3-D at Its Best

 

Welcome to March, everybody! I know it’s a couple days late, but March is great because it puts you that much closer to spring. And what’s so great about spring? It’s not winter. Snow is for old ladies who have no need to go outside and kids who enjoy sledding more than they enjoy being not cold. I’m not one of those kids. So, happy March, and here’s to warm weather!

 

Anyway, I’d like to direct your attention to the video at the top if you haven’t already looked at it. It’s a really cool concept, and I hope to see it in the future of gaming. If you absolutely refuse to watch the video (which I finally figured out how to embed!), then it’s basically about a cool little computer program this guy makes that changes the perspective of what’s on the TV screen based on where your head is located. He uses the Wii tracking technology to accomplish it, allowing anyone to experience this really cool 3-D effect by downloading the program off his website.

 

The concept looks really, really (gotta have two for emphasis) awesome. I mean, imagine applying this technology to video games. You want to peer around a corner to shoot the bad guys, you actually move your head to change your view. But I guess the Xbox Kinect could theoretically do that, too, if it actually had good games (although Sonic Free Riders looks pretty good; I’ve always been a fan of racing games). But anyway, the most exciting this about the “head tracking” is that it gives you the most realistic looking 3-D yet, and it doesn’t even need a special TV.

 

So, yes, the head tracking sounds all great and wonderful, but if you do apply it to video games, there is one thing I take issue with. It’s not that only one person can see it as 3-D–no, that can be fixed with a helpful setup called “split screen.” What I’m afraid of is wanting to play a really addictive game late at night and being too tired to move anything other than my fingers. You gamers know what I’m talking about. It’s 3 a.m., you’ve consumed more Mountain Dew than you’d like to admit, and you’ve been playing the best game in the world for the past 6 hours. There is no way you’re going to have enough energy to take a deep breath after a difficult boss, much less move the upper half of your body to look around a corner. I experienced something similar when playing Twilight Princess on the Wii. So many lost hearts that could have been avoided if only the attack command had been just a simple button…

3-D Food Printer

So I was listening to Rooster Teeth’s podcast yesterday (because my addiction to Rooster Teeth is so bad that I literally sit around listening to a group of people I’ve never met talk about what they’re going to eat for lunch), and I heard one of them mention that Cornell is developing a 3-D printer that prints food.

 

Yes, you read correctly: a food printer. It takes a homogeneous mixture (like soft chocolate) and spits it out of a moving funnel, creating (supposedly) edible foods like cookies, cakes, or even a ‘designer dome’ made from liquefied turkey meat. I have no idea what a designer dome is, but it’s made from turkey meet, which sounds pretty disgusting if you picture it coming out like frosting from a funnel.

 

People are saying “Oh! the possibilities are endless! We could print out any kind of food we want!” which I doubt is very accurate. Some things, when liquefied, just don’t go back to their normal state. But hey, what do I know? How could they possibly have any trouble printing, say, an ear of corn? With desserts, sure, maybe the possibilities really are endless, but fruits and vegetables might be a different story.

 

But what I want to know about this whole food printing thing is, when is the food fax machine coming out? The 3-D food printer uses blueprints of the food to create it, so why not send another printer the blueprints of what you want made? It would be awesome! “Oh crap, I forgot to make dinner. That’s okay! I’ll just email my 3-D food printer, and it’ll make dinner for me!”

 

Or how about all those times when you’re texting someone “im makking c00kiez!!!1″ (because we all text like that), and they go “i want sum!” even though they’re in the next state over, and you’re like “..how do I respond to that? ‘No you can’t have some’? Well now I’m a jerk.” With the 3-D food fax machine, you could say, “Sure! One liquefied cookie coming right up!” and waste all their food ink. Just be sure they don’t have it loaded with turkey meat, because that’s just gross.

 

Anyway, if you want to find out more about the food printer, here’s an article with some videos and words and stuff: http://www.switched.com/2011/01/24/3-d-printed-food-is-here/