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GDC China is rapidly approaching, only a few weeks away, and the speakers have been announced and it’s a great list of experts in Game Design and Art from all of the major studios.
Chris Hecker will be presenting a session on the challenges and meaning of user-generated content in Spore, Colt McAnlis of Blizzard will be addressing the technical challenges of generating and affixing art to the massive terrains of World of Warcraft, and Tobias Dahl and Mikael Lagre of Dice EA will discuss the unique task of creating a robust perspective for Mirror’s Edge, a game emphasizing fluid first-person movement and perspective. Professionals from Activision, Take Two Asia, Volition and Ubisoft Chengdu will be among the full roster of speakers presenting varied and informative talks.
Headlining the solid roster of speakers is Jordan Mechner, the accomplished game designer, programmer, screenwriter, and creator of Prince of Persia who will be providing a keynote lecture titled “Prince of Persia: 20 Years From Game to Film.” The list of featured speakers at GDC China includes:
via CGSociety – CGD China Speakers.
Graphics conference, gdc, video game
CAVE’s have been around for a while, but are quickly being replaced with newer, cheaper, faster technology. The King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST) is deploying several new visualization technologies, including today’s unveiling of the “world’s most advanced visualization facility” which is opening today. MechDyne gets credit for building their flagship installation, a massive VL6 they constructed, bringing a massive 100-million pixels and 10,000 lumens of data to your environment. In addition they’ve got 24 Quad-HD projectors running at4096x2160 each, and a multi-purpose room with a 32 million pixel digital cinema projection system that enables stereoscopic viewing for 75 people.
IEEE Spectrum has a reporter on-site viewing the impressive work Saudia Arabia has done in becoming a leader in the large visualization space:
I’m attending the inauguration ceremonies this week and got a quick tour of some of the university’s laboratories, including the supercomputer and the clean room. From my perspective, if you’ve seen one clean room, you’ve seen them all. What did draw my attention were the visualization labs, which are using Shaheen’s computing power to add a visual dimension to large data sets. The first example I’m posting here is of a visualization of the human brain, where researchers are attempting to trace how signals travel between different regions by mapping the flow of water through the brain.
You can read up on the KAUST facility at their website, and you can see video of the KAUST installations & the visualization of the human brain (mentioned) in the YouTube video after the break.
via KAUST: Visualization beyond the CAVE (Crunchgear) and IEEE Spectrum: Saudi Arabia Aims to Become Data Visualization Hub.
Read more…
Hardware cave, immersive
MIT’s Technology Review looks a the current state of Augmented Reality, discussing many of the applications we’ve reviewed here on VizWorld, and wonders what is holding it back from widespread acceptance? Their conclusion is both the cumbersome hardware and the currently lack of a “killer app”.
“Your world can be augmented without you having to change your behavior and do anything extra [like] taking out your cell phone and starting an application,” says MIT professor Pattie Maes, who heads the SixthSense project. Maes’s group is also exploring technical applications for AR. “If my car stops working, I might open the hood and an expert might remotely see what I see and [then] project information in front of the engine, saying things like, ‘Open this valve,’” explains Maes.
via Technology Review: What’s Augmented Reality’s Killer App?.
Science augmented reality
This week’s recommendation goes out to all of you in the Video Graphics industry: the Apple Pro Training Series: Motion 4. The Apple Pro Training Series
has long been the go-to source of information on all the Apple products, including Final Cut Pro, Aperture, and many others, and the Motion 4 book is another great one.
In this best-selling guide to Motion 4, you’ll create eight sophisticated projects including a 3D show promo, a network-style title sequence, a DVD motion menu, and an actual temp effect used in Overture Film’s Traitor. Each chapter represents a complete lesson, with a commercial-quality project to work through as you learn. Master trainer Mark Spencer starts with the fundamentals of motion graphics and quickly moves into compositing, animation, motion graphics design, visual effects design, and the world of 3D. The book is fully revised to take advantage of the software’s new features: you’ll explore 3D shadows, reflections, and depth of field; “fly” a camera from one object to another; ripple text characters on and off the screen with ease; animate date and time sequences automatically; and master Motion’s remarkable new linking behavior. Along the way, you’ll work with particles, generators, filters, effects, templates, greenscreen mattes, keying, tracking, paint, and more. Whether you’re just entering the field or are already an accomplished motion graphics pro, this book will have you designing in Motion in record time.
Head on over to Amazon and check it out now!
Graphics apple, book, feature, motion, resource of the week
Over at PhysOrg they have an article about Antonio Serrato-Combe’s efforts to digitally reconstruct the Aztec Ruins. As a professor of archtecture at the University of Utah, he has spent decades researching the ruins and in 2002 published a book, “The Aztec Templo Mayor: A Visualization”.
