VizWorld.com

Engineers with the University of Kansas have taken Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images of the bedrock beneath ice sheets near Summit Camp, Greenland. The radar signal was broadcast in the range of 120–300 MHz, which is roughly equivalent to television stations in the U.S. broadcasting in channels 7 through 13. Using a new algorithm to compute the estimated direction of an arriving signal, they have been able to reproduce the topography of the bedrock with a relative accuracy of 10 meters. From the Kansas City infoZine article.

The radar system is a game-changing development for researchers in global climate change. Previously, glaciologists could only know the thickness of the ice and bed conditions along a single line from a sole pass of a radar or at a single point where ice core samples had been drilled.

From the paper Ice-sheet bed 3-D tomography in the Journal of Glaciology :

Three-dimensional tomographic techniques produce a 3-D image of the ice and bed. For digital elevation model generation, we are interested in locating the ice–bed interface in the 3-D space. This work presents a simple, automated method for finding the ice–bed surface and removing point errors. Automation is critical for surface fitting due to the large number of data collected.

via Kansas City infoZine : KU Radar System Provides 3D Image of Earth Through Miles of Ice

via Journal of Glaciology : Ice-sheet bed 3-D tomography

Science sar, topography

Lots of drama and news in the world of NVidia’s PhysX GPU-Accelerated physics simulation toolkit.  It all started earlier this month with an interview with AMD on game development and DirectX11 support where AMD has, of course, taken the lead since NVidia has no DirectX11 hardware available (yet).  The comment was something like this:

The other thing is that all these CPU cores we have are underutilised and I’m going to take another pop at Nvidia here. When they bought Ageia, they had a fairly respectable multicore implementation of PhysX. If you look at it now it basically runs predominantly on one, or at most, two cores. That’s pretty shabby! I wonder why Nvidia has done that? I wonder why Nvidia has failed to do all their QA on stuff they don’t care about – making it run efficiently on CPU cores – because the company doesn’t care about the consumer experience it just cares about selling you more graphics cards by coding it so the GPU appears faster than the CPU.

Basically they accuse NVidia of crippling PhysX, reducing it to a single CPU core so that it ‘appears’ faster when run in combination with a GPU.  NVidia was quick to refute the claims in a response by Nadeem Mohammad, PhysX director of product management.

I have been a member of the PhysX team, first with AEGIA, and then with Nvidia, and I can honestly say that since the merger with Nvidia there have been no changes to the SDK code which purposely reduces the software performance of PhysX or its use of CPU multi-cores.

Our PhysX SDK API is designed such that thread control is done explicitly by the application developer, not by the SDK functions themselves.  One of the best examples is 3DMarkVantage which can use 12 threads while running in software-only PhysX. This can easily be tested by anyone with a multi-core CPU system and a PhysX-capable GeForce GPU. This level of multi-core support and programming methodology has not changed since day one. And to anticipate another ridiculous claim, it would be nonsense to say we “tuned” PhysX multi-core support for this case.

So they basically say that thread management is left up to the developer, so whatever situation AMD witnessed was not NVidia’s fault but rather the fault of the programmer that developed it. (Probably hoping it was an internal AMD engineer).  Of course, the bulk of this entire argument is that AMD wants to break NVidia’s grip on GPU physics simulation so that their own Bullet product will have an easier path to market.

Sadly tho, Bullet is still unreleased and under development.  This means that developers will have to stick with what’s available, and in a new announcement from the developers of RayFire, the popular 3dsMax shatter & physics simulation tool, that means PhysX.

Hey everyone.
Well, what can I say, RayFire Tool 1.49 Beta with 64 bit PhysX support is ready to use.
Due to some new PhysX plugin restrictions some old features are not available atm, that is why it is 1.49 Beta. For now there is no Glueing and Imposible to use Grouped objects. But the most needed features like dynamic simulation and Interactive demolition work fine.

