Here is a fantastic presentation on 'Filter Bubbles' on the web:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/el...r_bubbles.html

Recommended.

Youtube has added native stereoscopic support to their viewer. This has been an experiment for some time, and is nice that it is finally made publicly available.
DEMO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuxqPuhLBZg

You can choose a number of viewing methods including: red-blue glasses, blue-yellow glasses, side-by-side images, interleaved images, etc.

The most interesting addition (which is news to me) is that it supports 3D viewing with specialized hardware! Apparently there is a stereoscopic video standard in HTML5 that works with Nvidia 3D vision, and presumably more as time marches unrelentingly forward. AFAICT, this is one of the first (if not only) open standards for 3D content, and it's nice to see it on the web platform.

I have a sturdy plastic pair of red-blue (anaglyph) specs that I got for around $2. One thing that I absolutely would like to see with youtube3D is a way to calibrate the red and blue on the display to reduce ghosting. All monitors have different gamuts and display things differently, and I would imagine the same for the filters in the anaglyph glasses. Calibration would make something like this far more effective!

A case for Chrome OS.

Today, my g/f was enjoying a 2 hour mission in Starcraft, and the Ubuntu Unity Interface froze up after the screen went blank (we took a break for dinner). As you can imagine, it was extremely frustrating for her, especially considering that this had been a mission she had been working on, and that she was convinced that she would win it.

This type of thing could be *completely* avoided with the game being run as a service. How? Simple: a forward thinking developer could state save the map every so often to the server, making reverting or transferring to a different computer a breeze. Battery runs dry? No problem, you're covered. Computer freezes then falls off of a bridge into a vat of HCl? You're game is waiting for you.

This is exactly how Google Docs works -- and it works very well. It's quick to get back up and running if there's a system failure, and your data is exactly as you left it. I certainly cannot say the same about the bloated behemoth aka Open Office, LibreOffice, or MS Office.

But it gets better.

Currently, neither my computer nor hers is capable of playing Starcraft II. It requires somewhat of a modern system (though modest hardware) and our laptops are showing their age; especially our graphics cards. It's a shame that the prospect of playing this game will cost at least $500 for the new system and the price of the software. This puts it out of reach, as the investment isn't a priority.

However, with Chrome OS, developers can very easily tailor game resources to match the power of the users computers. If a user has an Intel GMA and it's a 3D game, the server can push models that are guaranteed to run well on the rather slow GPU. However, if the user has the latest GeForce, the server can push higher resolution models, animations, physics, etc, to up the visual quality and more closely match the resources of a stronger system.

Even the *game* can be easier to get into, by offering the game opening cinematics, the first 3 levels for free, and then in-game payments to get the rest of the campaign. Updates and fixes are pushed directly to your system without installation, and all cinematic videos are streamed.

Multi-player would be trivial -- by nature the platform is connected.

Chrome OS as a casual game system is a godsend. The benefits are farther reach, and a much lower cost (not only money) to engage in new experiences. It also offers the possibility to alleviate some frustration associated with gaming today including system obsolescence or the rare case of instability.

For the web-developers out there: don't underestimate the power of the web-platform. I predict that it will swallow a large portion of traditional app distribution.

Another reason why open beats closed.

WebM project has included stereo-3D support, which is the foundation of the Youtube 3D content!
http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/05/...th-nvidia.html

As you know, WebM 3D (via youtube) is compatible with NVidia 3D Vision, the shutter glasses tech that they have. In fact, 3D support was added by Mozilla in collaboration with NVidia.

You can read about how to implement it here:
http://blogs.nvidia.com/2011/05/yout...-in-3d-vision/

Kudos to WebM, which is making tremendous strides for open video.

This is precisely why I champion WebP as a display format -- progress unencumbered by intellectual property. Beyond a lossy format with an alpha channel, neat features like stereo display, can be added to the codec, giving it capabilities beyond the stagnant JPEG.

I just tripped on this lovely site for Web GL beginners:

http://learningwebgl.com/blog/?page_id=1217
For those looking to get into 3D programming, why not try WegGL? If you have a modern browser, and a text editor, then you're good to go! It's a painless way to jump into a new world.

I'll take my Chrome on this machine please:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/30/a...-cpu-video-ha/
VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aLwBxaNDiA

This is clearly a knock-off of the macbook air design, but I'm not complaining! It's very, very sleek looking and promises even better specs. Check out the all metal keys! Very luxurious. I also bet that its going to be a fair bit cheaper than the Apple computer despite the higher specs.

Core i7 (assumed with intel graphics HD -- not bad at all)
17mm thin
USB 3
SSD built in (unknown size)

This makes the MBA look fat by comparison. Lets hope that it has a fat battery.

EDIT: It seems that Sony basically did the thin 'wedge' design as well as the chicklet keyboard 8 years ago with the 'Sony X505'... Perhaps it should be Sony suing Apple and Asus?

Hasnt that been there for a long time?
I was using it over a year ago, anyway.

Also, I wish HTML5 had a proper TCP/Sockets thing to use. I tried WebSocket with so many different websocket server stuff, after 4 hours I stopped trying.

Yes indeed. 3D has been in 'experimentation' for quite some time, but it has finally come out of beta. Also, nVidia 3D vision hardware support is a feature!

It sounds like your websocket APIs were a bit confusing to use, which is unfortunate. Websockets are plain ol TCP connections over port 80 (AFAIK) with a special handshake and some multiplexing to share the port with other requests!

This makes it non-trivial from a TCP standpoint, but hopefully better APIs come about that make using it easier. I would also assume that the very web-server would have to be upgraded to embody this type of functionality.

It seems I was right... Here's a page on Apache.org talking about a module offering web-socket support in their server:
http://activemq.apache.org/websockets.html

Web sockets are a very novel technology, with some pretty major implications to client-server communication. Like all new technologies they will be a bit awkward to use at first, but once you are comfortable with the tools, they will be an extension of your tool set.

It seems that NaCL is coming to ARM SoCs!

NaCL is a way of executing native code in the browser in a secure fashion. Up until recently, it was available for x86 processors only, and relied upon a virtualization instruction that wasn't present in current ARM CPUs. However, a kernel tweak, memory sandboxing, and a specific ARM implementation (relying upon the ARMv7-A eXecute Never bit on memory) opens the possibility of secure, full-speed ARM executables in the browser.
http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient...e/arm-overview

This is great timing considering that ARM is about to march into the notebook space, and both ChromeOS, Android, and MeeGo are the most likely candidates to lead the software charge. NaCl should work on all of them.

I'm just waiting for a high-speed java interpreter to make it to NaCl. Dalvik would be a wonderful candidate, extending the ability to have full-speed Java in the browser!

Yes, I am aware of Java applets, but this is a very different implementation that is likely to become mainstream (unlike applets), and offer the freedom to code in any language. It also promises hope to free us from the tyranny of Flash with a 100% OSS solution.

Win.

I was looking at the answer here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4...l-5-websockets

I tried with Socket IO-Node, jWebSocket, websockify, wsproxy and netty.

None of them ended up working for me, so no idea what the problem was.
Oh well, another problem for another thread.