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Work on bringing 3D Acceleration to the web continues, and the latest advancement is that now WebGL is part of the regularly WebKit nightlies. WebKit is the foundation of Safari, and many other browsers, and if you’re on OSX you can check it out and take it for a test drive.

WebGL is a new standard being worked on in the Khronos consortium. The work done in Khronos is only available to its members, so I can’t show you the spec just yet. But it will become public within the next few months after a review by Khronos members. The good news is that WebGL is now available in WebKit nightlies as of October 4, 2009 (r49073). So if you’re running Leopard or Snow Leopard you can try it out for yourself. WebGL runs in the HTML Canvas element, so it works very similarly to the 2D Canvas capability currently in WebKit.

Even if you’re not on a Mac, you can hit the site for examples and code-snippets and see how the implementation is shaping up.

via Surfin’ Safari – Blog Archive » WebGL Now Available in WebKit Nightlies.

Science 3d, api, internet, webgl, webkit

CGSociety has a fantastic interview and writeup on the various people and technologies used in District9.  Expected to be a 2-part feature, part 1 is online and covers the work done by Vancouver’s ImageEngine.  They get into some great details such as Marco MEnco’s work on the “Prawns”.

Marco’s specialty was poly-modeling and texturing of the aliens and the clothes. Starting from a 3D scan of the clay model provided by WETA Workshop, the IE crew re-topologized the model and then cleaned the geometry in Maya to prepare it for rigging. Playing with lots of different aspects of character creation, they used ZBrush mostly for texturing, for gross displacement for background clothes. “I was pretty excited to work with the ‘marquette’ of Christopher Johnson (the main alien) on my desk, especially thinking that was done by the great artists at WETA,” explains Menco.

They also get into the details of managing the huge amount of assets involved in the alien textures and models, using an in-house tool called Jabuka.

“Jabuka is an asset management and shot setup system written in python using a postgreSQL database backend,” adds Nigel Denton-Howes, Modeling and Texturing Supervisor. “Many of its shot-end lighting tools are built upon the cortex libraries open sourced by Image Engine. Jabuka was designed to handle version control of assets, shot setup and interdepartmental dependencies once in shots.” Although Jabuka was used and useful on every shot in ‘District 9′, it really shines in shots with large numbers of creatures.

CGSociety – DISTRICT 9 [PART 1].

Graphics district9, image engine, jabuka, movie, vfx

John Mayer likes to stay on the forefront of technology, and what better way than to jump on the Augmented Reality gravy train?  His latest single “Heartbreak Warfare” has a nice twist if you go to his website and hold the marker (printable from his website) up to your webcam.

The music video for “Heartbreak Warfare,” from the upcoming Battle Studies album, is now featured on John Mayer’s website.After the Flash player loads, viewers can activate their webcam and hold up a printed or mobile version of the Battle Studies icon to their webcam, which, if aligned correctly, will prompt the video to begin playing with you as an extra in the background.

JohnMayer.com via John Mayer Releases Augmented Reality Music Video.

Graphics, Science augmented reality, music video

A continuous low-speed wind blows over Egypt’s Great Spinx, constantly eroding the statue with the effects of humidity, dust, and smog.  To investigate the formation of the wind, researchers at IBM and Bibliotheca Alexandrina simulated the effects using a classic Navier-Stokes equation and visualized the results in the VISTA CAVE.

Virtual Immersive Science and Technology Applications (VISTA) is a project established by the International School of Information Science (ISIS) at Bibliotheca Alexandrina in order to provide an interactive virtual reality environment. The environment allows researchers to transform numerical and 2-D data sets into 3-D simulations and to step into them. The VISTA team has implemented visualization of the researchers’ wind simulation results on a CAVE system using Avizo Wind software’s advanced visualization and analysis tools to provide new insights and better understanding of the data.

via Invisible Winds at Egypt’s Great Sphinx Revealed.

Update 11/10/09: Image Replaced at request of VSG.

Science cave, egypt, sphinx

Guru3D picked up a new eVGA p55 Classified motherboard and dropped in three of the new Radeon HD5770′s to test out Triple Crossfire (3-way CrossfireX), and published the results for all of us to drool over.  Sadly, the effectiveness of the build is throttled by the CPU’s ability to keep up.

