If you had to boil down Autodesk‘s business to a few simple words, it might be “helping people create new realities”—whether that means constructing new objects or structures first envisioned on the company’s computer-aided design (CAD) programs or generating new Avatar-like movie worlds using its modeling and animation software. But increasingly, the first step in the process of modeling a new product or environment is capturing an existing reality, then building on it. And a new cloud service hatched by Autodesk Labs, the company’s San Rafael, CA-based experimental design group, helps professionals and amateurs alike do exactly that, by synthesizing eerily accurate 3D computer models of almost any object or space from a few dozen conventional photographs.

Released in early November as an official Autodesk (NASDAQ: ADSK) beta product, the service is called 123D Catch, reflecting its place in a growing family of amateur-accessible design tools under the 123D brand. It uses a technique called photogrammetry to identify common features in a series of photos snapped from multiple angles. From those reference points, Autodesk’s servers can recreate the scene as a 3D mesh, like the model of my head shown below. The 3D models can then be modified using simple CAD programs like 123D, or even printed out and reassembled as real world sculptures using yet another Autodesk program, 123D Make.

It’s pretty amazing stuff for anyone who has a bit of maker in them. Until recently, building detailed photogrammetric models of everyday objects wasn’t possible without a battery of expensive laser scanners. But 123D Catch is just part of Autodesk’s larger plan to reach beyond its traditional audience of professional architects and designers with tools that can help advanced amateurs create, explore, and build their own 3D objects. And it’s a first step toward a future world where small-scale custom design and manufacturing may be widespread—and where Autodesk hopes to stake a big claim.

The “things industry” is gradually going the way of Netflix, argues Autodesk Labs vice president Brian Mathews. “We used to use money to buy things—shoes, glasses—but now we will effectively buy ideas,” Mathews says. “That is our prediction.”

And since the ideas will be digital, it will be easy to tweak them to our own tastes before they’re brought to life. Autodesk describes this as the “scan/modify/print” worldview. “In the music industry, people rip songs and deejays put them together in new ways,” Mathews observes. “That is also going to happen with the things industry. We’ve got the ability to modify things with 123D and do 3D printing with 123D Make. But what we haven’t shown is the scan part, and that’s what [123D Catch] is one aspect of—bringing laser scanning down to the consumer level.”

Autodesk first shared a preview version of 123D Catch under the code name Photofly in early 2010. I visited Mathews at Autodesk’s San Francisco offices this fall to learn more about Autodesk Labs, and we ended up focusing on Photofly as a soup-to-nuts illustration of the group’s mission and working pattern. “Everyone [at Autodesk] is inventing and improving, but an invention is not an innovation,” Mathews says. “An innovation has to be more in the practical realm; it has to work. We make real-world prototypes instead of research stuff, and our key differentiating feature is that we involve our customers. When we have something really new like Photofly, we are involving the customers in the R&D process from the beginning.”

Indeed, makers using early versions of Photofly have come up with some pretty stunning creations. One of the most impressive is this music video from the Brisbane, Australia-based electronic-pop band Hunz; it’s populated by haunting Photofly models of lead singer-composer-programmer Hans Van Vliet. But users have also employed Photofly to model more mundane scenes, from archaeological digs to ratty jogging shoes.

Photogrammetry—the process of measuring objects from their images—is a science that dates back nearly to the invention of photography in the mid-1800s. But it’s gotten a huge boost in the last decade from the introduction of digital photography and … Next Page »

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Barry Sandrew, whose imaging expertise as a Harvard neuroscientist led him to a mid-life career change in Hollywood, tells me the company he founded in San Diego remains on course with a 700 percent growth rate over the past year.

As I reported in May, Sandrew founded San Diego-based Legend Films in 2001 as a digital movie colorization lab. But Hollywood’s passionate rush to embrace 3D filmmaking transformed Legend Films from a behind-the-scenes colorization lab into a renamed company—Legend3D. And Legend3D is now viewed as one of the film industry’s leading specialty houses for digital 3D conversion of feature films. In fact, “except for one client, we have pretty much stopped our colorization work to concentrate on 3D,” Sandrew told me by telephone yesterday.

Legend3D’s early lead in converting two-dimensional digital films into a three-dimensional “immersive experience” has continued to accelerate. Sandrew says the company’s San Diego headcount now stands at 280, up from 260 in May, and the number of Legend3D employees in India has increased to 750 from 700 over the same four months. The company (with venture funding from what is now Boston’s Par Investment Partners and San Francisco’s Augustus Ventures) says it has experienced growth at a rate of more than 700 percent over the last year “due to its deep industry knowledge and proprietary technology.”

