Mike Brinker

full lit town

Here are a few screenies. Getting very bogged down in code right now. Not going as quick as I would like. I am really enjoying the artistic side of this, way more than the actual interactivity. Hopefully I can get out of that vein and into Lingo. As you can, probably too much time spent on the 3D side of things. Need to get crackin. Lots to do.

Director Interface

Town shot 1

Town shot 2

Town shot 3

three quarters no lights screen cap

three quarters rendered with lights

Other Directions...

Assignment: "Find related applications broader than medical paramedic emergency use."

Well...hmmmm....trying to think outside the box on this one. What other medical situations revolve around technology to aid human life? What about applications not relating to health? Such as...

Art? RFID sniper rifle. (Not real, but plays on the privacy issue) link via boingboing and nextbigthing

Navy? ACCCKKK they stole my thesis!

Cell Phone Security? Nokia to release a built in tag in phones.

Pervasive knowledge as fun? Phillips thinks so.

Okay, so my head is starting to hurt. How can I nail down what RFID really encompases and really provides us? Primarily, we are thinking identification, which leads to other things such as security and presence. Give RFID some information to hold, then what happens? We now have more data to sift through, more information. But that's not the point of this excercise.

Aha!

Good ol' intel is working on improving life from a tech standpoint.

So...Alzheimers is a disease that can affect memory. Memory can be affected with a good reminding tool. How about RFID? Watching grandma this closely could be...well...interesting...

Now a host of things pop up. Monitoring bone joints by placing a small RFID tag and reader on both bones of a joint and monitoring the distance between each. This could be a great way to help people go through rehab and monitor progress.

Whoa, let's back up a sec, how about things on a gene sized scale? Looks like PharmaSeq has an interesting approach. Tiny RFID chips that are powered by light! And when I say tiny, I'm talkin' 500 microns here. Wow.

Thesis (rough)

Heres the first draft for review. In PDF form of course.

Thesis Rough Draft

VoIP and the telco's

Happened to be cruising and found this article on the fate of telco's if this Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) ever gets off the ground. The company that I ran into before this little tidbit morsel is Glophone or VoiceGlo. With such a demand in the market for cell phones and portability, this idea of a phone over internet protocol doesn't seem to savvy for the future (at least to me anyway). Still, some very interesting situations arise from being able to dial any standard telephone number in the U.S. or Canada from your browser based phone. This sorta paints a funny picture in my mind, one that Todd dreamed up earlier. Imagine a man in a business suit walking to work, when he suddenly wips out his laptop and holds it to his face as if it were a flip cell phone..."hello?" Not too far off if you combine WiFi with VoIP! A side note for Tripp, if he is reading this....could this possibly solve your music problem over a phone for your mobile game you developed oh so long ago? Just curious!

THESIS_R

Not sure if the title is correct. Here are some very relevant links that have just popped up that directly concern my thesis.

Medical application for tracking patients - http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20040405005301&newsLang=en

The technology that made it possible from Alien technologies - http://www.alientechnology.com/02_products_p03.html

and the other company involved, idensys, and of course their site is down
http://www.idensys.net/

Microsoft jumps on the RFID bandwagon, trying to incorporate RFID software into windows platforms -
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2004/0405microeyes.html

BTX, PCI-E and DDR2

Yay for acronyms! Let's here it for my boyz! Anyway. The future of desktop computers as we know them is going to be rapidly changing in the next year. Intel is slated to be releaseing an interesting new set of standards that will change a lot of the current PC desktop form factors/standards/configurations (and who knows, maybe mac will follow suit later on). The following article at Tom's Hardware review has a lot to say about it, more tech than some can handle, but better than most of his rants. Overall, my feeling is one of caution.

PCI Express is a great jump in speed, but we haven't currently hit AGP 8x bandwidth limitations yet. Most of our current games and hardcore graphic intensive apps have barely begun to use the standard 128 megabytes of video memory dedicated to them, let alone the cards sporting 256 meg. This seems to be a bit of an overkill in the hardware realm, and more often than not, the newest tech seems to always have holes or problems. My biggest concern however is the new BTX form factor. It does sport better cooling considerations, but forces all the new computer cases and periphs to adhere to that standard. A different case size forces you to buy a different motherboard/a different motherboard size forces you to stick with the standard on the board for RAM and processor. Once you have those three, then you have to look at different PSU's, different exp. boards and essentially, you have a whole new PC from the ground up. It's like changing the chassis of your car. Everything sorta has to fit into it, and older stuff doesn't really play well with the new. PCI-X/PCI-E are going to be nightmarish at best, as there are different iterations of each as well as the fact that they each look exactly the same, except for the unobvious pin assignments. Same with DDR2. Looks close, but not the same. A big head ache I am not looking forward too. Feel free to respond after perusing the article, as it may not make much sense to the non-builder, but definitely an eye opener to those that tinker under the hood of their PC's.