Virtual Reality — new trends in Web Technology

I had this opportunity to attend a workshop at JNTU Kukatpally today. It was about “New Trends in Web Technologies — Information Filtering and Virtual Reality. JNTU had sent a letter asking college to nominate a student. shiva kumar sir looked around and found me wandering in the corridor. the first thing that came to my mind was “two full days of attendance ($) ($)”. but by the time we realised, the workshop had already started that day.

anyway i got a “nomination” letter from HOD (CSE-IT) and next day i went to JNTU only to find banner that said “FibreGlass technology and Advanced materials” by FibreGlass Industies Association. when i asked a concerned person there, he said there were no other seminars there that day. he was wrong. it took me around 40 minutes to know if i came to there right place. later learned that the seminar was in some other block of the campus. walked a lot.

it hadnt started yet. when it did, i found that the 3 speakers were not Indians. when one started actually speaking, i found they weren’t Americans or Brits either. I guessed “French” but they were from Università di Udine, Italia. It was a bit funny hearing “ITLISH”, but slowly “cone-thainer”, “thransforrrmasson”, “rothasson”, “vertheeses”, “X Y andh ZEE agses”, “intherpolasson” started sounding normal.

the first talk was about VRML ( Virtual Reality Modeling Language). i had misssed the first part the day before. but could understand most of it by mapping HTML and Blender-terminology. the best part was watching this guy use his Apple Notebook with the Mac OS running in it. he was showing the examples in Mozilla Firefox. He talked about

• defining polygon vertices
• building faces
• translation
• rotation
• scaling
• complex transformations
• lights and materials
• textures
• VRML event model
• Tools for VRML

here he mentions that “Blendher” is one of the free tools that can be used for modeling. when asked, i was the only one that used Blender out there. he said the tool “Art of Illusion” was less complex tool when compared to Blender. i had used this a while ago. its a java program. so it was a victim of my strange dislike for Java and anything related to it.

[LUNCH]

the next talk was about Information Management Systems / Knowledge Management Systems by a professor. All i could manage to jot down was “www.infofactory.it” will give you more information. however, this person had a striking resemblance to Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense, US.

the last one was worse. the “mama” ( local way of saying ‘dude‘ ) sitting next to me whispered to me “saava kodathadu mama” [ he is gonna beat us to death, dude ]. i soon understood why he said that. the speaker was very bad at English, which he later admitted anyway. But it was very difficult to understand his words. he was actually demonstrating a project he did, which apparently needed an internet connection. he was like “Oh! My Godh. 2Kbps??”. i said “Welcome to India”.

At the end, he was left with some time. he wanted to clear some doubts about India and/or Hyderabad. He asked what it meant when people nod their head as if drawing the symbol for “infinity”. he said in Italy people nod either vertically or horizontally but not this way.

then he asked ” is it very normal here to see these things lying around near you?” showing a picture of a big snake, which he said they found in a corridor somewhere they went.

and then he asked “is it very normal in India to have reptiles crawling all around where people live?”, this time showing a picture of a big lizard ( pedda balli in Telugu ). this one was right in the bedroom where they were staying the previous night.

he then announced that the “vice cancellor” will be arriving shortly. some other person came up, closed the day and gave away a certificate and a CD containing all slides, example code, links etc.

in short: free certificate, free lunch, free chai, free taste of itlish, free tour of JNTU campus, free attendance, free recap of 3d graphics concepts.

by the way, here “Free as in free beer, not as in free speech”.

PS: i had/have no intentions of hurting italians. we indians are not perfect at english either. talk about “parfect”(perfect), “vaaver”(over), “warrald”(world), “warams”(worms), catched, throwed, putted, cutted …….