In a statement released by the company, Sandrew says, “High-quality 2D-to-3D conversion work requires that skilled artistry and advanced technology be coupled successfully with a close working relationship between studios and filmmakers.”

Legend3D works its three-dimensional wizardry on both catalog film titles as well as new films that were shot in 2D and are essentially ready for release. “We’re trying to get up to the point where we could do four movies simultaneously,” Sandrew says. As part of the company’s growth spurt, Sandrew says Legend3D also is opening an office on Sunset Boulevard to help support the company’s work with Hollywood studios. “With colorization, we had a lot of studio clients, but very little interaction,” Sandrew tells me. “With 3D, there is a lot of interaction required… For the first time in 23 years, I’m finding a real need for a presence in L.A.” (Sandrew first worked with the pioneering colorizer American Film Technologies before starting Lightspan, a computer education company, and later, Legend Films.)

Most of Legend3D’s work, however, must be kept secret under non-disclosure agreements. “We did some work with DreamWorks, but I really can’t say anything about it,” Sandrew says. “We finished work on three movies about two weeks ago, but I can’t talk about that either.”

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Wouldn’t it be great to design and build your own personal house, real cheap? It may sound like a dream, but not for much longer. Difra, a Cambridge, MA, company co-founded by graduates of MIT, is working hard to fulfill this ambition.

Their idea is to use computer-aided design and manufacturing software (CAD-CAM) to model new houses in 3D, then translate the designs into kits containing all the flat 2D components needed to build them—in this case, engineered wood boards that interlock via so-called “friction joints.”

“To transform 3D to 2D for a typical, average-sized house of 1,600 square feet consisting of several thousands individual components is a very demanding task if done manually,” says Difra co-founder Morris Cox. But automation cuts the cost and the complication down to size.

Difra will sell its system directly to individual home buyers—and it already has some clients lined up. “Although our aim is to provide ordinary people with personalized homes, we will initially build more luxury homes, to show what can be done and gain acceptance among a broader audience,” says  Cox.

“My dream is to enable people, even on limited budgets, to personalize their homes, to allow freedom in design,” adds Cox’s co-founder Lynwood Walker. “Light and color, form and feeling, we let people have it the way they want it.”

The team dug into a CAD system called Rhino—chosen for its ability to model surfaces and export data as CAM files that can be used in fabrication machines—and wrote algorithms that translate designs into practical plans that can be built using friction joints, which fit together using only glue.

Once a Rhino model is transformed into drawings of the fundamental 2D components, the 2D files are fed to a laser cutting machine. Pieces are cut and numbered by the machine. All the pieces are neatly packed and sent to the construction site, together with assembly instructions.

“Building a home is like laying out a giant 3D-puzzle”, says Cox. “It is the perfect community project. Most of it can be done by ordinary people. We see it as a rewarding and socially enriching project for neighbors, relatives or other groups.”

Cox estimates that a small house or cottage can be put together in no more than … Next Page »

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Sony Electronics usually maintains a low corporate profile at its North American headquarters, even though it ranks among San Diego’s biggest private employers—with roughly 2,000 workers here. That seemed especially true after its corporate parent announced a massive reorganization at this time last year, which included hundreds of Sony layoffs in San Diego.

So it seemed unusual when Sony Electronics recently broke radio silence. The consumer electronics business organized an open house at its new 11-story building here—and invited hundreds of dealers, less than two months after courting them at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The unexpected glasnost even extended to some journalists like me, who were invited to join the trade press for a Q&A session with two of Sony Electronics’ top executives. We also got briefing on Sony’s push into 3D technologies.

The session included a demonstration of the new “Dash—a personal Internet appliance, alarm clock, and online media-streaming device based on technology that Sony licensed from San Diego-based Chumby Industries, the startup behind the soft-and-cuddly Chumby web terminal.

Stan Glasgow

Stan Glasgow, Sony Electronics’ president and chief operating officer, says the Dash is an example of the company’s renewed focus on consumer trends and demographics. Women, in particular, influenced its development, according to Edgar Tu, president of Sony TV Engineering of America. Sony says more than 1,000 free apps are available for the device, which connects to an existing home or office wireless network, so people can use it to access websites for recipes, weather, traffic reports, news, and other information. Tu tells me the Dash even features a 7-inch waterproof LCD touch screen, so people can use it in the bathroom and kitchen. It will be available in April for $199.

