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Big Stage Adds Cool 3D Avatars to Skype
Big Stage today announced that their popular 3D avatars based on pictures of your own face now works on Skype with their new Skype Add-on. It’s similar in concept to JibJab, perhaps the most popular site to feature animated avatars based on your own face. However, Big Stage goes one step further with technology that lets you move, change expressions, and more. I downloaded the beta to check it out. Here’s their demo video, but I hope to include one of myself soon:
QT_WriteOBJECT(’http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/videos/BlabberForSkype.mov’, ‘200%’,'195%’, ”, ‘autoplay’, ‘true’, ‘bgcolor’, ‘black’, ’scale’, ‘aspect’);
Others trying to make 3D avatars popular include Gizmoz and Kloonies. Gizmoz also uses your own digital photo to create an avatar based on your own face, but according to Big State, it falls short compared to their technology. They use three photos to make a more accurate 3D representation of your face, where as Gizmos only uses one. Kloonies is a different model all together sine they use cartoonist 3D avatars that you pick from a list.
Pretty cool stuff! As I was quoted in the press release they put out:
“Blabber’s advanced facial modeling and real-time animation makes voice over IP lots of fun,” said Tom Keating, CTO, VP, Founder of TMC Labs. “It’s a compelling example of the role the animated digital version of people will play as ever more advanced virtual world capabilities converge with voice and video in the connected online world.”
“Through the launch of a Big Stage-enabled Skype plug-in, we’re extending our advanced 3-D avatar technology into the realm of real-time expressive communications and further advancing our goal of projecting ’self’ into digital life.” said Big Stage CEO Phil Ressler. “The estimated 450 million people using Skype can have fun speaking as an ultra cool version of themselves instead of using chat, or substitute Blabber for video when for any reason they aren’t ready to face their web-cam or need to conserve bandwidth. Blabber debuts our voice-sync engine, which we intend to leverage as we extend a similar capability into video games, virtual worlds, virtual conferencing, and social networks like Facebook.”
You can download the Skype add-on here.
Tags: 3d, avatar, big stage, skype, voip
Related tags: avatars based, skype, stage, avatars, video, technology
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What Startups in Amazon’s Ecosystem Should Learn From VMware
Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is orders of magnitude bigger than its next largest Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) competitor. At first glance, this would seem to imply that Amazon’s massive scale should give AWS a significant cost advantage over fledgling IaaS cloud offerings. But the advantage Amazon gains from its scale is not necessarily […]
How Technology Won the Presidency, Pt. II
I explained yesterday how the Obama campaign utilized data integration techniques to realize a distinct advantage in targeting voters. However, all that data wouldn’t have meant anything without the technologies to process it and disseminate it. Obama’s team excelled here, too, utilizing the latest technological advances and trends to do on the cheap what, just […]
How Technology Won the Presidency, Part I
Command of the issues, cool confidence and disarming smile aside, Barack Obama might just owe his campaign’s success to his team’s ability to harness the technology at their fingertips. Social networking, broadband and data management all played huge roles in making the Obama campaign the most personalized presidential campaign ever. I learned just how big […]
String 24 SSDs together for 6TB & 2GB/s throughput!
What happens when you string together 24 256GB Samsung MLC SSDs - you get 6TB of storage and 2GB/sec throughput. Sweet mother of —!
Discovered the news on Lucas Mearian’s Computer World blog who writes:
When you’ve got millions of dollars at your disposal, and access to some of the industry’s best hardware engineers, what do you do? Well, if you’re Samsung you make a YouTube video showing the speed, capacity and reliability you can get by stringing together 24 solid state disk drives behind a RAID controller to create “the world’s most powerful consumer computer”. The result: 6TB of storage and 2GB/sec throughput that is able to load 53 programs 18 seconds. Whoa.
The video below shows the 24 SSDs setup along with some interesting benchmarks. For instance, in the video they rip a 700MB DVD in 0.8s, open all of Microsoft Office apps in 0.5s, and launch 53 programs in 18.09s! At $500 a pop per SSD, it’ll cost you $12,000 for ludicrously fast hard drive speeds! Of course, I remember writing about Samsung’s Super Fast SATA hard drive in 2004, which featured 3Gb/s speed using traditional HDD technology, which is cheaper than SSDs. Of course, it’s 3Gb/s (3 Gigabits per second) not 3GB/s (3 Gigabytes per second), so you’d have to divide that by 8 bits per byte or 0.375 GB/s or 375MB/s. That’s odd - that’s faster than the 220MB/s random access speed of each individual SSD (aggregate is 24 x 220MB/s). I thought SSDs were generally faster than hard drives? Something must be off in my math. Actually, just read that the 3GB/s is the speed of the I/O channel. The read speed is 1.5GB/s or 0.156 GB/s, which is 156MB/s . Now that sounds more accurate!
