VizWorld looks back: 2009 In Review

As 2009 comes to a close, we wanted to take a look back at the big events of 2009 and recap what worked, what flopped, and what amazed us all in 2009. Companies crumbled and new companies everged from the ashes. Software died, only to be replaced by newer and better offerings. Technology changed the face of cinema, the power of the personal computer, and the capabilities of visual effects artists worldwide. 2009 was a big year and the list was huge, much bigger than I had originally expected, so we trimmed it down to a few key events of the last year.

Read on for our recap, and chime in with your own thoughts in the comments.

Stereoscopic 3D

No one can doubt that 2009 wound up being “The Year of Stereo 3D”, as polarized glasses and 3D films came back to the silver screen in a big way. Major studios like Pixar and Dreamworks Animation announced that all of their new CG animated films will be in stereoscopic 3D, and even some mainstream films wound up postprocessing in 3D effects. A far cry from the 3D of your parent’s generation, the new polarized lenses and new research into the human vision system and the human brain has created a 3D experience far more realistic and, most importantly, less nauseating than previous attempts.

No movie has implemented this new stereoscopic technology with such success as James Cameron’s ‘Avatar‘. Using the stereoscopic effect as a way to draw viewers into the story, rather than a gimmick to scare (and subsequently nauseate) viewers as things come flying at you, ‘Avatar’ has truly shown us what stereoscopic 3D can mean.

But not only in theaters, stereoscopic displays are coming to the home. Companies like Alioscopy have created glasses-free 3D displays, and several companies have begun to manufacture polarized displays capable of accepting various inputs for 3D viewing. While it has stumbled occasionally, the potential remains. Movie studios have embraced 3D as both an anti-piracy measure and a reason to drive up prices, and brought a stereoscopic 3D standard to Blu-ray that makes it possible for all 120Hz televisions using active-shutter glasses.

Collapses

However, as successful as stereoscopic 3D was in 2009, not all was roses in the industry. A few industry greats, most notably SGI finally succumbed to years of mismanagement, poor business offerings, and financial weight (Which we chronicled in-depth). Smaller companies as well, such as Verari, finally crumbled under the economic stress of the “Great Recession”. But where every company crumbles, another is in the wings to pick over the carcass.

In the case of SGI, Rackable jumped in and bought it for a steal. After a few months of trying to determine exactly what they bought, they took the surprising step of axing the entire graphics division. Again, other companies were waiting in the wings and NVidia picked up several of the key engineers and managers and integrated them into their own staff. This left us all wondering just what ‘SGI’ stood for, without any graphics offering, but eventually they finally announced their newest piece of technology after years in development: Ultraviolet. The newfound energy in the HPC space combined with their integration work with Intel seemed to indicate that SGI would begin integrating Larrabee as their new ‘G’ of choice, however that floundered too and was eventually canned.

The Verari saga is still underway, and appears it will be for some time. Management claims it’s business as usual, but the employees say otherwise. Several companies have stepped up to honor the old Verari support contracts, but Verari claims it’s all unnecessary. Hopefully 2010 will yield some definitive answers.

Software

Companies weren’t the only ones radically changed by the economy, as software found several changes as well. After several years of simply being ignored, Apple finally canned Shake. Several people had already begin to switch to Foundry’s Nuke, and The Foundry found themselves in a great position by selling several large site licenses.

TrueSpace & Caligari, acquired by Microsoft a few years ago, finally bit the dust as well. Apparently the victim of an “Acquire & Assimilate” strategy, Microsoft never really got to the second part and decided to simply crush them instead. The company went down with honor, however, letting everyone know ahead of time and allowing ample time for people to get in one last download.

SUN found themselves quietly and discreetly terminating their “Sun Visualization System” product, at least it was quiet and discreet until we called them out on it. Of course, this was after Oracle decided to buy SUN, leaving the entire state of the company in flux.

Several companies avoided going under through clever mergers. One such successful merger is the recent GenArts and WonderTouch merger which has brought ParticleIllusion to several new systems as a plugin, rather than a standalone. DAZ3D and Gizmoz merged, bringing photorealistic 3D Model avatars to the world.

Hardware

2009 was also a big year for Graphics hardware companies, but not how you might expect. ATI is currently enjoying a huge lead in the market as the only graphics card manufacturer with support for DirectX11. While ATI is pumping out record numbers of cards with full DirectX11 support, NVidia has held off on releasing any new video hardware for several months. Instead, NVidia has focused on development of their next-generation product code-named ‘Fermi’.

GPU computing has become big news this year, as evidenced by anyone who attended SuperComputing2009 in Portland, OR this year. Not only in the HPC space, several mainstream packages have begun to implement GPU acceleration for video encoding/decoding, physics simulation, artificial intelligence, and even anti-virus scans. GPU acceleration has found a great niche in the real-time rendering space where tools like MachStudio Pro use ATI hardware to reduce render times from hours to mere seconds.

All of this has led to an inevitability we predicted back in August that MultiGPU is the inevitable progression of the industry. At the time some major outlets were claiming that Multi-GPU solutions would remain a niche market, relegated to obscurity for reasons like cost, complexity, and necessity. I still believe that more and more systems will become MultiGPU, either through multiple dedicated cards or special multi-chipset cards (like the GTX295 from NVidia). Even operating systems (Windows 7, Vista, or Snow Leopard) now make use of 3D accelerators for optimization of certain systems, and the possibilities grow every day. Given the GPU’s natural parallel design, you get a near linear improvement of speed as you add more GPU’s (in many situations, at least), so people will continue to add GPU’s just like people today add additional CPU cores to boost performance.