Yippi Kai Yei :D

Sen te nebiju bijis, bet nu beidzot prātā ienāca doma te iebrist. Atceros, ka sākotnēji šis blogs tika uzcepts ar domām "nu es rausīšu ahūno piķi ar googles adu palīdzību", diemžēl nekas no tā nesanāca un es tiku mūžīgi mūžos banots googles adsense programā.

Kā jau pieminēju, šodien te sanāca pavisam netīšām nokļūt. Izdomāju, ka tad nu es te varētu spamot par tik nodrāztām tēmām, kā apkārt notiekošais un manas domas par to, par dienā padarīto, etc.

Tad nu varu teikt, ka šobrīd mācos rītdienas ģeogrāfijas kontroldarbam [btw, zinājāt, ka japāņi atšķir 4000 krāsu toņu? :O ] un fonā skan "sitiet bungas mani mīļie, sitiet plaukstas brāļu bars.."

Okey, lasītāj, tad nu tiekamies līdz nākamajam ierakstam :)

Soon I will be back from my trip :)

Hi, I just want to write that soon I will be back with many funny&interesting news and topics!

Video games need 'realism boost'

Crysis

Games like Crysis are hoping to push the boundaries of realism

More than good looks are needed to make a great video game, according to Glenn Entis, chief technical officer at games giant Electronic Arts.

Mr Entis told the Siggraph conference that games makers had to use much more than graphics to make their creations believable, engaging and fun.

Game worlds must not just look lifelike, he said, they must also react in a realistic manner too.

Tools that let players create content were also becoming important, he said.

Siggraph, held in San Diego, is the world's leading computer graphics conference.

During his speech, Mr Entis warned against assuming that games which look lifelike automatically take on the characteristics of the real world.

He said this problem was most acute when creating believable human video game characters.

Exquisitely sensitive

Humans were so exquisitely sensitive to how other people move and behave, said Mr Entis, that the smallest differences undermine the almost perfect physical representations of people becoming possible on next-generation consoles such as the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3.

"When a character's visual appearance creates the expectation of life and it falls short your brain is going to reject that," he said.

Improvements in graphics would not boost believability, he said. "Just adding polygons makes it worse."

He said that to add authenticity EA had made extensive use of motion capture to catalogue how stance, gait and the tiny movements of facial muscles combine when people display different emotions.


Every part of nature that can respond will respond
Glenn Entis, EA

Using this, he said, the game maker had created a movement system for characters that unites these gross and fine-grained changes.

"It gives us alertness and empathy that we have never really had in our games before," he said.

"Model and motion are what gives fidelity for non-interactive characters," said Mr Entis, "but it is responsiveness and intelligence that really brings them alive."

"Players have to relate to the characters they are holding in the palm of their hand," he said.

Movement matching

The emotion and movement matching system was going to get its first airing in the next release of EA's basketball game, NBA Live.

Similar demands held true for game worlds as well as the characters that inhabit them, said Mr Entis.

Game worlds must also react in a lifelike manner to whatever people do, he said. Often this can be done via good physics that dictates how scenery reacts when blown up or how liquids or gases move to produce an engaging, thrilling game.

"Every part of nature that can respond will respond," he said.

Mr Entis said the forthcoming Crysis title was a good example of a game in which the responsiveness of the world made it more fun to play.

"It's about worlds that look beautiful but behave beautifully as well," said Mr Entis.

Finally, he said, easy to use tools for players were growing in importance and in some cases had become as important as the gameplay itself.

EA research

For example, he said, EA research had revealed that more than half the people that played The Sims spent more than half the time they play it just making stuff - be it characters or game extras such as furniture.

"They love making the stuff so much that it becomes the game," he said.

EA was now working on a European Xbox 360 title called Virtual Me that gives players unprecedented control over the looks and wardrobe of the character they create. The game will be released alongside a TV programme put together by Big Brother creator Endemol.

The move by the games industry to give players more tools, such as the much-anticipated Spore game by Sim City creator Will Wright, was like the trend towards user-generated content seen on the web, said Mr Entis.

"It's an exploding area," he said.
By Mark Ward
Technology correspondent, BBC News website, San Diego

The Tech Lab: Lesley Gavin

BT futurologist Lesley Gavin looks ahead to a time when real and virtual worlds mix as easily as making a mobile phone call.

Second Life
The virtual and the actual world could merge in the future

Social networking sites are essentially communication spaces where you can see and talk to friends, but in a slightly different way than you would face to face, or by email or text.

The fact that these sites have become increasingly popular suggests that this "slightly different" way of communicating fills some purpose or need that we have. They give us an extra awareness of our friends and of the context or mood they are in.


WHAT IS THE TECH LAB?
The world's leading thinkers give a personal view of future technologies

They allow us to choose whether or not to interact with them at that moment or later.

In parallel, we've seen enormous interest in 3D virtual environments as communication and meeting spaces, Second Life is just one example, where people have fun creating avatars, developing role play and spending virtual money.

It's also interesting that as users become older (the original virtual world users are now in their early twenties) we are seeing a trend for real world mega-clubs such as Oceana, offering numerous different themed environments under one roof.

These are places where you can dress up and role play in a real world environment. Virtual worlds are great for meeting lots of people from around the world while sitting in your favourite comfy armchair at home.

However they don't yet meet the asynchronous communication requirement we have as provided by Facebook, Bebo and Myspace.

In the future these environments are likely to merge. Interfaces will improve, and more specifically, personalised applications will be built on top of them.

Virtual worlds will also become integrated with real environments. Buildings or public spaces may offer virtual world counterparts.

