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Ken Rigby

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Jo Ithaca commented on Ken Rigby (MellaniuM, Tele3dworld)'s blog post 'MellaniuM Apartments:the way in'May 4

Ithaca Rentals and Renovations, Inc. is owned and operated by Travis & Travis Real Estate Development located on 323 North Tioga Street in the beautiful downtown Ithaca. ithaca-rentals

Profile Information

Hometown:: Preston (Home of the Automaton)

Current Location:: England (Land of Angels)

My Involvement With Serious Games:: company, other

Current Employer and Position:: Tele3Dworld; Founder, CEO and Technical Director MellaniuM ltd

Website1:: http://mellanium.com

Website2:: http://mellanium.co.uk

Website3:: http://dotvidi.com

About My Involvement With Serious Games:: Involved in producing Virtual Real Worlds for Tele3DWorld and MellaniuM Designs. Using the Unreal 3D Engines.

See http://mellanium.co.uk and http://mellanium.com

About Me:: Ken Rigby spent his previous life as a real-time system software designer in the aerospace industries in Europe and the USA; Specializing in safety critical systems and simulations with reference to systems engineering standards (ISO) for software. For the past three years Ken has Researched and Developed the performance envelope for 3D virtual real world applications; preparing over eighty (to date) articles on the subject. Ken is part of Team MellaniuM™ and Tele3DWorld who comprise of an enthusiastic group of domain experts dedicated to using the latest technology in communications, design, working practices, methodologies, and Standardization, to produce revolutionary 3D environments for the 21st Century which can be used in many applications such as advertising, marketing, medicine, architecture, engineering, education, management, safety, and many more domains.

Favorite Music:: Trance, Beatles, Stones, Wagner

Favorite TV Shows:: Simpsons, Have I got News For You, Dads Army,

Favorite Films:: Matrix, spaghetti westerns, 50's War of the Worlds,

Good Sites

http://mellanium13.blogspot.com/

http://3dwebcommunity.ning.com/profile/Ken

http://mellanium13.blogspot.com/

http://seriousgames.ning.com/video/elounge-by-nortel

Mellanium.co.uk

http://seriousgamesportal.blogspot.com/2008_12_01_archive.html

Second Life vs UT2004

CAVEUT at UCLAN

Association Of Virtual Worlds

http://www.koinup.com/Tele3dworld/works/coolest/

http://elianealhadeff.blogspot.com/2008/01/mellanium-when-reality-feels-like.html

http://www.virtualworldsconnect.com/profiles/blog/show?id=1131819%3ABlogPost%3A34424

http://seriousgames.ning.com/profiles/blog/show?id=630751%3ABlogPost%3A26315

http://www.koinup.com/Tele3dworld/works/

http://houstonsgc.ning.com/profile/Ken

http://elianealhadeff.blogspot.com/2007/10/mellanium-serious-games-widening-your.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0shcqpXXQo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDJB0Me96No

http://www.virtualworldsconnect.com/profile/Tele3DWorld

MellaniuM's Private Virtual Worlds:

http://elianealhadeff.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html

Ken Rigby (MellaniuM, Tele3dworld)'s Photos

Ken Rigby (MellaniuM, Tele3dworld)'s Videos

MellaniuM Furnace VR environment

Added by Ken Rigby (MellaniuM, Tele3dworld)
Added by Ken Rigby (MellaniuM, Tele3dworld)
HWANODE Refactory from MellaniuM

Added by Ken Rigby (MellaniuM, Tele3dworld)

Ken Rigby (MellaniuM, Tele3dworld)'s Blog

MellaniuM defines Furnaces for HW.

Visit the next generation VR at:

http://furnace.projectchainsaw.com/… Continue

Posted on June 25, 2009 at 6:00pm —

Hang out the Old Shoe Horn

http://archsl.wordpress.c… Continue

Posted on February 28, 2009 at 9:30am —

Come Visit the Apartment

Caleb Booker blogs about the MellaniuM Apartments
http://www.calebbooker.com/blog/

Posted on February 26, 2009 at 11:00pm —

Checking out: MellaniuM Apartment

http://www.skribeproductions.com/2009/02/26/checking-out-mellaniums-apartment/

Posted on February 26, 2009 at 3:02pm —

MellaniuM Apartments:the way in

http://ec11.projectchainsaw.com/Apartments-1.0beta.82.0-b0/index.html… Continue

Posted on February 21, 2009 at 7:00pm — 1 Comment

MELLANIUM Apartments

Find more videos like this on Serious Games - The Serious Games Networking Portal

Link for viewing now available: http://ec11.projectchainsaw.com/Apartments-1.0beta.82.0-b0/index.html

Say Goodbye to "blah, blah, blah" and "Mumbo Jumbo" Worlds… Continue

Posted on February 20, 2009 at 11:00pm —

MellaniuM and the eLounge Experience.

