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ATI/AMD today is announcing its new “Stream Transcoding Paradigm”, and showing off a lot of charts that indicate it beats NVidia quite soundly.  Unlike NVidia’s CUDA or OpenGL offerings, however, this technology seems to be relegated solely to video transcoding.

The new transcoder should work on most 4000 series GPUs. The older version only used the higher-end cards, but now the compatibility matrix goes all the way down to the lowest-end 4350 – almost integrated territory there. The lowest-end cards don’t do GPU encode though, they simply don’t have the horsepower, and would be slower than a CPU.

It’s got a pretty wide compatibility spread, working on cards down to the 4350, and Video Transcoding is one of the big GPGPU uses right now.  It’s nice to see ATI and AMD exploiting the fact that they build CPU’s, GPU’s, and controller chipsets to build an integrated end-to-end GPGPU solution.

via Ati ups the gpgpu ante – The Inquirer.

Hardware amd, ati, gpgpu

SIGGRAPH has announced some of the papers that will appear in the Technical Papers program, and it’s a pretty impressive collection.

Papers cover core topics of computer graphics, such as modeling, animation, rendering, imaging, and human-computer interaction, and also explore related fields of audio, robotics, visualization, and perception. Presenters are from all around the globe – from the Czech Republic to Japan.

The list so far:

• UC Berkeley & UNC Chapel Hill – Interactive Simulation of Surgical Needle Insertion and Steering
• MIT – Bokode: Imperceptible Visual Tags for Camera-based Interaction from a Distance
• NYU – Dark Flash Photography
• MIT, Adobe, and UW – Real-Time Hand-Tracking with a Color Glove
• Cornell – Harmonic Fluids
• ILM – Directable, High-Resolution Simulation of Fire on the GPU

Looks like a good group, especially the ILM paper.

via SIGGRAPH 2009 Technical Papers Focus on Technology and Advanced Techniques.

Science conference, paper, siggraph

David McCutchen is the CTO of Immersive Media, the company behind the recently discussed Dodeca2360.  He took the opportunity to sit down and talk to us (via email) about spherical video, Immersive Media, and the Dodeca2360 in an exclusive VizWorld interview.

VW: How did the idea for Spherical Video come about?

DM: When you think about it, everybody actually lives at the center of a spherical field of view.  If you could capture that image in every direction, in full color, motion and sound, then you could reproduce what a real experience is like.  Lots of people have tried to fake it with virtual reality, but photographic immersive video shows us the real thing.

Click through to read the rest.

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Graphics, Hardware, Science dodeca2360, feature, immersive media, interview, video

A fun animation from Douglas Lassance and Jonathan Vuillemin, produced by The Mill in 2008.  Done mostly with XSI Softimage, it’s a fun depiction of the futuristic cut-throat world of package delivery between UPS & FedEx.

See the video after the break.

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Graphics animation, softimage, the mill, xsi

A new commercial for Benadryl entitled “War” merged the intensity of gaming footage with the beauty of nature.  Directed by Steve Cope for JWT London, it includes some fun computer-graphics work done by The Mill.

Read the full release after the break, including a link to the movie.

Update 6/9/09: Corrected a typo.. It’s “Benadryl”, not “Benedryl”.

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Graphics commercial, the mill, vfx

LG is showcasing a new 23″ 3D LCD with twice the brightness of a conventional 3D LCD.  Brightness has long been one of the problems of LCD 3D displays, so this new technology has the potential to really break the market open.

Full press release, and a video, after the break. (Although, watching a 2D video of a 3D lcd doesn’t really do it justice).

Read more…

Hardware 3d, lcd, lg, television

A company named Ocarina is making waves through the image processing and storage industries with claims of a new “Lossless Image Recompression” technology, that can take the previously-thought uncompressable (JPG, TIFFs, MPEG’s, etc) and recompress them in a lossless manner.  The details are a bit sketchy aside from the note that is uses a Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) to analyze the image.  For those not in the know, the DCT is already the foundation of JPEG compression.

The process does, however, take some beefy hardware to do the work.  Currently they deploy a dedicated applicance, the Ocarina Optimizer, which contains dual quad-core Xeon 5400 chips with 16G of RAM (upgradable to 32G of RAM).  They claim they can compress 2TB per 24hour day, and is resold by Bluearc.  Already certified by Hitachi, HP, Ilison, they’re working with Nirvanix, EMC, and DataDirect.

Ocarina makes waves with lossless image compression • The Register.

Science algorithm, compression, image, ocarina

A bit more information on the E&S 8k Laser Projector is coming out.  At the 2009 Conference on Lasers & Electroc-Optics/International Quantum Electronics Conference (CLEO/IQEC), (say that five times fast) later this week, they’ll be talking about the powerful fiber lasers behind the projector.  Unlike traditional projectors that use a light source behind an 2D LCD display, this projector uses a single 4K tall line of pixels powered by a laser, which can be quickly swept left-to-right to generate an 8k wide display.

World’s Highest-Resolution Projector, more information at CampusTechnology.

Hardware display, E&S, laser, projector

Eric Alba tipped me off to a new service called “RoamBi”, which combines a powerful web interface for creating data visualizations with a powerful iPhone application for viewing and manipulating them.  Free for personal use, they also offer a special business version to enable reporting and Business Information systems use.

RoamBi – Your Data, iPhone-Style.

Science data, iphone, roambi, visualization

This week in the forums we’re asking a few multiple choice questions for you to check out:

• Do you prefer DirectX or OpenGL? And this one’s not just for programmers, but for application users as well.  Alot of software lets you choose (3ds Max, for example), which do you pick?
• AMD or NVidia? Who delivers your graphics goods?

Hit the forums and chime in, let us know!

Website forum, Website