Perhaps the local cinema will offer the latest sci-fi world, or historic sites will offer us worlds where we can go back in time.


Lesley Gavin
Virtual worlds will also become integrated with real environments. Buildings or public spaces may offer virtual world counterparts
Lesley Gavin, BT Futurologist

Rather than view virtual worlds on devices, in the future you could use active contact lenses .

These would of course allow you to see the real world - but you could adjust them to see the virtual world, or a mixture of the two.

For example, you may be walking along the street and get a call from someone in a virtual world, and instead of talking on your mobile phone, you instantaneously switch into the mixed reality environment.

Alongside these developments we will have fully networked homes with embedded sensors. These sensors will capture movement and speech, so that when you are travelling, and away from loved ones you could pop in your virtual contact lenses and step into your very own virtual home world.

In an instant you could be on your sofa with your kids watching Tracey Beaker. Of course as soon as your child hits teenage years you are going to be unlikely to find them, as they will be wearing some T-shirt that interferes with the houses motion capture system.

And what of the skills our children are learning in these 3D worlds? Role play means that duality is commonplace and easy to deal with.

Multi-channel communication is another skill that is becoming highly developed, as is cross cultural understanding within these truly global environments.

As new technologies integrate more closely into our real lives I'm interested in the developing social norms that go alongside this.

It is now illegal to use a mobile phone whilst driving - it is recognised that our mind is at least partially in another world, a different communication space.


Second Life


My friend has created one that follows her around the virtual world complimenting her

People on mobile phones often walk a bit strangely, sometimes pacing up and down the pavement without fully realising what they are doing.

With increased use of mobile, alternate worlds this will increase. What will our pavements be like when people start waving or hugging their virtual friends?

The next stage for virtual worlds is embedded intelligence. For example, in some worlds you can create 'bots'.

These are avatars you can programme by adding behaviours or giving them tasks.

My friend has created one that follows her around the virtual world complimenting her - 'Barbara, you're looking great today' - a great boost to her confidence.

In the future these bots will be able to collect information for you, store it and process it. Perhaps your bot will go round the world making friends, so when you are next online there are a whole host of interesting people for you to meet.

As these worlds become more familiar and sophisticated, we are likely to use them as communication spaces for work as well as play, perhaps to collaborate with remote workers or encourage new kinds of creativity.

A fully functioning, easily accessible, intelligent, well hosted, knowledge based global communication space would be a great invention.

But hang on, wasn't that the Holodeck?

Funny Clock ... Uniqlock!

Funny shit :)
But I'm warning you - after 5min that sound was made me very angry! :D
I set the time and place location to my own. But you can change it in the hompage of Uniqlock!

There is a link were you can find more info about this project Uniqlock



P.S. If you want, you can turn the sound on, by one click below the animation

Cannabis harm worse than tobacco.

The impact of cannabis is worsened by how joints are smoked.

A single cannabis joint could damage the lungs as much as smoking up to five tobacco cigarettes one after another, scientists in New Zealand have said.

The research, published in the journal Thorax, found cannabis damaged the large airways in the lungs causing symptoms such as coughing and wheezing.

It also damaged the ability of the lungs to get oxygen to, and remove waste products from tissues.

Experts say the study confirms that the drug represents a serious health risk.


This research confirms that cannabis poses a serious health risk to the lungs, and smoking a joint can be more harmful to the lungs than smoking a cigarette
Dr Keith Prowse
British Lung Foundation

In the study researchers from the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand, Wakefield Hospital and the Wellington School of Medicine and Health Sciences, studied 339 volunteers.

They took CT scans of their lungs and tested their lung function through breathing tests to assess their lung damage.

Participants were divided into four groups - cannabis smokers, combined cannabis and tobacco smokers, tobacco smokers, and non-smokers, and gave them a questionnaire on their smoking habits.

Cannabis smokers were included if they had smoked at least one joint per day for at least five years, while tobacco smokers had to have smoked 20 cigarettes per day for one year.


Smoking a joint
One joint could cause as much damage as up to five cigarettes

Cannabis smokers reported symptoms such as wheezing, coughing, chest tightness and excessive phlegm production.

The drug also reduced the numbers of small, fine airways that transport oxygen and waste products to and from blood vessels in the lungs.

And it damaged the function of the large airways of the lungs, obstructing air flow and forcing the lungs to work harder, so contributing to symptoms such as coughing, and the development of bronchitis.

The extent of this large airway damage was directly related to the number of joints smoked - the more joints smoked, the more damage was seen.

However, in this study, people who smoked only cannabis were not found to suffer from emphysema, a serious and crippling lung disease which was previously thought to be linked to the drug.

Impact

The authors said: "The most important finding was that one joint of cannabis was similar to 2.5 to five tobacco cigarettes in terms of causing airflow obstruction.

They said the impact of cannabis was likely to be due to the way in which cannabis joints are smoked - joints do not usually have filters, and they reach higher temperatures with users inhaling more deeply and holding their breath for longer than cigarette smokers.

The British Lung Foundation welcomed the research, and Dr Keith Prowse, chairman of the foundation said: "This research confirms that cannabis poses a serious health risk to the lungs, and smoking a joint can be more harmful to the lungs than smoking a cigarette.

"It's important to remember, though, that tobacco continues to be more harmful overall because it is typically smoked in much higher quantities than cannabis."

The warnings come after recent research suggested cannabis smokers were 40% more likely than non-users to suffer psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia.

Realy nervy boy?! :D

Ohh, i hope my kids would't be so nervy.. ;)