Hey Juicers. I have an announcement to make.

Luster is now in public beta. Download it here. It is available for PC and Mac. I promise that it if you install it and want to uninstall it, you can uninstall it easily as you would any program.

Luster is our platform for creating interactive 3D applications. Like Flash, once the Luster runtime is installed on your computer, you can run Luster applications. Luster applications can be hosted on a website through major browsers or as applications on your desktop.

So what are you going to do now that you have installed Luster? Well easy! Download and play Blocks.

Blocks is a game we have been working on at the Darkwind Media offices to promote and test Luster. You can download Blocks for free and run it on, again, Mac or PC. Its small. It does not require installation. Just download and play, delete when you are done.

If you could give us feedback on any bugs you encounter in Blocks while playing it, that would be great. Email us at feedback@luster3d.com. Once Luster is downloaded, you can also check out some of our other demos. If you don’t want to download the demos, please at least check out our gallery.

Thanks Juicers. You are great. Huge thanks also to Brian, Choof, and Chris for putting in so much work and making this happen.

Hey Juicers, how have you been? I haven’t been around much lately, I’ll be better I promise.

I wanted to let everyone know that you can finally get Luster installed on your Windows machine and start playing around with some demos. Head on over to the Luster Beta Sign-up page to get started. After you have signed up, we need to activate your account. Once that happens, you’ll receive an email with instructions and more details about the whole shabang.

There’s some basic tech demos available online right now, but we have some sweeter demos that will trickle out over the next week or two, including one of the music visualizers. You should definitely check out the Arthas Dance Animation, it’s pretty cool. It uses somewhat advanced lighting techniques, so if you have an older video card it may not look as great as it should. But that’s what this beta thing is all about, figuring out these little details, right?

I leave you with a video of the Arthas animation. Major props to Chris for making this happen.