More involved than the research however, was the question of how to visualize the discoveries. A self-proclaimed computer geek, it was at the suggestion of a student that Combe combined his two passions of research and computer graphics into an illustrated book. He said, “One day, after one of my history classes here at the University of Utah, one of my students remarked, ‘since you know so much about pre-Columbian architecture and you also seem to be a computer geek, why don’t you combine both disciplines and come up with a book that uses digital tools to illustrate the past?” The rest is history.
via Visualizing the Aztecs.
Science architecture, history
The ATI RadeonHD5870 is now available, with support for DirectX11 and their new Eyefinity. Currently, the Eyefinity support is limited to 3 monitors, the “Eyefinity6″ card is “coming soon”. So far the reviews are overwhelmingly positive, with comments like this from HardOCP:
Through all of this, Eyefinity, DX11, DirectCompute 11, OpenCL, the Radeon HD 5870 remains true to the focus of just being a desirable gaming video card. One of the most impressive “features” is the fact that it doubles performance, yet remains within the same power envelope as the previous generation. This is impressive. The fact that you can get all of this for around $379 makes it a really good value with a tremendous price/performance ratio compared to the previous generation.
I won’t bore you with details.. Check out one of these links for all the gory details and benchmarks you can stand.
- Read – AnandTech review
- Read – Driver Heaven review
- Read – HardOCP review
- Read – Hexus review
- Read – Hot Hardware review
- Read – PC Perspective review
- Read – Tech Report review
via ATI Radeon HD 5870 blazes onto the scene, receives approving nods.
Hardware amd, ati
Tony DeYoung tipped me off to a new video on YouTube from a SIGGRAPH2009 discussion including Rick Bergman, Senior VP & GM of AMD, Peter Berg, Director of “Hancock” and “Dune”, and Jules Urbach, CEO of OTOY. The segment shown is Rick Bergman talking about AMD’s interest in hardware accelerated rendering technologies & GPGPU approaches, and discusses their integration with StudioGPU’s MachStudio Pro.
See the video after the break.
Read more…
Graphics, Hardware amd, machstudio, otoy, siggraph, studiogpu
LucidLogix’s Hydra system, the vendor-agnostic multi-GPU hardware system discussed previously, is finally coming to market in a new motherboard from MSI.
There are three versions of the Hydra 200: the LT22114, the LT22102 and the LT22114. The only difference between the chips are the number of PCIe lanes. The lowest end chip has a x8 connection to the CPU/PCIe controller and two x8 connections to GPUs. The midrange LT22102 has a x16 connection to the CPU and two x16 connections for GPUs. And the highest end solution, the one being used on the MSI board, has a x16 to the CPU and then a configurable pair of x16s to GPUs. You can operate this controller in 4 x8 mode, 1 x16 + 2 x8 or 2 x16. It’s all auto sensing and auto-configurable. The high end product will be launching in October, with the other two versions shipping into mainstream and potentially mobile systems some time later.
It’s an interestingly priced addition as well, running about $1.50 per PCIe lane, which means each x16 slot on the system adds an extra $24. The high end Hydra chip support 48 lanes (3 PCIe x16 slots) for about $72.
via AnandTech: Lucid Hydra 200: Vendor Agnostic Multi-GPU, Available in 30 Days.
Hardware hydra, lucidlogic, msi, multigpu
Here’s the links for today:
Graphics, Science pixels
There was some confusion initially about yesterday’s SGI Octane III announcement, and some news has come out that might help to answer some of the questions.
One big question was how you got 10 “trays” but 19 “nodes” when using the Xeon 3400 or Atom processors. Apparently the system uses only a single set of disk drives for booting, so most of the nodes operate “diskless”. In a single “tray” you can fit two separate nodes when using these smaller processors, which means 20 “nodes”. However, a node must be sacrificed in order to make space for the drives, which yields the final number of 19 nodes, 38 Atom cores. Also, the Xeon 3400 configuration is not currently available. Right now the Atom build is available, and the Xeon 3400 will be available “soon” although no firm deadline is given.
News about the SGI Octane III has gotten around:
While those of us that work with such systems regularly already know, one common misconception going around is that the system is a massive 80-core 1TB monster computer, rather than the 10-node system it actually is. That means:
- It won’t run Photoshop any faster. As a single computer, it’s just a regular dual-processor/quad-core 96GB Ram machine.
- It won’t set any Crysis benchmark records. As a single computer with a video card, it’s a dual-processor/quad-core 144GB Machine with a regular NVidia card.
- You won’t be loading up any gigantic datasets on it with your usual stuff. You’ll need some that can properly utilize the distributed architecture like the new Fieldview, Paraview, or Visit.
- For 3D rendering, it might actually help. It won’t make a single render go much faster, but think of it as a “Render Farm at your Desk”, where each of the 10 nodes is a render node and you can see how it might help in certain circumstances.
So there you go.. Hopefully this will help answer a few of the questions I’ve seen floating around the internet. Have anything to add?
Hardware sgi
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