Can’t wait to see what it does when it’s fully released.

AMD Interview, via Bit-Tech

NVidia’s Response, refuting the claims via exPreview and TomsHardware

Graphics, Hardware amd, nvidia, physx, rayfire

Ryan Shrout of PC Perspective got his hands on a coveted OnLive beta invite, the widely discussed but incredibly secretive remote gaming service, and put it through the paces on a few popular games and wrote up the experience.  He was, sadly, unimpressed.

The games were running at 1280 by 720, and the expected issues became reality. “The input lag on UT3 was so noticeably bad with the mouse and keyboard that I would call [the] game simply unplayable. I often found myself overshooting the mouse movement by half a screen, moving well past my intended target because the cursor didn’t stop when I did.”

It’s worth pointing out that he did not receive the beta invite via official channels, rather via the age old ‘friend of a friend’.  This is important since OnLive has long said that they would deploy multiple gaming centers, to maintain the required proximity to the end-user, and he may have been too far away, resulting in his degraded performance.  In fact, it even warned him via the image shown to the right.

Guess we’ll just have to wait for a real review on an official invite.

PS: If any OnLive folks are reading, I’ld be happy to take one :)

OnLive Game Service Preview, via OnLive demoed: lag, graphics are a problem.

Graphics onlive, video game

CGSociety has an interview with Jeremy Bennet, Character Designer, and Randy Lundeen, Environment Designer, who both worked on Left 4 Dead 2.  In the interview they discuss the design of the environment, throughout the Southeast, and get into the various details of the tiny effects that contribute not only to the visual effects but to the subtle player psychology of the game.

“Also, in order to help guide players through the swamps, we wanted to have the water generally flow down the path to the end of the map in a way that was subtle enough to be natural, but clear enough to cue the players to their intended route.  We implemented a new water shader that could have a unique flow direction and water speed at every point on the water surface. We used Houdini to generate flow maps offline by first painting 2D flow directions manually. Another campaign that needed some additional effects work was “Hard Rain.”"

via CGSociety – Left 4 Dead 2.

Graphics interview, videogame

Whenever I travel to foreign countries, I not only try to learn their language and customs, but I also try to understand how their coinage works. Mac Funamizu has developed a solution for that. He has combined the art of the infographic with the practical use of coinage. All a consumer needs to know is how to read a pie chart. Another advantage of the coins is that it would be easy for visually handicapped persons to recognize the correct change just by the shape and feel of the coin, especially if Braille were added.

Sure, there are some drawbacks to non-round coinage. For one, the edges would wear down fairly quickly. For another, all the vending machines would need to be retrofitted to accept the new coins. A few simple changes to his design could yeild round coins for the 25 cent and 50 cent pieces to make it work, while keeping his elegance.

via : Infographic Coins

Graphics infographic

USA Today and Universal Studios Orlando have partnered up to turn a page from next week’s USA Today (January 28th) into an Augmented Reality marker, allowing you to use it to explore the upcoming ‘Wizarding World of Harry Potter’ theme part interactively.

By rotating the map, you can take a closer look at this 20-acre magnificently themed environment from all sides and angles. Hogwarts castle will appear before your eyes. Hold the map closer to your webcam and explore Hogsmeade and see the Hogwarts Express. Blow on your computer’s microphone and the banners on the map will wave.

No details or screenshots yet.

via MuggleNet | The World’s #1 Harry Potter Site – Deathly Hallows, Half-Blood Prince, JK Rowling, and much more.

Science augmented reality, harry potter, usatoday

Actuality Systems made the Perspecta Display. This machine allowed 3-D visualizations to be shown without the use of goggles. It accomplished this by first taking a 3-D model and breaking it down into 2-D still images, each from a slightly different angle. These 2-D images were then projected on a display spinning at 720 revolutions per second. I called it a blender. Others called it a crystal ball. Can you tell I never was a fan of this company? I followed the company because it was part of my day job, and I always hoped something bigger and better would come from them. Anyway, today I received the following email from them.

