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User:Dhhodgin/FSOSS 09

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== 3D in the Browser... More than just Doom ==
This presentation was given by [http://cleung.wordpress.com/ Catherine Leung] who is a professor at Seneca College in the School of Computer Studies, where she teaches in the game development and programming areas. Cathy's talk was about a project she has been working on called [http://www.c3dl.org C3DL]. C3DL is a JavaScript library that will provide a set of classes for rendering 3D objects in the browser. Currently it requires an up to date browser such as Firefox 3.5 in order to run. Cathy demonstrated an application called Motionview which allows previewing of raw down sampled motion capture data in the browserby using the C3DL library. The purpose of Motionview is to reduce the expensive cost of 'clean up' in motion capture animation scenes when sometimes certain points in the animation are wrong. Because of the high cost of producing motion capture video this data is never sent out in a raw format over the web, instead C3DL is used with a converted format of the raw motion data and it is displayed in the browser for artists to preview which shots they want to use and mark which shots to be cleaned up instead of everything. This results in a huge cost savings.<br />Cathy moved on to show a few other demos such as particle systems and a 3D Google maps road view demo that could simulate turns in a route on Google maps.
For more details needed here 200-300 more words.information on C3DL you can visit their website
=Comparisons=
=My views on open source=
My own personal view on open source is in two different directions. I think there is something to be said for the ability for student developers to gain an incredible amount of experience and knowledge from open source projects and seasoned developers. I've learned a lot from Al MacDonald just in the last few weeks about JavaScript and he's always been willing to help out on IRC anytime he's available. So in one way I think open source gives great opportunities to students for experience and also it gives people a way to mold their favorite open source apps into exactly what they want in an application. What I mean by this is if I decide I want a certain feature in my favorite open source project there's nothing stopping me from implementing it and adding it to the program. given By giving enough time and providing quality code can get you a piece of software that is to some degree customized exactly how you want it.<br/>
I do tend to look at the open source community from the other side as well though. The corporate side. Sometimes I'll sit back and think 'wow all this work thousands of people are doing for free to improve and build on this product is making people for this company richer than astronauts'. While their is nothing wrong with that it makes me wonder how they can do it. So I wonder exactly how it is some of these corporations make the money they do. One of the lectures I attended at this years FSOSS was all about how to make money at open source. Unfortunately the presentation lacked a lot of details on specifics and exactly how much money is being made at different organizations. If I could put in one request for presentation ideas at next years FSOSS I'd love to see more presentations on how to make money with open source. Judging by the turnout for that presentation I think it's a wildly popular topic with a lot of people actually.<br/>
In the end it's all about the experience and the ability to be part of the community and also to be part of the software design process as well. Everyone loves free as a price point too let's not forget about that. Someday if I run my own software company I would like to be able to go open source with my applications as a way to give back to the community.
=Conclusion=
I think this years FSOSS was a successful experience for me personally. I got a chance to speak to a few of the presenters and learn a good deal more blahabout the projects they are working on. The ranking the bugs presentation was very informative in terms of statistics and it taught me a lot about writing quality bug reports to increase the chanes my bug would get fixed. The processing.js presentation had lots of information i hadn't yet learned on the background of processing and processing for the web. It also had the best 'cool' factor of all the presentations in terms of spawning new ideas for features in web sites I design in the future. Cathys C3DL and Motionview presentation helped me draw the comparisons between processing for the web and C3DL and canvas in HTML5. Motionview is a really interesting piece of software and i've always had an interest in motion capture and CGI in movies and how its done. It was nice to connect a lot of the dots between all the presentations I got to see this year.
==Requirements==
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