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Typically when we think of programming GPUs, we think of NVidia and CUDA. However, a new standard is taking hold that allows people to program heterogeneous devices, not just GPUs and CPUs. This standard is called OpenCL, which stands for Open Computer Language. OpenCL will work just fine on NVidia GPUs, as well as GPUs from AMD. [H]ard|OCP has an article today what AMD is doing with OpenCL. Included in that article are five videos. Hit the link to read the article and see the videos.

via [H]ard|OCP : Geeking Out with AMD and OpenCL

Science amd, opencl

Petavoxel broke out his Olympus FE-26 12-megapixel camera and took a picture of the beautiful snow, and found the resulting image.. Well, it’s crap, just plain crap.  He took it upon himself to deal what might be the best blow against the ‘megapixel wars’ underway amongst low-end point-and-shoot camera providers, complete with some detailed math and optical physics.

So, is Olympus just the crappiest manufacturer ever? Well, I will concede that the lens on this camera seems to be particularly poor. Look at that crazy color fringing!

But when it comes to the smudgy lack of detail, the problem is the same as with every other compact camera today—too many pixels.

The FE-26 is a “12 megapixel” model (actually it’s more like 11.8 Mp) using a 1/2.33″ sensor. This means each pixel is about 1.5 microns wide. When pixels are that small, the random difference in photon counts between adjacent pixels can add quite a bit of noise to the image. To solve this, the camera’s processor chip applies a noise-suppressing algorithm, which unfortunately smears out all the fine detail and texture in the scene.

Admittedly, different camera companies can be more or less clever about their noise-reduction processing. This one looks especially bad, but it nicely illustrates the kinds of artifacts that can result.

But what’s clear is that the surplus megapixels of this camera are certainly not delivering additional image detail. And as you increase the ISO or stop down the lens, quality will only get worse.

As I discussed last time, 1.5 micron pixels are always going to struggle with diffraction blur. The theoretical minimum size for a light spot focused by an f/3.7 lens is 5 microns. Stopping down the lens makes the diffraction blur larger.

Read the full story, and more examples, at his blog.

via The Great Megapixel Swindle: An Example « Petavoxel.

Hardware, Science optic, photography

No doubt, GPU acceleration is here to stay.  As graphics cards continue to add cores and systems like Fermi push the limits of what’s possible, we will continue to see it making inroads into our day-to-day applications.  This weeks’s recommended resources go out to all of you programmers and software developers who may need to brush up on one of the big standards in GPU computing: OpenCL.

First up is the latest edition of ‘Introduction To Game Development’ from Steve Rabin.

Welcome to Introduction to Game Development, Second Edition, the new edition of the book that combines the wisdom and expertise of more than twenty game industry professionals to give you a unique introduction to all aspects of game development, from design to programming to business and production. Organized around the curriculum guidelines of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), the book is divided into seven independent sections, each featuring articles written by the experts on those topics. Suitable for both an introductory game development course or as a reference for game developers and designers, the book offers coverage of all the key concepts and ideas that encompass game development, while providing real-life examples and practical insight. Fully revised for today’s technology, this second edition features an expanded section on game design, a new chapter on game writing and interactive storytelling, and much more. And the accompanying CD-ROM contains all the source code, demos, art files, and other materials referenced throughout the book. Introduction to Game Development, Second Edition is a must-have resource for anyone who wants to understand the entire game development process.

In addition, you might want to brush up on massive parallel programming strategies, with ‘The Art of Concurrency’ by Clary Breshears:

If you’re looking to take full advantage of multi-core processors with concurrent programming, this practical book provides the knowledge and hands-on experience you need. The Art of Concurrency is one of the few resources to focus on implementing algorithms in the shared-memory model of multi-core processors, rather than just theoretical models or distributed-memory architectures. The book provides detailed explanations and usable samples to help you transform algorithms from serial to parallel code, along with advice and analysis for avoiding mistakes that programmers typically make when first attempting these computations.

