Google 3D Team Reveals Social 3D World at Google TechTalks: SIAT Prof. Steve DiPaola Invited Guest and Speaker

posted: july 10. 2008

SIAT Professor Steve DiPaola recently visited the Google 3D team to get an inside look at their work. He was the invited guest of Google 3D team lead member and noted computer graphic pioneer Lance Williams ( former head of Animation Research for both Disney and Dreamworks and the inventor of the mipmapping texture mapping technique used in all games and graphics cards).

Prof DiPaola gave a public talk at Google on artificial intelligence and creativity techniques in media systems, that showcases his SIAT research teams work (available from GoogleTechTalks on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i78P-K1RhjY ). Prof DiPaola also gave invited talks at Adobe and HPLabs on his recent trip to the San Francisco bay area when he attended the Game Development Conference for SIAT CATGames research group (catgames.ca ).

More on Google's recent work:

Hands-on: Google's Lively social 3D world is 20 percent done

Google today introduced a 3D chat room plug-in called Lively that is easy to embed in websites and blogs. Ars Technica went hands-on to see if Google actually has introduced us to "another dimension of the web."

Unveiled on Google's blog with the disclaimer that it was a "20 percent" project, Lively is designed to be a portable 3D space where users can build rooms and interact with visitors via avatars. "Second Life in a web browser" is an applicable analogy, though Google appears to have made sure that rooms and user activities remain in the G to PG range. Each room can be linked with a unique URL—I Hate Ewoks and Lively: Google Room are two good examples—or even embedded in a website through an iframe.

"If you enter a Lively room embedded on your favorite blog or website," Google's Niniane Wang said in the announcement post, "you can immediately get a sense of the room creator's interests, just by looking at the furniture and environment they chose." Apparently, a WordPress theme, Flickr photostream widget, and a Twitter Flash badge aren't enough to show off one's personality anymore; we need to know people's architectural preferences as well.

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