Sony’s new focus on consumer trends has grown so keen, in fact, that Glasgow says Sony and CBS have established a … Next Page »

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This week’s column comes partly in the form of a digital cartoon. Click on the play button below to watch it. (Or if you’re reading this story via an RSS feed or e-mail newsletter, click this link to view the video—then come back here).

Clever, eh? Of course, it’s just fiction. I still have a job here at Xconomy—as far as I know. But if I ever lose it, maybe I’ll hitchhike to Montreal and apply for a position at Xtranormal, the startup that created the Web-based movie maker I used to create the video.

Xtranormal, which is funded by Cambridge’s Fairhaven Capital, was founded in 2006 and emerged from stealth mode about a year ago at the Demo 08 conference in San Diego. (You can watch vice president Paul Nightingale’s six-minute Demo presentation here). The basic idea—automated synchronization of synthesized speech with animated, 3-D avatars—has been around since the early 2000s. If you don’t remember the green-haired virtual newscaster Ananova, here’s a link to some archival video. But Xtranormal’s innovation has been to put the same technology into the hands of average Web users—letting them produce and direct their own little 3-D movies.

It’s a great idea that strikes the same chord as some other new consumer tools for creating and remixing digital media—Animoto, which assembles high-energy animated slide shows with musical backgrounds from your digital photos, being one of my current favorites. Xtranormal’s easy-to-use toolkit of commands and its endearing cartoon people give it the feel of a big Lego set for adults. I made the clip above in an hour or two just by choosing a backdrop, a couple of characters, and some basic camera angles and gestures from Xtranormal’s large menu of options, then writing some dialogue. The script doubles as an interactive storyboard; Xtranormal has developed a clever drag-and-drop interface for inserting pauses, facial expressions, and camera angle changes.

As Xtranormal puts it, “If you can type, you can make movies.” And there are people using Xtranormal in some pretty entertaining ways—for examples, check out Deadpan Inc., Howard and Leslie, and Rejected Jokes. To quote website Lifehacker, it’s “a seriously addictive sandbox for crafting miniature dramas, comedies, or whatever you can tell your little actors to do.”

Although Nightingale talked in his demo about using the tool to build business presentations or daily Web talk shows, I’m not convinced that the service, at least in its current form, has any serious business, educational, or media applications. Those may be coming down the road, as the company gives users access to tools for building customized avatars and laying in their own voice tracks rather than relying on the software’s speech synthesizer.

For now, Xtranormal is simply a heckuva lot of fun, which is enough for me. Better yet, it’s free, at least for now—though there are indications that this won’t last forever, and that Xtranormal plans eventually to sell credits that users can apply toward publishing movies.

Xtranormal’s About page calls the democratization of movie-making “a massive business opportunity,” and Nightingale talked at Demo about additional revenue possibilities for the company, such as interactive marketing—think exclusive worlds where content owners (say, Pepsi or Honda or Universal Studios) give visitors digitized movie characters or branded props from which to build their own movies.

But apparently, these types of marketing deals aren’t materializing quite fast enough. According to this report in the Vancouver, BC-based blog TechVibes, the company was forced to lay off 36 people, or about half of its staff, back in November. There have also been complaints from users about performance issues, including long waits for Xtranormal’s servers to show their previews and finished movies (though I didn’t experience that problem myself). And the downloadable version of the Xtranormal movie generator promised by Nightingtale last January is, so far, nowhere to be seen.

I hope the company gets through its current rough patch, because it’s developed a fun and intuitive tool that, with a few more features, could provide the palette for a new generation of home movies by creative amateurs. Given the graphics-processing power of today’s home computers, you shouldn’t have to be CGI professional or machinima hacker to produce nice-looking animations.

Of course, I’m not about to put down my writer’s pen. At least, not until an avatar pries it out of my cold, dead fingers.

(Addendum, 1/19/09: Talk about coincidences. Last night somebody from Xtranormal left the following comment over on the YouTube page for my Richard & Simon video: “Great stuff. Did you know that Simon & Richard are the product designers/managers for Xtranormal? Nuts. Nice write-up too. We are going through a rough patch, but we’re going to pull out of it and it’s gonna be FUN.”)

