VizWorld.com

We’ve mentioned EyePet here before, Sony’s augmented reality pet game for the PS3 and Eyetoy.  Over at Kotaku, they’ve got a short review of the game up and some video of it in action.

These two videos show the beta version of the game which is being shown off today in New York. The game is set for a holiday release, Sony Computer Entertainment told Kotaku. The game will be sold both as a bundle with the camera and on its own. Both versions will come with a card used to interact with the virtual pet.

See the video after the break.. Warning: Shakycam in action.

via PS3′s EyePet Hits This Holiday, We Take It For a Virtual Walk – Eyepet – Kotaku.

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Graphics, Hardware augmented reality, ps3, sony, video game

Autodesk and TurboSquid are hosting a 2-hour long Technolog Preview of what you can see comign up in the future of their 3ds Max product.  It’s rather secretive, tho, and attendance is limited.

This session is for key customers under NDA who want to learn about the future roadmap for 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design along with announcements that will be made in August regarding 3ds Max. The session will include demos and videos of future capabilities along with some breakthrough research by the 3ds Max development team. Shane Griffith (3ds Max Product Manager ) and Ian Nies (3ds Max Product Design Manager) will be giving the presentation and taking questions from the audience.

Hit their website for full details and registration.;

via The Area :: Blogs :: 3ds Max Technology Preview – SIGGRAPH 2009 in New Orleans.

Graphics 3dsmax, autodesk, siggraph

Over in Sweden, the Linkoping University and county Council have been working on developing new visualization technologies for working with the always-increasing volume of data from medical scans like CT’s and MRI’s.

For example, Doctor Anne-Marie Landtblom, chief neurological physician is working on a particularly tricky case. Her patient has shown symptoms of MS that were not visible with traditional MR imaging. She discusses imaging alternatives with Marcel, who is just steps away. Marcel Warntjes, clinical scientist and the inventor of synthetic MR, discusses Anne-Marie’s problem with a few of his colleagues. He decides to reform a synthetic MR scan of the patient which provides the information that Anne-Marie wants to see. He then turns to Frida for support with the visualization.

Frida Hernell, visualization specialist makes a few suggestions on how to render the images in 3D while increasing shadows and textures. The new 3D images reveal what Anne-Marie is looking for and she can make her diagnosis and start treatment while Frida applies her new found knowledge to a new problem. She mentions her findings to Marcel who immediately sees that could benefit Anne-Marie’s new patient.

In addition to “synthetic CT” and “synthetic MR”, they have systems for “synthetic autopsy” and others.

A traditional autopsy may take several days. A 3D virtual autopsy here takes only 20 seconds. In addition, you don’t need to cut the body open-something that many religions prohibit. Alien objects, injuries and fractions are readily visible and in case of an unnatural death, no evidence is destroyed. All data can be stored and the images turned and rotated in an infinite number of ways.

via Sweden invents visualized image for medical diagnosis and treatment – People’s Daily Online.

Science biomed, volume

AMD puts a new line in the sand with a 2GB video card, the V8750.  For specs, it’s got 2GB of GDDR5 memory but runs at the same speed as the V8700.  It beats the competition performance-wise by a small margin, so it’s hard to justify the price unless you’re in severe need of the 2GB of ram.  Say, like you’re a user of the new MachStudio Pro acceleration:

“We’re amazed at the performance boost to our already fast MachStudio Pro real-time 3D workflow and rendering product with the new ATI FirePro V8750 3D workstation graphics accelerator,” said David Koenig, CEO, StudioGPU. “Powered by the new ATI FirePro workstation graphics accelerator, the MachStudio Pro non-linear real-time 3D finishing workflow enables design firms and 3D artists everywhere to power through big, complex projects amazingly fast. Thanks to the ATI graphic accelerators, small and mid-size studios can now work at the speed of thought to streamline workflow in a way that was impossible for the largest and most fully equipped production facilities as little as a year ago.”

HotHardware has benchmarks.

via AMD Delivers Its Most Powerful Professional 3D Graphics Card With Up To Four Times The Processing Power And More Memory Bandwidth Than Comparable Competing Solution(1).

Hardware amd, benchmark, firepro

While SIGGRAPH is returning to the fantastic city of New Orleans this year, the city itself hasn’t yet fully recovered from the havok and destruction of Katrina.  The “Make-It-Right” foundation has partnered with the SIGGRAPH Graphic Pioneers to help survivors by rebuilding a house.

“We have had wonderful experiences in New Orleans for the SIGGRAPH conference,” said Kathleen Maher, vice president, Jon Peddie Research and a member of the SIGGRAPH Graphics Pioneers. “However, the devastation Katrina left in its wake is unfathomable, and unless you’ve seen it firsthand, it’s really hard to imagine. The SIGGRAPH Pioneers encourage the graphics community to band together and help support the victims of Hurricane Katrina by helping New Orleans return to its former glory,” continues Maher. “Every dollar counts to help ‘Make it Right’ for those families still trying to recover from such the devastation.”

