A breakthrough in how film makers create special effects and video game designers develop characters will be unveiled at a computer graphics conference in San Diego this week.

New York-based Organic Motion will demonstrate at Siggraph 2007 a motion-capture system that does away with the need for the body suits, markers and tracking systems that are currently used to translate natural human movements into computer graphics.

Organic’s technology uses an array of 10 standard cameras hooked up to an image processing computer. The different viewpoints are processed in real-time to become 3-D spatial data, creating full-bodied moving characters on the screen rather than the skeletal moving dots of existing systems.

The system could transform how animators work - they can step away from their computers into Organic’s system, simulate the movements they want from their characters and then instantly begin working on the results.

To achieve the same effect currently, they would have to don a body suit with marker dots, work with a technician and spend a long time calibrating the system, and then hand over the end result to an artist to clean up jitters.

"Body-suit systems cost $150,000 and, at the end of the day, the results are mixed," says Andrew Tschesnok, Organic’s chief executive and founder.

"This changes it from being a niche market and turns it into one that can become mainstream."

The company sees applications outside the entertainment industry and is in talks with medical research facilities, sports trainers, physical therapists and even museums on how they could take advantage of the application.

The system, which costs around $80,000,  could analyse a golf swing from every angle, including underneath the player. Doctors are already working with the company on motion analysis, tracking the gaits of children with cerebral palsy.

Mr Tschesnok envisages video game players themselves could eventually become completely immersed in what they are playing, stepping into a booth and carrying out the movements of their characters in real time.

And they are likely to be fighting with a friend - Organic Motion’s next advance is for its system to be able to track two people at the same time.

The major news that Grand Theft Auto IV will not provide the blockbuster success the console makers crave this autumn obscured another set of impressive earnings from Activision on Thursday.

The Santa Monica video games publisher had better financial news than all the other major US players - Electronic Arts, THQ, Take-Two and Midway - who also made announcements over the past two days.

Activision could be the major beneficiary of Take-Two delaying GTA IV. Without the competition , its Call of Duty 4 is now likely to be the best selling game on the PlayStation 3 this year.

Activision is currently the number-one publisher in the US of third-party titles - those not made by the console makers.

Bobby Kotick, chief executive, told us in an interview its success was down to good management, a little luck and a great franchise strategy.

One major franchise under threat from a bigger rival, Electronic Arts, is Guitar Hero, a game that puts an axe-shaped controller in the hands of air guitarists.

EA is releasing Rock Band for the holiday season. which expands the range of instruments so that several players at once can perform a song.

Mr Kotick believes Guitar Hero can fight off the challenge, describing Guitar Hero as a game and Rock Band as more of a collaborative tool.

"We are on every format in every geography with localised content," he says, adding that the price of jamming with friends in Rock Band could run to $300 for all the "instruments".

The pieces are starting to fall into place for the synergy demanded by Sony chief Howard Stringer and breaking down of silos between different divisions of the consumer electronics company.

Take online video. The company is just about there in what could be described as providing an end-to-end solution from the consumer’s camera viewfinder to a YouTube debut.

Sony’s answer to YouTube is Crackle, a relaunch last month of its Grouper acquisition, with the emphasis on more professionally produced video and high definition.

Crackle is working with Sony Electronics on the display of its internet content on TV and with the HD camera people on some as yet undisclosed features.

Camcorders themselves are already being designed for the YouTube generation, with simpler recording and uploading methods.

The software part of the puzzle that creates professionally edited pieces from raw footage and prepares them for uploading is Sony Creative Software’s Vegas Movie Studio, the best-selling video editing package.

Movie Studio is one of the products Sony acquired when it bought Madison, Wisconsin-based Sonic Foundry in 2003. Other products include Sound Forge Audio Studio and Acid Music Studio and all three are consumerised versions of professional products.

The Platinum Edition of Movie Studio, just released, adds Vista support and high-definition and surround-sound editing. Movie Studio also makes it easy to upload to Crackle or the 10-year-old ACIDplanet.com site – it provides a friendly interface with buttons like “Publish to Web” and a variety of options to reduce file sizes for faster transfers.

