Remi Arnaud will be lecturing at this years GDC in Lyon on how to take advantage of COLLADA in the content pipeline. This presentation is for artists and programmers that want to discover COLLADA, or want to learn more about this technology and all the possible usages.

OpenSceneGraph recently announced a new training course to be held in Washington DC. This training event is co-instructed by Bob Kuehne (Blue Newt Software) and Paul Martz (Skew Matrix Software). The training will be held in the heart of Washington DC with easy train, metro, and parking, all near the location. The three days are broken into two courses: January 22-23 will teach you everything you need to know in order to move from basic OSG usage to detailed and comprehensive library features. January 24 will cover creation and rendering of large terrain/urban databases in OSG. Registration is now on and space is limited, so don’t delay, sign up today.

Marsel Khadiyev has created meshplant.com, a model-sharing site for all kinds of meshes with peer-reviews and easy searches. A model on meshplant.com consists of a set of meshes and their textures. Uploading is simple- put your model file in a new folder, add any textures (currently only diffuse is supported), zip the folder, and upload. Currently models can be exchanged in either .3ds or .dae ( COLLADA ) formats.

The exploding popularity of mobile computing is undeniable. From cell phones to portable gaming systems, the global demand for multi-functional mobile devices is driving amazing hardware and software developments. 3D graphics are becoming an integral part of these ubiquitous devices, and as a result, Mobile 3D Graphics is arguably the most rapidly advancing area of the computer graphics discipline. If you are a graphics or game developer then you must learn to program for mobility, and this book will teach you how. You can read more about the book on the official homepage for the book, or purchase it directly from Amazon here.

Electric Rain announced in a press release that the upcoming version of Swift 3D will offer support for the Papervision3D format (read: COLLADA support). Electric Rain’s decision to support the Papervision3D format was based on the recent explosion of interest in working with true 3D in Flash.

Google’s Android project, developed as an Open Handset Alliance Project, released the first version of its SDK along with an introduction to the mobile device platform in video. The video shows some of the slick features available in the stock platform. As well, the platform supports some rather nice looking OpenGL ES powered 3D capabilities, including the ability to run Quake on Android devices, something that they briefly demo in the video. Watch to the end of the video and you will see that Google is giving away $10 million in prizes to the best applications built for the Android platform. That’s right, being an open platform, it is up to the people to build the apps. Enjoy. More reading.

Hayden Porter has done an interesting interview with Nathan Charles, lead for the Khronos Group OpenSL ES API working group and Software Architect at Creative Labs. Read the full interview here. Hayden Porter is a developer with a special interest in interactive sound for the web and mobile.

ARCSoft’s TotalMedia Mobile multimeda software applications have been integrated into NXP’s Nexperia ARM based cellular system solution 5210 family for 2.5G/2.75G cellular feature phones. The ArcSoft TotalMedia Mobile software applications are pre-integrated in the 5210 family. Providing an OpenMax IL interface, the ArcSoft solution includes a host of multimedia features.