Darkwind Media Blog

We have had quite the few months at Darkwind Media. I’ll have to put this in list form to keep my thoughts straight.

• Luster has moved onto a stable release cycle, with 0.6 the current version. 0.7 is due out very soon.
• Several businesses around Rochester have agreed to be a part of our closed beta. We are talking to more as time goes on to gather more users.
• Several projects are using Luster as the platform for their 3D applications.
• Immersive environment exploration is an application which runs in a large projected environment which totally encompasses the user. This project is making a 3D exploration of the solar system. The rendered image will wrap around giving a 360 view of your surroundings as you navigate freely using Wii remotes.
• Virtual theater is a grand project seeking to meld real actors, real crews, real audiences with virtual environments and actors. The project will use Luster to create a distributed theatrical performance where motion captured actors allow distributed audiences to experience rich and high-quality theater anywhere in the world.
• DIRS is a visualization project which allows analysts to view aerial data in multiple spectrums at high resolutions. The renderer can also create 3D images by analyzing the flat 2D data. Luster is being used to create a real-time viewing experience for this generated data. This allows human analyzers to move around in 3D space in real-time

We’re also preparing an all-new version of HVP, which will sport a 3D media browser, and a completely reworked navigation system as well as look-and-feel. New demos have also been created including a standard box physics demo, as well as a facial animation demo. Videos and picks will be coming shortly!