And then of course, there’s perpendicular hard drive technology, which is a new way of “squeezing” more bits onto a hard drive by changing the orientation of the way the bits are recorded. Normally magnetic bits are written parallel to the drive’s surface, but not with perpendicularity - its 90 degrees perpendicular to the normal parallel orientation. Because the bits are recorded upright and “into” the surface of the drive platter, you can squeeze a lot more bits together without the bits polarity causing the bits to flip their magnetic orientation. Check out my blog post where a classic School House Rock video makes an appearance along with a hilarious Hitachi video on perpendicular HDD technology.
Anyway, here’s the 24 SSD RAID video:
Tags: computerworld, hard drive, hdd, Lucas Mearian, perpendicular hard drive, samsung, sata, SSD
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Should Google Be Added to the Dow?
A provocative story from Reuters Monday ruminated on which companies are likely to replace Citigroup and General Motors in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Its conclusion: Google and Cisco are the most likely contenders, with Apple and Visa as less likely candidates. It’s a safe bet that those two troubled companies — trading below $2 a share — will get the boot, but does Google belong in the Dow? I think it does for a few reasons.
Should Google Be Added to the Dow?
A provocative story from Reuters Monday ruminated on which companies are likely to replace Citigroup and General Motors in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Its conclusion: Google and Cisco are the most likely contenders, with Apple and Visa as less likely candidates. It’s a safe bet that those two troubled companies — trading below $2 a share — will get the boot, but does Google belong in the Dow? I think it does for a few reasons.
Should Google Be Added to the Dow?
A provocative story from Reuters Monday ruminated on which companies are likely to replace Citigroup and General Motors in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Its conclusion: Google and Cisco are the most likely contenders, with Apple and Visa as less likely candidates. It’s a safe bet that those two troubled companies — trading below $2 a share — will get the boot, but does Google belong in the Dow? I think it does for a few reasons.
Twofish Elements Helps Developers Price Virtual Goods for Fun and Profit
Happening upon virtual items for sale in the games you play is now as common as a dentist handing you a new toothbrush after each visit. It is expected that online games will hawk some form of virtual wares to players.
But most social and casual game makers are carelessly tossing virtual swords and daggers into […]
Why T-Mobile’s BlackBerry Curve 8900 is Worth Buying
It’s been almost a month since I broke up with my iPhone and switched to the new T-Mobile BlackBerry Curve 8900. And while I sometimes yearn for my iPhone’s awesome sleekness and its admirable browser, the new BlackBerry Curve is proving to be a worthy and admirable replacement. Instead of boring you with details about the innards of the device, let me stay focused on what matters most to typical BlackBerry owners: usability. 
Facebook Was Made for the iPhone
It’s been about five days since I ditched my iPhone and made the BlackBerry Curve 8900 my primary device. There are many things I miss about the iPhone, such as surfing the Internet with a full-blown browser. More importantly, I miss Facebook Mobile. And I am missing it even more on the road, since I’m […]
Satellite Collision Means Tiny Outages
The collision of a decommissioned Russian military satellite with one of Iridium’s birds on Tuesday will likely have few affects beyond twice-daily outages of about 5-9 minutes until another satellite fills the hole in the satellite constellation. According to Tim Farrar, an analyst at TMF Associates who covers the commercial satellite industry, Iridium has a […]
The Standalone Kindle Won’t Stand Alone for Long
Amazon unleashed its second-generation Kindle device as expected today, and it doesn’t fail to please in the looks and specs department. There’s seven times more memory, advanced eInk capabilities for 16-color grayscale and faster page refreshing, plus an updated design that addresses some of the original Kindle’s shortcomings. The device even reads text aloud. You […]
A Brief History of Twitter
Dom Sagolla, formerly of Odeo Corp., corporate predecessor of Obvious Corp., the company behind Twitter tells the story of the micro-messaging service that has caught the imagination of everyone from from tech mommies to cable news networks, sports stars and Hollywood stars. It has become a source of breaking news and rumors. It is the […]
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