Virtual reality news - research and literature

I've bought Unreal Tournament 2003 (UT) for its editing application UnrealEd 3.0 and am working my way through various tutorials -- here are some links to non-game applications of UT and its editor
- here is an article on using UT to make a "wedge" type CAVE installation. More on this project here and tons of UT links here.

Good article on motion capture systems -- including low-end Director-based systems.

2d to 3d conversion softwares and services:
3d pictures - link - softwares
promagic - link - software for adjusting multiple layer photoshop files for lenticular viewing
lenticular links -- with some companies offering conversion services
Erich's conversion service
Space cadet is a free software for optimising stereo camera configuring in max scenes.
Lots of anaglyph and crosseyed viewing conversion examples on this Hungarian site.
This unusual "Smartron" autostereoscopic display also has 2d/3d conversion software.

3dfilmmaker.com is a machinima technical blog -- cool links to tools and content. Article on prototype software to explode 3d models of buildings into different level views -- instant floor plans - with video ... from urbansimulation.com. A recent article on how multiple photographs under different lighting conditions can be used to produce information-rich illustrations (image-based relighting). A European conference earlier this year on "Immersive communications and broadcast systems" -- lots of leads to 3d tv screens and transmission/capture systems - including the Phillips ATTEST project. A detailed paper about it here.

Software downloads from Microsoft Research -- there are some very interesting vision related tools here cf. especially Videocube. Shadowilluminator -- smart image contrast control. Videocube looks like another version of the time-space video transform idea. An interesting article on Cylindrical Relief Texture Mapping.

Image Based Modeling and Rendering Links - old but still a useful collection. The Omnidirectional Vision Page -- this is the most comprehensive listing of mirror 360 systems. From this last this new (to me) Japanese stereo video 360 system (captures depth maps too.) The movie examples from this system are cool. Image mosaicing links.

'grandtextauto' a group blog on interactive narrative developments has some great links ... for instance, to this blog 'Terra Nova'("Our world and its synthetic offspring: MMORPGs, toy worlds, social worlds, and other realms of emergent collective reality")

Japanese urban simulation consortium - MapCube

An excellent source of "digital content creation" news