Experience a truly virtual 3D on-line shopping experience. Ask your friends to join you, and together explore and learn about displayed products. It is similar to shopping in a retail store except you are on-line and in control of your real time interactive shopping experience.

* Create your own personal avatar
* Browse and interact with our virtual products
* Walk around and share your experience with customers from around the globe
* Get support from one of our virtual avatar product speciali… Continue

Posted on February 16, 2009 at 10:56am —

NORTEL creates a Virtual New World Order

THe Lenovo eLounge heralds the new Virtual World Order.

Try it and see:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gracemcdunnough/3191058963/

MellaniuM

Posted on January 26, 2009 at 5:58pm —

NORTEL creates a Windows socket for the UNREAL Engine

The new kid on the Virtual World block

http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPortal/en_US/special-offers.workflow:ShowPromo?LandingPage=/All/US/Sitelets/eLounge/welcome&ipromoID=wna00408&

Experience the WEB 3.0 now.

MELLANIUM

Posted on January 15, 2009 at 11:00am —

Bye Bye Web 2.0; Hello Web 3.0

http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2009/01/nortel-licenses-unreal-engine-for-webalive-opening-up-to-development-community.html

3D, virtual reality and metaverses are the must-have tools for companies looking to enhance their levels of performance. Internally, they can harness the pooled intelligence of the employees for a whole array of activities: brainstor

… Continue

Posted on January 14, 2009 at 9:00am —

Architects finally realise the 3D game engine potential

As predicted by MellaniuM

http://archsl.wordpress.com/2008/12/31/autodesk-set-to-launch-a-real-time-immersive-game-engine-for-architects/

Serious games get serious

Posted on January 3, 2009 at 12:30pm —

MellaniuM Scans the Real World

Scan Real-World 3D Objects Into Unreal
MellaniuM’s hive of innovation continues to boggle the mind. Above is a highly detailed scan of a Chinese mask, created using the VIUSCAN (a hand-held device is capable of scanning objects as big as a car) from CREAFORM3D and imported… Continue

Posted on December 9, 2008 at 1:47pm —

MellaniuM reconstructing the CASINO at Ghent using .ifc files and BIM data.

Mellanium are busy constructing a 3D Virtual Environment that will allow over 30 users to explore the reconstructed Ghent Casino from .ifc files obtained from Ghent University.
We are working with Ghent university to import the BIM data into the models to demonstrate the usability and sustainability can be offered to the architecture sectors.

Send us your textures and their huddled meshes and will will breathe life in the environment for you to explore.

Innovation; using 3D to 3D is the new… Continue

Posted on November 16, 2008 at 6:00pm —

MellaniuM Business Cards and web page

New MELLANIUM W… Continue

Posted on October 16, 2008 at 4:31pm —

Business in Virtual Worlds News Roundup - Aug 25-31 2008

Business in Virtual Worlds News Roundup - Aug 25-31 2008

Headlines about virtual worlds just from the past week.

This is week three and I’m a day late. Sorry about that folks - long weekend up here. Turns out it’s a pretty slow newsweek - shortest one of these yet I think.

Also this week I’ve begun to include stuff that is seriously old news but is being reported as cutting-edge headli… Continue

Posted on September 1, 2008 at 9:30pm —

MellaniuM at the Danish Virtual Worlds workshop.

Mellanium

Danish Virtual Worlds Workshop

Interview with Joe Rigby (from Canada), the Marketing Manager of MellaniuM Ltd which is based in Preston,… Continue

Posted on August 31, 2008 at 3:00pm —

MellaniuM pioneers Stereoscopic Projector VRWs

… Continue

Posted on August 31, 2008 at 11:09am —

MELLANIUM CAVEUT WORKSHOP AT UCLAN

MELLANIUM CAVEUT WORKSHOP AT UCLAN

In collaboration with ADSIP (Applied Digital Signal and Image Processing Research Centre) at the University of Central Lancashire, Preston UK MellaniuM has successfully employed the CAVEUT software ( kindly supplied and supported by Jeffrey Jacobson of PublicVR) with their realistic, virtual environments. The potential applications for a combination of high polygon, accurately dimensioned modelling with scaled photorealistic textures could be enormous i… Continue

Posted on August 31, 2008 at 11:03am —

MellaniuM: Virtual Reality, History, and Digital Heritage Listen to this article.

