Earth since long before Google bought Keyhole, but they just keep making it better and better. In addition to lots of other neat upgrades that I’ll not mention, you can now explore SPACE and fly right into panoramic photos. Getting lost zipping around the solar system and exploring distant stars is frikkin sweet, ya should check it out.
Gettin there…
Last night I finally got WordPress on my own server, and started building my new template.
As you can see, there’s still much to be done, but we’s got some nice progress here, yo.
Daft Punk: Alive 2007 concert in Keyspan Park, NY
Best. Show. Ever.
Going into this, I heard a lot of hype. I heard that people who weren’t even Daft Punk fans (yet somehow went?) described it as a “religious experience”. Personally, I’d not call anything short of playing shuffleboard with Jesus a religious experience… but I certainly get where those folks were coming from.
Awesome show… certainly the best I’ve been to. (though if I could have somehow attended the Pink Floyd: The Wall tour, then this would possibly fall second)
Anyway, here are some clips that I managed to shoot in between frantic dancing and screaming. Enjoy.
PS: the video above, while reasonably good for web streaming, is half the quality of what it really should be.
(plus, this is just more fun to watch on your TV or iPod)
Right click here and choose “save as” to download a high-resolution (& iPod / iTunes / iTV / iPhone friendly) version
flickr badge thingie
Street level mapping
If you haven’t already seen it, check out the new “Street View” feature in Google Maps.
Totally cool: now you can take a virtual tour of Central Park, or actually scope out the particular building you are going to.
How do they get that street level imagery, you ask? Check out this van.
MS takes the interactive table (closer) to primetime
First Apple busts out consumer multitouch with the iPhone, then Microsoft shows up with Surface, a (almost) consumer multitouch table. Very cool. I love the table I made, but it definitely has it’s shortcomings: I’ll be nice to see what a real software/electronics company can come up with, and it looks like that’s exactly what we’ll see in the coming years.
MS Surface official site
Popular Mechanics article (featuring video & Jeff Han)
CNN article (with video)
CNET article (with video)
Forbes article
New York Times article
yeah, pretty much
Ok, I’m diggin on WordPress like a fat kid on cake.
Now it’s time to get my CSS going so I can make this thing puuurdy.
Stay tuned.