For a full list of my columns, check out the World Wide Wade Archive. You can also subscribe to the column via RSS or e-mail.

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38 Studios, the Maynard, MA-based game development studio founded by Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, has decided not to reinvent the world. The virtual world, that is—the one it’s creating as part of the massively multiplayer online-gaming experience it plans to debut in late 2010. The company said yesterday it will license a suite of world-development tools and game servers from BigWorld Technology, which has offices in Canberra and Sydney, Australia. BigWorld supplies the technology behind online role-playing games such as Stargate Worlds.

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Marlborough, MA-based Proficiency, which makes software that allows product designers to transfer product models between various types of computer-aided design programs, said today that it has raised $4.25 million in new venture funding. Catalyst Investments of Israel led the round, joined by Carmel Ventures and Pitango Venture Capital. Catalyst said its network of connections in the aerospace and automotive industries would help Proficiency expand its reach to new users.

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I can tell you right now that Wade is not going to like this post. As many of you know, he’s a huge fan of both maps and 3-D modeling technology, and anything that puts the two together…well, forget about it. Which is why, I’m guessing, he is so intrigued by EveryScape, a Waltham, MA-based company that’s building a navigable, photorealistic, 3-D online map of the world, or at least select cities. To be sure, there’s a lot even for map-neutral users to like about EveryScape site, which Wade wrote about when it launched in October. But I have to say, Google Maps’ street view feature, launched today for much of greater Boston, is better.

First of all, there’s the question of coverage. Google’s got most of the inside-Route-128 region pretty well blanketed with panoramic street-level photographs that let users pick a spot on the map and not only see what it actually looks like—an absolutely critical feature if you’re trying to plan a trip through what’s probably the worst-signed streetscape in the country—but also to pan and move as if actually walking around. EveryScape, on the other hand, is so far limited pretty much to Boston proper. (On a national level, Google has the edge too, covering Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Boston, Fort Worth, Houston, Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, Providence, San Diego, San Francisco, St. Paul, and Tucson, compared to Aspen, Boston, Laguna Beach, Miami, and New York for EveryScape.) With Google, you can even take a gander at Xconomy’s Cambridge headquarters; with EveryScape, not so much.

I’ll cut EveryScape a break on the coverage question—lord knows a startup with less than $10 million in venture funding can’t match Google’s resources to send photographers out to every nook and cranny of every city. But what really bugs me is how user-unfriendly the company’s site is. Compare, for example, the landing page you get if you choose to visit Boston via EveryScape and the corresponding offering from Google. A map site that requires reading four different information boxes before it lets you actually see the map just isn’t very intuitive, in my book. With Google, you just drag the little orange avatar anywhere along any of the blue-lined streets and a window pops open with a view from that location; you can then pan around in place or follow arrows down the street. With EveryScape there’s a more complicated system involving a small map off to one side; I can’t describe it exactly because just having the site open actually brought my computer to its knees (probably the central source of my frustration with EveryScape, truth be told).

Now, to be clear, I don’t think it’s time to give up on EveryScape just yet. As Wade pointed out, the site’s photography is much brighter, sharper, and prettier than Google’s—making the possibility of convincing virtual tourism much more likely with EveryScape. [Everyscape also puts a lot more effort into the animations that give you a feeling of moving from one point-of-view to the next. ---your friendly editor, W.R.] And unlike Google, EveryScape lets you explore inside certain buildings, though the number of them is limited so far.

What’s more, the way that the startup is monetizing that feature by selling commissioned interior views to property owners, stores, and the like is both clever and, I think, likely to generate content that will be genuinely useful to users. Being able to virtually walk up to and into an expensive hotel, say, or a tony club before you plunk down the cash could provide a big help in deciding how to spend your time and money—and a nice voyeuristic break for those not planning on spending either. If it’s going to realize that vision, though, EveryScape will need to make sure that virtual tourists don’t get tripped up before they even cross the threshold.

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The “Cyber Monday” phenomenon is a baseless piece of marketing fluff crafted by the National Retail Federation—the biggest online shopping day of the holiday season actually falls somewhere between December 5 and 15 every year. But if virtual shopping floats your boat, today is a good day for it anyway: the novelty retailer Brookstone, based in Merrimack, NH, has chosen Cyber Monday to open its first 3-D online store using technology created by Marlborough, MA, startup Kinset.

