Mobitrends

Finally got the Palm Pre SDK (hurray) and got to play with the emulator and write the first hello world, this device really looks promising and it’s so exciting to see Palm back in the business. For the record, my first handheld device was a Palm III in 1998, and since then Palm devices have progressively lost their appeal… But now it seems i cant’ wait for the Pre to reach us in Europe with its GSM version !
On the left a screenshot of the emulator with browser pointed to this blog.

That’s really big news, Flash 10 is coming for real on Android mobile phones. The HTC Hero will be the first one featuring a native Flash Player 10. I’m pretty anxious to see how it’s really going to come out, and especially hot the tons of flash content such as rich websites or casual games are going to adapt and feel like on a mobile. HTC Hero is due July 15th.
Check out the video below to see the official Adobe announce.

This is also big news as it waves goodbye to the Flash Lite initiative Adobe kinda failed at delivering (outside of Japan at least) which was supposed to be a mobilized and light version of Flash. Now they seem to be willing to focus on providing native deep integration of their player within their OS. How it’s going to impact application development is yet another question but if they can bring the Air framework along this is really going to change the face of the market…
Last but not least, it’s now official, Android gets multitouch!

Pretty cool device spotted by Axel, as usual the use of natural interactions and a cool device really bring a lot to the gameplay and the engagement. As you can see committing yourself to the game with such setup is just one frag away!

PC VR Game Gun
par gamecorner_tv

30Mbps down, 23up…. amazing scores ! Can someone get me fiber in Neuilly please ?
I’m so curious about the new use cases this kind of speed is bringing in – for instance time-machine-on-the-cloud just starts to make a lot of sense, and I wouldn’t have to worry anymore about crappy usb drives dying…
Also Second Life might get smooth, would love to see that happening – same for streamed or downloaded-on-the-fly games such as OnLive, QuakeLive or Unity’s…

I’ve been a pretty big fan of Second Life since its release. Have had a sim that we used at WaveStorm for demo purposes, vr-wear developed mods to the SL viewer with unique head facial analysis abilities and I am an active contributor to Erica Driver’s Thinkbalm focus group on the professional use of immersive Internet.
Although I’m obviously a virtual worlds enthusiast, I feel the change of management and objectives at Linden Labs destroyed the dynamism of the community surrounding the project.
Indeed, SL is definitely a work in progress, we all know that, and the full virtual world thing is only at its premises, as such the community has alway been very supportive on the efforts made by LL in delivering the vision and developing the use cases. Nevertheless, since LL changed management, the whole system has been stalling pretty badly, and when a system stops evolving its defects start being really annoying. For instance the clumsiness of the viewer, the lack of shaders, the poorness of the environment, the lack of goals and the little life in there just cream out loud “I’m a useless proof of concept”. And while I’ve been quite a lot in touch with active developers and builders, most of them are leaving the arena as time goes because the whole world is just not going forward anymore.

Linden Labs, it’s time to react fast and give a new pulse to this initiative or it will get buried and dead for the end users…

ARhrrrr is a very impressive augmented reality shooter game created at Georgia Tech Augmented Environments Lab and Savannah College of Art and Design, (SCAD- Atlanta), and produced on the NVidia Tegra devkits which are used as demonstration purposes for next-gen portable graphics platforms.
This gives out a pretty funny and interactive game experience!

Pretty amazing experimentation by Peter Molyneux’s Lionhead where you can better grasp the implication of natural interfaces such as the “Natal” camera interface pushed by Microsoft.
Here you can see a seamless (and controller-less) interaction between the player, Claire and Milo, a game character, and see Claire being drawn to this little boy’s virtual space.
In my opinion natural interactions and immersion are about to be profoundly changed with those technologies and others such as wearable computing, sensors, immersive headsets…
And all those technologies are here for a sole and simple purpose, breaking the glass between the gamer and the game.

After the announces of OnLive and David Perry’s Gaikai, there seem to be another player in the game called OTOY. Techcrunch got the opportunity to test-drive an alpha of the service and let’s face it it’s stunningly realistic in terms of playability.

Spotted at Computex 2009 on Asus booth, a really amazing surface-like experience ! can’t wait to have my desk augmented that way.

Some of you might already know it but I joined Steek to lead the Mobile division. While most of our work at Steek is still under the radar, I wanted to show you a sneak peek of something we have been working on for a few weeks : the “Steek Mobile Share” on Blackberry.
Check out the official blog post and a couple of pics showing how easy and secure we can make mobile sharing be.