Well! I've just read the news about this year's Google Summer of Code :) There are quite exciting things that will be developed in Blender during this event: Camera Tracker, BGE features and polish, animation system cleanup, retopology and mesh tools (hopefully with Bmesh!)... and much more!! Here you have the entire list and people involved:

This year Google has been especially generous to Blender. We have the privilege of mentoring 17 students.

Some will be familiar faces from the Blender coding community, others are relatively new to the blender code base.

The talents of these students will be put to use all across the Blender core tool set as well as offering some exciting improvements and additions.

Mesh Editing/Retopology – Dan Walters was selected to implemented a number of new retopology tools and to polish existing mesh tools he will be mentored by Joe Eager (joeedh).

Sculpt/Paint – Jason Wilkins who worked on Blenders sculpt tools last year is returning to both further improve the sculpt tools as well as port many of the brushes and tools to our other paint modes, he will be mentored by Tom Musgrove (LetterRip).

UV Unwrapping – Shuvro Sarker was selected to implement some improvements to our uv tools. This was perhaps the toughest of the decisions since we had 5 excellent UV tool proposals this year. Andrea Weikert (elubie) will be mentoring Shuvro.

Weighting Tools – Jason Hays was selected to implement skin weighting tool improvements. He will be mentored by Campbell Barton.

UV/Paint Tools – Riakiotakis Antonis was selected to implement additional uv tool and painting tool improvements as well as possibly some additional weighting tools. He will also be mentored by Tom Musgrove.

Animation System Polish – Joshua Leung will be doing animation tool polishing addressing a number of issues to our star animators have identified as issues with Blender. He will be comentored by Bassam Kurdali (one of our talented animators) and Ton Roosendaal.

Motion Capture Tools -Benjamin Cook will implement a number of tools necessary for working with motion capture data including things like footskate cleanup. Campbell Barton (ideasman_42) will be mentoring.

Fluid Simulation Improvements – Christopher Neal will be working to implement some of Nils recent papers into our fluid simulator. He will be mentored by Daniel Genrich (Genscher)

Camera Tracker Integration – Sergey Sharybin will design interfaces and other tools for integrating the camera tracking library libmv for 2D and 3D matchmoving, camera tracking, and camera stabilization. Ton Roosendaal will be mentoring.

Camera Tracker library improvements – Matthias Fauconneau will work on additional features for the libmv library so that it can fully meet Blenders camera tracking needs. Julien Michot, one of the main developers of libmv will be mentoring.

Improved Internationalization and Localization – Xiao Xiangquan will be working to improve Blenders abilities to work with translated text for our tools so that they can be better used by an international audience. Xiao will be mentored by Kent Mein (sirdude)

Nodes for the GE logic – Sven von Brand will work on nodifying our game logic system. This project will be mentored by Benoit Bolsee (ben2610)

BGE Animation improvements – Mitchell Stokes will improve the game engines handling of blender animation data for character animation and will be comentored by Dalai Felinto (dfelinto) and Benoit Bolsee (benoit)

BGE bugfixing and polishing – Daniel Stokes will work on bug fixing and assorted minor tools and polishing for the game engine. He will be mentored by Dalai Felinto (dfelinto)

Collada – Prabhath Jayathilake will improve Blenders Collada support for animation and will be mentored by Nathan Letwory (jesterking)

3D Audio – Joerg Mueller will bring 3D audio tools for our animators and will be mentored by Martin Porier (theeth)

Dynamic Paint – Miika Hämäläinen will work on improving his dynamic paint tool work-flow and will be mentored by Janne Karhu (jahka)

We would like to thank the many students who applied this year. We received a number of excellent proposals – many of them for the same areas including UV tools and Collada – which made for some difficult choices, with the number of excellent proposals being much greater than the number of slots available.

We are thrilled to see so much interest in Blender and would encourage students to get involved in Blender development outside of GSoC.

Good times are coming, I bet!! :D Also, Bretch, who was hired some time ago for working on Octane Render, will work again with the Blender Foundation, and he has some pretty cool things on his hands... to let you know: Realtime Rendering integrated in Blender! :D (Follow this link to see the news and watch a video showing the idea!)

Cheers!!