Donations of any amount are accepted.  Full details and announcement after the break.

Science make it right, new orleans, siggraph

NVidia’s second annual Emerging Companies Summit will be at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA from September 30 – October 2nd, and host talks from 60 start-ups around the world.

“This is the only event where start-ups utilizing GPUs for visual and compute-intensive applications can showcase their businesses to venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, analysts and others in the GPU computing ecosystem,” said Jeff Herbst, vice president of business development at NVIDIA. “The companies we have lined up represent a broad range of fields, extending from consumer applications to those utilized by the world’s most sophisticated researchers.”

So far they’ve got OnLive, the popular remote-gaming company, and RTT, a realtime visualization company, on tap along with several others.

via 60 Innovative Start-Ups to Present at NVIDIA’s Annual Emerging Companies Summit.

Science conference, nvidia, onlive, rtt

A new video from Intel is online at YouTube, where Intel Research Scientist Daniel Pohl shows an update on their “Realtime Ray Tracing” project.

With the power of upcoming many-core architectures Intel is developing, real-time ray tracing (using the physics of light to realistically render an interactive 3D scene) comes closer and closer to the desktop. At Research@Intel Day 2009, Intel researchers showcased the latest innovations from our Real-time Ray Tracing project, including more realistic 3D water and the ability to render more than 500 animated characters at once, and showed a version rendering multiple camera views on a stereoscopic display, in which viewers can see the 3D depth of the scene without the need for special glasses. See video from Research@Intel Day 2009 for more info.

Now, the video is pretty neat.  The 8-layer stereoscopic display alone is pretty impressive.  But I fail to see what, if anything, in this demonstration is Ray-Tracing.  The water looks like classic tesselated surfaces, and so does the environment.  Maybe someone in the PR group got confused and used the wrong buzzword?  Or maybe it’s just a bad demonstration of the technology.  See the video after the break, and tell us what you think.

via Intel Press Room

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Hardware intel, raytracing, video

If you’re going to SIGGRAPH for the technical papers, then you’ll definately want to head on over to the ACM portal where they’ve now published the official “ACM Transactions on Graphics, Vol 28 Issue 3″, better known as the Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH2009.

Every paper is available online in PDF format, with “extras” downloadable as ZIP files (mov’s, sample datasets, etc).  They’re separated by their Session, with 4 papers per session. Check it out, and let us know what papers you’re interested in.

TOG: Volume 28, Issue 3.

Science papers, siggraph

LSU’s Center for Computation and Technology (CCT) has a booth at SIGGRAPH to showcase the results of their new AVATAR initiative.  AVATAR stands for Arts, Visualization, Advanced Technologies and Research, and is a multidisciplinary group focused on merging art, technology, and computation into new areas.  Some of the things they’ll be showing include:

Xin Li, a professor with CCT and the LSU Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, will display examples of his research into shape mapping, which analyzes similarities between two unlike shapes. Shape-mapping is a useful tool to help scientists and artists alike analyze geometric data for patterns. Li has developed a shape-mapping paradigm that allows researchers to make comparisons between two objects in different dimensions, such as 1-D curves, 2-D surfaces, or 3-D solid objects.

and this:

Robert Kooima, a CCT post-doctoral researcher who conducts research as part of AVATAR, is the LSU instructor. He recently built a 52-inch TacTile LCD touch table that students can use to play and display their video games, giving them a place to experiment with multi-touch gaming. Kooima will display the table and some of the top video games students produced this semester at the CCT booth during SIGGRAPH.

They’ll also have some audio projects such as the Immersive Computer Controlled Audio Sound Theater (ICAST), a 27-channel surround sound system.

via HPCwire: CCT to Present at SIGGRAPH 2009.

Graphics, Hardware, Science lsu, research, siggraph

I just got off the phone with the crew at Caustic Graphics, makers of the amazing real-time raytracing card the CausticOne.  See that graphic above?  They’ve got some big announcements coming up at SIGGRAPH that fit in those big black boxes, but if you want to know what it is then you’ll have to wait until Monday at 8am (Eastern)!  Caustic Graphics will be at SIGGRAPH in booth #2026 demonstrating their CausticRT and CausticOne systems, as well as participating in a few other mysterious locations that we’ll announce on Monday!

In addition, Caustic will be presenting at the High-Performance Graphics conference August 1-3 in New Orleans, one of the co-located events with SIGGRAPH, to discuss their technology and talk about making CausticGL an open-standard, like OpenGL and OpenCL, for ray-tracing graphics.

Hardware caustic, raytracing, siggraph