Powered by Odiogo.com

http://interactivemultimediatechnology.blogspot.com/2008/08/mellanium-virtual-reality-history-and.html

Posted on August 22, 2008 at 10:39pm —

MellaniuM: Virtual Reality, History, and Digital Heritage

aturday, August 16, 2008
MellaniuM: Virtual Reality, History, and Digital Heritage
Listen to this article. Powered by Odiogo.com

The image “http://artscool.cfa.cmu.edu:16080/~hemef/pompeii/images/vtd_side_3.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Joe Rigby, from MellaniuM, focuses on the use of interactive virtual reality technology to create environments that support the learning of history. Thi… Continue

Posted on August 19, 2008 at 10:00pm —

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At 3:20am on January 18, 2008, Farnham Farrjones said…: Thanks, I keep finding new networking widgets. Another I found today was Scientific American, a magazine I grew up with, now has a 2.0 community. Wow! See http://science-community.sciam.com/index.jspa

At 1:25pm on December 15, 2007, Ken Rigby (MellaniuM, Tele3dworld) said…: The Latest from Mellanium
Filed under: Animation, Machinima — overman @ 11:07 am

Joe Rigby of Mellanium (previously talked about here) gave me a guided tour of their product recently. There are many things to be excited about with this technology, but one of the most significant breakthroughs is with regard to the quality of 3d models. Since its inception, real-time 3d rendering’s trade-off has been low poly models - a necessary evil which is ever so slowly becoming less of an issue. (See Mass Effect, UT3). Finding ways around this limitation has been a bit of a holy grail for machinima in some circles.

Mellanium’s modification of the game environment allows the introduction of Autocad-quality (very high detail) 3d models into the UT2004 engine, while still keeping performance speeds / client machine specs very reasonable (i.e. close to the specs already required to run that game).

During the walkthrough, I got to see highly detailed player models, exquisite Autocad props, and all within the kind of large open environments Unreal has always been so good at rendering; I noticed no lag. The video below shows the kind of detail I’m talking about. If they can do this in UT2004… imagine what they’ll be able to do in UT3 if they port their tools over there?

My Zimbio

At 6:56pm on October 6, 2007, Ken Rigby (MellaniuM, Tele3dworld) said…: Find more photos like this on Virtual Worlds Connect

At 7:41pm on October 1, 2007, Ken Rigby (MellaniuM, Tele3dworld) said…: Are we Serious about Serious Games? SL is like BASIC was to programming in the 80’s; a good introduction; but totally useless as a serious programming language.

We need a professional 3D engine to be serious about creating 3D environments that will educate and entertain in the future.

Real-Time Films, realism in experience, animations to WOW, and simulations that are as near to the real thing as possible.

We need projects like; recreating putting a man on the moon: using Saturn and LEM Full size objects with all the physics and details to provide reality.

At 7:03pm on September 28, 2007, Ken Rigby (MellaniuM, Tele3dworld) said…: MellaniuM Puts Second Life In Skype
By Caleb Booker - Posted on September 29th, 2007
Tagged: second life • skype

Today I met with Joe Rigby, co-owner of a very young startup called MellaniuM. His company is in the process of experimenting with two things: video streaming from 3D environments, and finding new ways to use custom virtual worlds for business applications. He's already had some impressive successes.

We started off in Skype voice chat, but then he met me in Second Life at the same time. Using tools his company haven't even named yet, he was able to broadcast video of our avatars meeting through Skype. (Click the picture for full-size.) They still consider it technology in the pre-alpha stage, and won't feel like it's ready for consumers until they have it running in much higher detail. Even at the low resolution, being "in" Second Life through Skype and, in addition, seeing myself through multiple camera angles at once was a pretty impressive experience.

This was, of course, just the beginning. He switched from Second Life to a custom environment they had built with the Unreal 2 engine and again, streamed it right through Skype. The great part about using an engine like this one was that they were able to import high-detail AutoCAD files and make them look extremely realistic. Soon I was watching a high-quality alien avatar from Mars Attacks! exploring the environment in real-time. Below is a video of the world he had walked me through that they apparently built over the course of a few days.

Recently Rigby showcased the technology at the Copper/Cobre Conference. All of the other presenters went up and showed PowerPoint presentations. Rather than show a series of AutoCAD sketches, he plugged his laptop into the projector and walked the crowd through a 3D rendering. A copper smelter in the U.S. retained him to create a "virtual furnace" that not only showed the schematics in high resolution, but had walls lined with photographs of how everything is supposed to look as you assemble the machine. Not only that, but you can actually enter the furnace itself and (through color coding) see how everything is supposed to fit together.

Even though his company has already been retained by a few engineering firms for more work, Rigby sees more applications for high-resolution custom worlds. He's currently in touch with several galleries in London to create scale models of the buildings with high resolution art renderings inside. People could download them for a token fee (maybe five dollars) and collect them over time as the gallery updates itself with new exhibits. Also, since "Unreal 2" is a server-based platform, you could walk around these little worlds with your friends.