As a former customer, partner, or supporter of Actuality- real 360 degree 3D display, we want to provide you with a personal update on the status of the firm.

In December 2009 Actuality reached an agreement with optical product development firm Optics For Hire. OFH, which employs Actuality’s founder Gregg Favalora, acquired the following:

• The remaining inventory of Perspecta Spatial 3-D display systems (100 megapixel, floating-image, walk around, no eyewear, interactive, video systems)

• The entire IP portfolio including 19 patents

• IP and patent applications related to improved guidance and visualization of soft tissue surgical procedures, and operating room data demonstrating breakthroughs in low dose rate prostate brachytherapy

Given the value in these 3-D display and medical visualization technologies, OFH has/is:

• Signed a licensing agreement with a radiation therapy equipment provider (related to HDR) and will seek additional partners for visualization

• Begun marketing the remaining inventory of Perspecta 3-D displays

• In discussions to license or sell the 3-D display IP portfolio

If you check out the news, be sure to look at where the first link listed on the 28 Dec 09 date takes you. It makes you think that you are going to Optics for Hire, but instead it goes to Seth Godin’s blog. Seth Godin is an author of business books, and as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with Actuality or Optics for Hire. They fixed the link.

via : Actuality Medical: News

Hardware 3d

HardOCP managed to get their hands on some benchmark slides from Nvidia, showing the power within the upcoming GF100 ‘Fermi’ based video card.  While HardOCP didn’t run these benchmarks themselves, so they probably lack customizations & performance tweaks that bring the AMD counterpart to a slightly closer match, the comparisons are startling.  Just check out these two charts for beginners:

That’s a 4x performance boost in geometry shaders (tested by using 6 cubemap environment maps in a single render pass), and roughly a 1.5x-2x boost in framerate in the Unigine benchmark.  See the rest at their site.

GF100 Official Benchmarks Unearthed – Expreview.com.

Hardware benchmark, gf100, nvidia

The newest WHQL Drivers from NVidia seem to have an interesting “new feature”: It disables Overclocking.

Yesterday NVIDIA updated its GeForce/ION driver to 196.21 WHQL version which includes SLI and multi-GPU support for many new gaming titles as well as some bug fixes, but several users have found that after upgrade they’re unable to overclock any more.

Expreview did a small test to check out if it’s true. We run the test with Galaxy GeForce GT240 under Windows 7 64-bit operating system, and used the following four popular overclocking utilities to see what would happen.

They test 4 popular overclocking packages, and 3 of them fail in various interesting ways.  It’s currently unknown if this intentional or accidental, but definately something to pay attention to.

via NVIDIA 196.21 WHQL Driver Disables Users to Overclock – Expreview.com.

Hardware driver, nvidia

Comparison of 4 Pico-Projectors, Click for full-size

Syndiant CEO Mark Harward has posted on the company blog about one of their demonstrations at CES, the SYL2041 pico-projector compared against three other technologies.

We are very proud to be the industry leader in providing high resolution pico projectors panels, and we are rapidly forging a path to true HD pico projectors enabled by our breakthrough VueG8TM technology. The best way to emphasize our leadership, superior resolution and image quality was to demonstrate a projector with our SYL2041 simultaneously against other pico projectors display technologies. As you can see in the photos, our technology is more advanced, and we know consumers are not going to spend their hard-earned money on pico projectors that provide obsolete, 25 year old display resolutions.

Also, they discuss the Foryou Multimedia pico-projector display that uses their SYL2061, the first Wide SVGA Resolution pico-projector, and some other announcements made after CES.  Hopefully, these will be coming to mainstream devices soon, as I’ld love to get my hands on one for some proper testing.

via Syndiant – World’s Smallest, Highest Resolution imagers for Pico Projectors | Blog.

Hardware pico, projector, syndiant