It’s also a relief to discover that the Sonic Foundry roots and a loosening of Sony’s attitude mean the software is not tied to Sony’s proprietary formats such as ATRAC and M2TS – import and export is possible for every flavour of Mpeg as well as Quicktime, AVI and Windows Media formats.

It is obvious that Google is taking very seriously the concerns that arose earlier this year over its privacy policies.

Google is between a rock and a hard place on this one. On the one hand, with the internet at more than 15bn pages, it is essential to make searches more personalised and tailored, otherwise we may drown in too much information.

On the other hand, privacy activists and consumers dislike the idea that someone is compiling and keeping detailed profiles on them.

So, each time Google now announces a new step in personalising internet searches, there is a softly-softly approach to reassure that rights are not being trampled.

The latest example was Google’s announcement on Wednesday that it was launching international versions of its “web history” service, which tracks all the web pages a user has ever visited and allows them to search and go back to them. The idea is that that funny video or recipe you half remember looking at will be easier to revisit.

The service has already been in use in the US, but will now be operational in 26 languages, from Chinese and Hebrew to Norwegian and Portuguese.

To make sure the Norwegian authorities – for example - didn’t have an apoplectic fit over the announcement, the press call was handled not only by Sep Kamvar, the head personalisation engineer, but also Peter Fleischer, Google’s head of privacy. He spoke for almost as long as Mr Kamvar.

In fact, it is very simple. The service is optional, and opt-in services have never been a problem for privacy activists. Getting people to “opt-in” is a handy way for Google to push forward personalisation developments and stay within international laws.

What Google doesn’t reveal, however, is how many people are opting in to personalisation. This is a shame, as it would be a useful gauge for privacy regulators – if most Google users are opting to personalise their searches at the risk of less privacy, perhaps search history privacy is not an issue to worry about. If personalisation is not proving popular, however, it may be Google that needs a re-think.

  What are the kids doing in Mumbai, Marseille and Mexico City? Some fascinating new data from comScore suggests that social networking has so far been a distinctly regional game. The big question of the next two-three years is whether this regional tendency will become entrenched, or whether a small handful of global powers will win out.

The audiences of MySpace and Facebook are still heavily biased towards North America. Friendster, on the other hand, blew its early lead in the US but is still the clear favourite in Asia, while Google’s Orkut is dominant in Brazil and the rest of Latin America. Bebo, thanks to its UK origins, is skewed towards Europe.

Less noted because of its broader geographic reach has been Hi5, a San Francisco-based network started by two Indian engineers in 2003. Of course, having a broad audience spread across a lot of places is not necessarily a path to success. Most social groups are by nature local, so critical mass in any given market seems essential.

According to Ramu Yalamanchi, co-founder of Hi5, there is an interesting cross-border dimension to some parts of the social networking business. Some of his company’s biggest markets are Spanish speaking, and benefit from connections between family and friends trying to stay in touch around the world.

Yet the real fight is about to take place at the national level. A place among the top three in any given market is essential, says Yalamachi. He raised $20m of venture capital last week and plans invest that in further tailoring the service and building a sales force in targetted countries.

On that measure, MySpace’s massive early audience lead looks daunting. Even with less than 10 per cent of its audience in Asia it can almost rival the reach there of Orkut, for which Asia has been a clear success story.

Some financial bloggers are buzzing about Facebook’s purported June rate card, which has been obtained by Valleywag. The card shows that Facebook is charging an initial rate of $300,000, over three months, for a sponsored Facebook group. That is double the rate the company was apparently charging in February, according to another rate card published in Valleywag earlier this week.

Sponsored groups are just one way Facebook says it can help companies get in front of its network of interconnected users. So what does this mean for Facebook? Henry Blodget at Internet Outsider did some back of the envelope maths and came up with this:

Let’s see, 150 group sponsorships times $300,000 per sponsorship for three months ($1.2 million per year), and you’re at $180 million in revenue.  And that’s before the home page sponsorships.  And the $200 million three-year display deal with Microsoft.  Etc. […]

So here are some updated Facebook revenue estimates:

2007:    $150 million ($200 million? $250 million? Who cares?)
2008:    $750 million
2009:    $1.5 billion

As Blodget himself points out, big customers are likely to get a substantial discount on the $300,000 price. Any way you slice it, though, it’s clear that Mark Zuckerberg and his crew are onto something big.