peter nitsch.net

Yesterday my wife and I had an appointment for a 3D ultrasound. We wanted some better images of our new daughter, who we’re expecting in the fall, and this technology seemed like the best way. If you’re unfamiliar with 3D ultrasound, it’s essentially a machine which broadcasts the same ultrasonic waves used in a traditional 2D ultrasound but on multiple planes to simulate a 3D effect.

I thought it was super cool tech, but I could tell the nurse didn’t know how to respond to questions like “What formats can this thing export the spacial data?”. But really, playing around with 3D imagery of my unborn daughter is just too good an opportunity to pass-by. Luckily they gave us a CD of JPG’s.

Here’s an image from the set:

I thought this would be a great chance to play with the Pixel3D class Andy Zupko added to Papervision a while ago. It took some tweaking, but I like the end result.

View demo.

Alexey Gavrilov writes a great ‘Crash Course’ article on DevX.com highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of Silverlight, AIR, and JavaFX.

It’s official. An article published by the New York Times reveals Microsoft’s deployment strategy for Silverlight:

On Friday, a spokesman for Microsoft said that services that take advantage of the Web standards effort like Silverlight, a new system for displaying multimedia content via a Web browser that competes with Adobe’s Flash media player, would not be included in the first release of Windows Live, but would be added in the future.

It will be exciting to watch how Windows Live rolls out over the coming months with Microsoft and Google fighting over the cloud-computing space. It’s a solid deployment strategy, and one that hopefully forces Adobe to continue innovating. A little competition never hurt anyone. Then again, this is Microsoft we’re talking about.