If you’ve ever visited the virtual worlds Second Life or There, you’ll feel right at home inside the virtual Brookstone store. It’s a rough 3-D mockup of a real Brookstone retail outlet, fully stocked with the chain’s trademark so-cool-you-gotta-have-one gadgets, like the $70 iHome Shower Dock for your iPod or $30 White Microbeam keychain flashlight. You can saunter through the store using your computer’s mouse or arrow keys. If you see something you like, you can zoom in on it, pull up a text window for more information, and then add it to your shopping cart, just as if you were shopping at Amazon. (In fact, when you’re done, Kinset’s software sends you to Amazon to complete the purchase, which is then fulfilled by Brookstone.)

The Brookstone store is one of three adjacent stores inside Kinset’s 3-D shopping world, which was launched in beta form on October 22 and is accessible via a small Windows program that you download to your PC. Brookstone was attracted to Kinset’s 3-D retailing platform because it makes online shopping into “a deeper, more robust and interactive journey of discovery,” akin to visiting a bricks-and-mortar store, said vice president and general manager of direct marketing Greg Sweeney in a statement about the opening.

That may be taking things a bit far. My own visit to the virtual Brookstone store—and to the demonstration bookstore and electronics store Kinset has built next door to it—didn’t feel terribly deep. It could be that I’m jaded, having spent more hours than I care to admit exploring Second Life and building virtual objects using that world’s extensive modeling tools. But I’d say that Kinset’s Brookstone store is a first, tentative step toward retailing’s 3-D future—a serviceable but not-fully-baked melding of 3-D modeling and navigation techniques with older e-commerce tools.

For one thing, Kinset’s default mechanism for moving around—using the mouse to jump from point to point—is awkward and disorienting; you really have to turn it off and use the arrow keys to understand where you’re going. And in the biggest departure from the Second Life model, you don’t have a personal avatar in Kinset’s world—the screen simply shows the first-person point of view from where your avatar would be standing, if you had one. That’s an understandable technical choice, since you don’t really need an elaborate Second-Life-style avatar to go on a shopping expedition. But the main benefit of an avatar is to orient you inside a virtual space, and without one I felt somewhat lost and, er, disembodied.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, the Brookstone store doesn’t contain any Brookstone gadgets—it’s a room full of boxes with photographs of the products pasted to the outsides. If you’ve been to Second Life, you know that it’s possible to build exquisitely detailed 3-D replicas of objects as small as flowers and teapots. That, frankly, is what I was expecting to see inside Kinset’s Brookstone store—not stacks of cubes covered with flat, 2-D pictures that I could just as easily have found in a Brookstone catalog or at the Brookstone website.

Even without avatars and detailed 3-D objects, however, there is still value to the concept of arranging products in a three-dimensional space. For example, spreading products out the way they’re arranged in a real store and allowing the shopper to walk down virtual aisles makes browsing—and serendipitous discoveries—much easier and more natural than on a traditional e-retailing site.

There are other advantages as well. I wasn’t able to speak with Kinset executives for this story, but the company’s FAQ points out that many well-known retail chains—think Best Buy, for example—have spent lots of money honing the look and layout of their physical stores. Kinset’s tools make it easy to re-create the experience of being inside one of those stores more faithfully than any flat website could hope to do. The Web, as Kinset’s FAQ puts it, “introduced an alien visual vocabulary to merchandising;” Kinset’s 3-D spaces restore the more familiar vocabulary of bricks-and-mortar stores.

At the same time, transposing retailing to virtual worlds allows new kinds of interactions that aren’t possible in the physical world. Without having to leaving home, for example, shoppers in Kinset’s world can ask questions of virtual clerks. In the future, they’ll be able to rendezvous inside the world with friends who are also connected from their home computers, or attach notes for their friends to specific items.

I’ve talked with lots of people about the evolution of virtual worlds, which range today from social worlds like Second Life to gaming worlds like World of Warcraft and practical map-based worlds like Google Earth. It’s not clear whether there’s a demand for a dedicated Shopping World, or whether retailing will simply be a component of other types of worlds—but all of the experts agree that social shopping experiences will be one of the 3-D universe’s key pastimes and moneymakers. Providing the infrastructure to make that happen is where Kinset is carving out a lead. “If, in the future, you find a store via Google Earth, that’s fine,” the company’s FAQ. “When you want to go inside that virtual store and buy things, we will be about rendering the inside experience.”

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