Special Edition Video: Augmented Reality
6:15 am
Topics covered in this episode:
Supinfocom Airles videos: Machu Picchu Post and From The Hoop
2:00 pm
Supinfocom Airles has posted two videos made by their students on Vimeo.
First is “Machu Piccu Post”, created by Clément Crocq, Nicolas Novali and Margaux Durand-Rival.
Made in full high definition (1920*1080) with 3DsMax 2008. Render with scanline only (except some materials like the precious stone made with Vray) and an ambient occlusion pass, compositing made with After Effects.
Second is “From the Hoop”, 
From the hoop is a full HD movie.
To minimize render time, we choose to render everything in default scanline (with an additional occlusion pass). In those videos you can see first some examples of several rendered layers then turned into the final result after some compositing work.
See both videos after the break.
NVIDIA GPU Computing Webinars
1:00 pm
NVidia has some free GPU computing tutorial webinars coming up. The first class is “GPU Computing” and will cover writing small GPU programs, using on-chip shared memory, and coordinated GPU and CPU executing. The second class is “Performance Considerations for CUDA Programming”, and covers basic optimization techniques, performance measuring, and getting the most out of the CUDA memory system.
Links and details after the break.
AMD released OpenGL 3.0 Drivers
12:30 pm
AMD has “renewed its commitment to OpenGL” today by releasing new FirePro drivers with OpenGL3.0 support.
AMD’s commitment to OpenGL as an extensible graphics API is exemplified by its release of OpenGL 3.0 drivers, its commitment to supporting OpenGL 3.1, and its innovations with OpenGL extensions such as AMD_vertex_shader_tessellator and AMD_GPU_association. These unique extensions enable improved performance scaling and parallel processing with multiple GPUs and enhanced scene realism through increased geometry detail.
The drivers can be found here.
via 2009.
Yes, Good Graphics Cards make a difference in CAD
12:00 pm
There’s always been some debate on exactly what impact a good graphics card has on CAD software. As most CAD software doesn’t take advantage of per-pixel shaders and special fragment-processing pipeline effects, what is the advantage other than sheer triangle-pushing power? Well, it turns out that sheer triangle-pushing power can do alot, as evidenced in this article from Cadalyst, where Mastenbroek upgrades to ATI FirePro V5700 and wows at the improvements.
“Loading the full model of our 1012D compact machine, all 5,500 parts, is down from over five minutes to just one minute. Loading the HR-65, all 22,363 parts, is down from eight minutes to less than three minutes. Even the HR 65+, with 27,938 parts, takes just three and a half minutes to load. Overall, we can open a model up to ten times a day, saving up to five minutes each time. We can invest the time saved to make a better design, so for each hour saved in that way, we can save up to six hours’ workshop time.”
Mastenbroek Unearths Secret to Optimized 3D Modeling – Cadalyst Manufacturing.
Spore Skeletons Augmented Reality Demo on Vimeo
11:41 am
Augmented Reality is becoming all the rage, and another neat project is on the scene.
This is a demo of a little Flash application I made yesterday. It uses the Spore API to display the skeletons of the 100 most popular creatures made by users of the video game Spore. In its “augmented reality” mode demonstrated here, you can use a printed marker to see the skeletons with you in your own webcam. Thanks for watching.
Carlos Schiedegger talks about VisTrails
11:00 am
IF you happen to be near the University of Utah tomorrow, then you might want to stop by the Visualization & Geometric Computing Group of the Scientific Computing & Imaging Institute (wow, mouthful) to check out a talk from Carlos Schiedegger about his project VisTrails.
How do we cope with the ever-increasing amount of available information? Can we create computational tools that facilitate the exploratory process inherent in scientific discovery? With a motivating example I encountered in my work in geometry processing, I will present research on managing the provenance of computational processes with VisTrails, a novel scientific visualization system I have helped design and develop.
If you’ve never tried VisTrails, I highly recommend it. It applies classic strategies on Revision Control & branching onto visualization pipelines, making it a breeze to build re-usable visualization pipelines and share them amongst friends. It even has a (commercial) Maya plugin to add the same features.
GPU Panel: Making Your Desktop a Supercomputer?
10:00 am
If you’re attending the International Supercomputing Conference this June in Hamburg, Germany, then you might want to check out the “Making your Desktop a Supercomputer?” panel. They will be discussing hardware and software that’s making inroads into mainstream applications, and how we can begin using it. To speak are:
- Prof. Dr. Kun Zhou – Panel Chair
- Dr. Justin Hensley of AMD, to disuss the basics of Graphics Hardware
- Dr. Pradeep Dubey of Intel, to discuss Larrabee
- Dr. Miguel Sainz of NVidia, to discuss CUDA
- Dr. Li-Yi Wei of Microsoft, to discuss parallelizing algorithms though to be intrinsically sequential
- PRofessor Pedro Sander of Hong Kong University, discuss GPU in database applications
Mapping the Energy Usage Distribution in New Zealand
9:00 am
The National Energy Research Institute has gathered data on energy usage in the country and mapped in in a nice interactive visualization called “Energy in NZ“. It’s a flash-based visualization that lets you view energy produced and consumed in NZ, and it’s separation amongst transportation, industry, commercial, and residential areas.
via Mapping the Energy Usage Distribution in New Zealand – information aesthetics.
Hitachi announces new LCD & Plasma TV’s
8:30 am
Hitachi has announced some new LCD and Plasma TV’s today. Of particular note is the face that several models have integrated 250GB Hard Drives and ethernet connections, making them integrated digital TV recorders and media viewers. They also boast special “energy sipping” technology to reduce power consumption on the Plasma’s (typically huge energy hogs), and a 40000:1 contrast ratio.
More information inside.
VizWorld.com 
Comments