MellaniuM has only been experimenting with the possibilities since September of last year and has already shown some great innovations. If they keep up this pace they'll be the ones to watch in the future.

At 2:43pm on September 27, 2007, Ken Rigby (MellaniuM, Tele3dworld) said…: Find more videos like this on Serious Games

At 5:24pm on September 24, 2007, Ken Rigby (MellaniuM, Tele3dworld) said…: Tele3D-immersive Worlds

Tele3DWorld-Immersion is a new medium that enables users to share a virtual 3D environment with remote users or participants. The participant is tele-immersed in a 3D virtual real world with other users depicted as avatars (manifestations of your choosing). Users can be physically anywhere in the world. Each Virtual World contains hi-res simulation of the real world with characters, objects and is fully surround sound. This media for human interaction is enabled by 3D digital technology, and approximates the illusion that a person is in the same physical environment as others, even though they may be thousands of miles distant. It combines the display and interaction techniques of virtual reality with new computer-vision and tracking technologies such as Head Mounted Displays fitted with gyros and accelerometers. Thus with the aid of this new technology, users at geographically distributed sites can collaborate and experience in real time a shared, simulated, virtual real environment submerging in one another's presence and feel as if they are sharing the same physical space.

This is the ultimate synthesis of 3D media technologies:

* 3D environment scanning;

* projective and display technologies;

* haptic feedback;

* tracking technologies;

* audio technologies;

The considerable requirements for Tele3DWorld-immersion system, has made it one of the most challenging internet applications.

In a Tele3DWorld-immersive environment computers can recognize the presence and movements of individuals and objects, track those individuals, and 3D Objects, and then permit them to be projected in realistic, multiple, geographically distributed immersive environments on stereo-immersive surfaces or a 3D Virtual Real World TV. This requires sampling and resynthesis of the physical environment as well as the users' avatar, which is a new challenge that has moved the range of emerging technologies, such as scene depth extraction and warp rendering, to the next level. Additionally AI robots (bots) can provide assistance to the immersed users.

Tele-immersive 3D environments therefore facilitate not only interaction between users themselves but also between users and computer generated models and simulations. This has required expanding the boundaries of computer stereo-vision, tracking, display, audio, and rendering technologies. As a result, all of this will enable users to achieve a compelling and compulsive experience and lays the groundwork for a higher degree of their inclusion into the entire system simulation.

Tele-immersive systems will significantly change educational, scientific, architectural, developmental, and manufacturing paradigms. They will show their full strength in the systems where having 3D reconstructed 'real' objects coupled with 3D virtual objects is crucial for the successful fulfilment of the tasks. It may also be the case that some tasks would not be possible to complete without having such combination of sensory information. There are several applications that will profit from tele-immersive systems. Collaborative mechanical, architectural CAD applications as well as different medical applications are two that will benefit significantly.

Tele-immersion may sound like conventional video conferencing. But it is much, much, more. Where video conferencing delivers flat images to a screen, tele-immersion recreates an entire remote 3D environment with true perspective. Although not so, tele-immersion may seem like another kind of virtual reality. Virtual reality allows people to move around in a pre-programmed representation of a 3D environment, whereas tele-immersion is measuring or simulating the real world and conveying the results to the sensory system.

For more information : see http://www.mellanium.com or SKYPE joe133952 http://skype:joe133952

Copyright (c) Ken Rigby for MellaniuM design and Tele3DWorld.

All Rights Reserved. 2006

At 11:30am on September 23, 2007, Ken Rigby (MellaniuM, Tele3dworld) said…: Find more videos like this on Serious Games

At 4:20pm on September 22, 2007, AC said…: Response to your comments about Second Life and similar virtual worlds.

I really believe the markets for 3D worlds will be large and diverse enough to require multiple technological approaches.

There will be no 3D equivalent to the World Wide Web that wiil take over from the web. The web is a platform to collaboratively share and update rich media 'documents' (like this page). There will always be a need for this. 3D will not replace 2D web pages that contain text, images, video and increasingly live streams form within 3D worlds.

As for whether the server side or client side is the future of 3D worlds,l I think both approaches work well. If speed and visual quality are the most important considerations then a technology like Unreal is a great solution. However games engines like Unreal are not good at creating simulations of the world that involve collaboration between people.

e.g. In the future a construction company may want to simulate a building site. Everyone has to see the same building as it's being built, they need to see new machines as they are introduced. Maybe an admin will want to 'undo' changes to the building. Basically the more collaboration and changes to things the more complex the server must be.

Just look at how the Web has changed application software, due to the demand for collaboration. Microsoft Word is great but increasingly people are using Google documents because of the ability to collaborate on documents from any computer, for free, with no software to download or install. There are big advantages in having big complex servers and thin clients.