With Google SketchUp. In the news here.

Theres a new kid on the block for graphics enthusiasts or ui prototypists - a visualization language called Processing. Seems to be used by many graphics artists these days for creating visualization programs.

Graphics technologies that are being used in movies are fading the boundaries between reality and computer generated images. I saw The Chronicles of Narnia, Ice Age 2 and King Kong - all being extremely breath-takingly beautiful (in terms of graphics). We have surely come a long way from Jurassic Park.

See if you can tell the difference between what's fake and what's not on this page.

The art in the previous post was created entirely using the mouse. While admittedly not the greatest work of art...but it surely reminded me of the drawing classes we used to have in school. The ArtRage 2 software was used in the creation of this master-piece. It allows one to use effects like paintbrush, crayons, sketch pen, etc etc.

The PlayStation 3 specs were released at the E3 Expo on Monday. The PS3 is supposed to be twice as fast as the XBOX360 with a floating point speed of 2 teraflops. Right now (as per the supercomputer rankings for November 2004), there is only one supercomputer in India faster than the PS3 (Link to article in Times of India). And imagine such kind of a system selling for 400-500$ (around Rs 23000) a piece. And all this computing power being used to drive the next generation graphics in the games. A normal console lifespan is around 5 years...so both of these heavyweight consoles will stay around 2010 and some predict the PC would have itself become a multi-core 5GHz machine by then. The question is would we still be just surfing, checking emails and chatting with that kind of machine?

I always didn't used to like strategy games like Age of Empires and Rise of Nations. I have played Black and White, and even though the replayability factor is much more than usual third person shooter games, the latter had much better graphics (and you know, I am a fan of 3D graphics and not that lazy, right:?). Black and White had quite good graphics for this kind of a game and am really looking forward to the next generation strategy games - Black and White 2 and Age of Empires 3.

Also, while you are it have a look at the next generation Unreal technology here.

And while I am at it, I should also mention that I am currently into playing Half Life 2 (for the PC) and Doom 3 (for the XBOX). Half Life 2 beats the hell out of any other game that I have played - the best in graphics (I always seem to get in love with the rendition of water in the game) and the best in AI too.