Intel Software Network Blogs » Rita Turkowski (Intel)

Virtual Worlds London has some quality speakers

Rita Turkowski (Intel) — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:07:21 +0000

I just noticed that the schedule for VW's London (Oct 08) is up http://www.virtualworldslondon.com/schedule/index.html and I'm happy to see that Intel is sending our VWs thought expert, John Hengeveld: http://www.virtualworldslondon.com/speakers/johnhengeveld.html

Kudo's to John for keeping the virtual worlds torch lit for Intel.

Afternoon Keynote - Virtual Worlds Roadmap Keynote
A cross industry team will present a framework and effort to publish virtual world case studies and descriptions of the technical and business barriers to future mass market adoption of specific virtual world applications. The session will invite the audience to contribute to virtual world industry predictions, analysis, and ideas for lowering barriers to innovation.

Content sells hardware

Rita Turkowski (Intel) — Sat, 03 May 2008 21:06:18 +0000

I just had coffee with an old friend, an M.D. (and an active extreme gamer) active in building a virtual world for medical emergency preparedness. He's very excited about his work, and said he receives avatars and location models from many sources around the world in his medical circles, and is now building a repository to store these models. He's asking his medical community contributors to use COLLADA as the export format so he can have one consistent file format in his hopefully long living content repository. I said to him that sometimes it's kind of hard to evangelize something I know well the value of in software content development, COLLADA, to folks who really only understand hardware. His response to this? It was one simple sentence: Easy: content sells hardware! Without great content, and the ability to easily get to and reuse that content to make even better content, the desire to buy more and better hardware is limited. People buy computers to get the work done that needs doing, or to use some cool content, such as a well-made game. Games drive 3D tech research now, games drive the desire for better and better hardware, and games drive PC sales, no matter how many pundits in our industry say otherwise. In other words, content STILL drives hardware sales. Content is still King. Long live great content! Go out and make some of your own ;-).

Virtual Worlds 2008 in NY - first sessions day

Rita Turkowski (Intel) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:05:28 +0000

As promised, here is a tiny update on VWs Spring show in NY this week.The enterprise panels are very well attended as are anything platform. Mostly branding, marketing and advertising type folks here, but it is media soaked NY afterall. However, its cool to see financial planners talking about modeling the stock ticker info in 3D for instance.. More: All the advertising houses here (NY has many!) have gone completely digital for content creation, most use Flash and SL tho...but Papervision is in the latest issue of Creativity! - an Ad agency paper. COLLADA is a known entity in NY!! surprise! well, maybe I'm not surprised ;-). About 30 exhibitors, all quite intereting, going to hit the floor now after spending most of the day in sessions and small meetups. So the word is out, 3D content houses and VWs is the next wave to hit wall street I predict. More later...

Cool video snippets in Intel's GDC booth on COLLADA

Rita Turkowski (Intel) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 06:39:57 +0000

We were fortunate to have several very cool DCC tool ISVs demo COLLADA in the Intel GDC booth this year and Intel's ISN team captured these interviews for us:

COLLADA, Tools and Intel Graphics:
Luxology MODO 302, Softimage XSI, or see http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/videos/home.aspx

This is cool for tracking MMO popularity

Rita Turkowski (Intel) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 06:25:14 +0000

http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart2.html

Someone needs to do something similar for virtual worlds applications (as they emerge).

so many pixels, so little time...

Rita Turkowski (Intel) — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 07:23:08 +0000

...and just how do graphics software developers keep up with all the action going on today? How to choose the best graphics software opportunities to pursue is probably a good problem to have however ;-). Many years ago, it must be 15+ now, I recall some of my co-workers wearing a cute t-shirt made especially for Siggraph fun. It depicted a stick figure shoveling what appeared to be (RGB colored) pixels into a wheelbarrow with the quote on the shirt front "So many pixels..." and the back of the t-shirt showing "So little time!" At the time, I empathized being overwhelming busy working on 2D and 3D "in house" graphics formats at the time.

Fast forward a decade or more and I can safely say not only has the pace of application development quickened significantly for all things pixel, but commercial graphics applications in general have increased probably over an order of magnitude from where we were as a graphics industry a decade + back. This being my first blog for Intel, and being at Intel in a growing and very exciting visual computing software group almost 4 months now, I would love to hear more on how many successful commercial graphics app's were out in the early 90's (Photoshop, Freehand, Director, Illustrator, AutoCad, a few games for Mac and PC, etc. come to mind) vs. today (besides the decades-long updates to the very popular Adobe and Autodesk applications), since there are literally hundreds of small graphics applications out there slinging pixels and more -- much more. It's an exciting time to be marketing graphics application support tools for Intel and I hope you will be inspired to comment here and tell me what you'd like to see Intel support for great graphics and game software development tools to make your job easier, and hopefully more fun! And, yes, I would love to hear about what you're working on too!

-next up: 3D standards, game profiling, the 3D internet, middleware support - you tell me! - rita