Obviously rendering your games with three GPUs equals a lot of brute horsepower, so big that the rest of the PC might become a bottleneck for your graphics solution. That is however a luxury problem though but as an example, Fallout 3 at 8x AA at 1920×1200 performed as well as a 2-way 5770 setup as the processor (Core i7 @ 3.75 GHz) was literally holding back the GPUs from reaching the stratosphere.

via Radeon HD 5770 in 3-way CrossfireX review.

Hardware amd, ati, benchmark, crossfire

Carl Zeiss is demonstrating a new member in its LSM-7 laser scanning microscope family, the LSM780, which using a new GaAsP detector to double the sensitivity.

To make the GaAsP detector technology available to a wide range of users, it will be offered in three versions: as an internal spectral 32-channel detector in the LSM 780 laser scanning microscope, as a detector upgrade for existing LSM 710 systems and as the external LSM BiG upgrade module. All versions of the 32-channel GaAsP array permit traditional spectral imaging, photon counting with maximum sensitivity, and single molecule visualization through fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) with one to six signal channels.

With this new technology they can capture 512×512 images at 8fps, and as high as 250fps if you drop to 512×16 pixels.  In addition, they have a new HDR scanning mode that scans the image at multiple acquisition settings and combines them into a single image.

via Sensitivity in a New Dimenison With Laser Scanning Microscope From Carl Zeiss.

Hardware microscope, zeiss

In a new press release from Sony they announce at the upcoming digital content EXPO2009 (October 22-25th) they’ll be showing a “Solid 360 degrees display”.

The “360 Degree Stereoscopic Display” unveiled by Sony is a prototype of a tabletop 3D display that can be seen from 360 degrees and doesn’t require funky 3D glasses for full effect.

According to Sony’s press release, the gadget measures 13 cm in diameter and is 27 cm tall (or about 5 by 10 inches).

So what’s it for? Seems that Sony isn’t sure yet. Speculations are swirling that the device could be used commercially (for advertising, medical visualization, and digital signage) or in the home as a 3D digital photo display.

The resolution isn’t too great (96×128 dots), and the size isn’t very impressive (13x27cm), but it’s a good proof-of-concept.  Something like this on a larger scale could be pretty impressive.  Sites are calling it a “holographic” display but I think they are mistaken, it looks more like a cylindrical persistance display (small screen that rotates at high-speed and synchronizes the display to the rotation).

via Sony’s 3D Display Unveiled: 360-Degree Hologram, No Glasses Needed (PHOTOS).

Hardware 3d, display, holographic, sony

Over at Information is Beautiful, they dug through some of the data surrounding the controversial HPV vaccine (to prevent one of the viruses that cause cervical cancer), and created a powerful visualization showing some of the claims.

I’ve been reading a lot about the HPV (Human Papillomavirus) vaccine and the risk of serious side effects and even death. I thought I would seek out the numbers and put them in context. Especially given headlines claiming the HPV jab is “as deadly as the cancer” it seeks to prevent.

via How Safe is the HPV vaccine? | Information Is Beautiful.

Science biomed, hpv, infographic

Casio has just announced a pair of new cameraphones that really crank up on features: 12.17MPix Camera with autofocus, 3.3″ OLED screen, GPS, Wifi, FM Radeo, and more.

Here’s the Casio Exilim Ketai CA003, another mobile phone featuring a 12.17Mpix camera sensor with AF, a 28mm wide angle and a 3x optical zoom, with a 3.3” WVGA OLED screen, supports microSDHC cards up to 16GB, has GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, FM radio, Felica….

And its little brother, the CA004, offers basically the same features with however a 8Mpix camera module with AF (9 Point), the support of 2GB Max microSD cards and a 3.1” WVGA OLED screen.

Sadly, this phone just screams “never coming to the US”.

via AU KDDI Winter Line-up… Exilim Ketai CA003 and CA004 : Akihabara News .com.

Hardware casio, mobile, phone

The “Viz Worth Watching” Blog, run by the guys behind EnSight, have just posted information on the newly released 9.0.3c.  But that’s not all, they also announce that EnSight 9.1 should be out sometime in January, and will feature Volume Rendering, a popular feature that’s been in ParaView and VisIt for some time and frequently used as a deficiency in arguments against EnSight.

The results looks promising, and the combination of solid geometry and volume rendering looks great.

Viz Worth Watching: EnSight 9.0.3c faster, better, and reads more data.

Science cei, ensight, software, volume rendering