Written by an Intel engineer with over two decades of parallel and concurrent programming experience, this book will help you:

• Understand parallelism and concurrency
• Explore differences between programming for shared-memory and distributed-memory
• Learn guidelines for designing multithreaded applications, including testing and tuning
• Discover how to make best use of different threading libraries, including Windows threads, POSIX threads, OpenMP, and Intel Threading Building Blocks
• Explore how to implement concurrent algorithms that involve sorting, searching, graphs, and other practical computations

The Art of Concurrency shows you how to keep algorithms scalable to take advantage of new processors with even more cores. For developing parallel code algorithms for concurrent programming, this book is a must.

You can find these books, and several others, in the VizWorld.com Store!

Science feature, opencl, resource of the week

Video cameras have become integrated into many devices. Intel is looking to take advantage of these video cameras for gesture based interaction. Intel’s Tony Chun describes mobile augmented reality for develping accelerators to be used in smart phones for image recognition and speech recognition. You can hit the link below for a two minute video describing the technology. From Intel’s website:

As video cameras are integrated into more devices from laptops to phones, computer vision capabilities have become increasingly attractive to enable applications such as gesture-based user interfaces and augmented reality. Intel has demonstrated a functional, reconfigurable hardware accelerator to enable advanced vision capabilities on mobile devices. This research from Intel Labs, St. Petersburg explores the automated design of reconfigurable accelerators based on tools-aided application analysis targeting computationally-intensive media workloads such as the SURF object recognition algorithm.

via Intel : Computer Vision Accelerator

Science computer, intel, vision

No doubt that Haitians right now need help.  From the original 7.2 earthquake, the dozen 5.0 aftershocks, and last night’s 6.0 aftershock, the place is in ruins.  If you want to help, then get yourself some Apple or iPhone software in the process with indie+relief. They’ve got lots of applications, and here’s some of interest possibly to the VizWorld community:

buy for$49.95 Acorn Flying Meat flyingmeat.com

Acorn is an image editor built for the Mac with simplicity in mind. Fast, easy, and fluid, Acorn provides the tools you need to alter and enhance your images, without any overhead. Acorn feels right, it won’t drain your bank account, and you don’t need a Ph.D. in computer graphics to use it.

buy for$29 Clipstart Riverfold Software riverfold.com

Clipstart helps you discover and organize your own videos. Import your videos from the iPhone 3GS, Nano, Flip, and other video cameras, then tag, search, and upload with one click to Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube, and Twitter. You can even upload a trimmed portion of a video without saving a new copy. Clipstart’s clean interface automatically organizes your videos by date and provides a fast tagging workflow to make sense of even large collections.

buy for$1.99 Chromixa Simon Watson chromixa.com

Chromixa is a new and unique colour-blending puzzle game, designed specifically for the iPhone and iPod touch Truly the first of its kind. Arrange shapes of light to complete beautifully designed puzzles. Based on the colours found within white light; red, green and blue combine to create new colours as shapes overlap. Like a jigsaw of light, your goal is to arrange the shapes to fill an outline with a single colour. As you complete puzzles, the points you earn can be used to unlock fun arcade-style mini games. Like all good puzzle games, Chromixa has a simple concept which creates progressively harder puzzles. A fun and addictive mental challenge for all ages!

buy for 99¢ wxRadar atlwx.com atlwx.com

wxRadar provides quick and easy access to all 150+ US Doppler Radars. You get a beautiful and clutter-free interface along with everything one would expect in a radar app: “locate me”, pinch zooming, radar loop, one tap full-screen, and landscape mode… But you also get a feature unique only to wxRadar: “tap and hold” to access adjacent radars. wxRadar is simple enough for all users, but if you want to dig deeper, wxRadar provides advanced options that allows you to access additional radar imagery (for example: “Storm Relative Velocity”). Many more features are planned for wxRadar this year and all updates will be free.

There’s loads more, including games, productivity tools, and much much more.  At least go check out the list, maybe you’ll find a piece of software you’ve always wondered about but haven’t wanted to fork out for.  Now you can get it, and feel good for helping out.

Indie+Relief.

Graphics, Science apple, haiti, software

The Wall Street Journal has an article today on HP showing a new “wall of touch”. This is a standard display wall comprised of six LCDs. Each LCD can be anywhere from 43″ to 46″ and is capable of 1080p resolution. Philip McKinney, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of H-P’s Personal Systems Group, showed the setup to the Journal.

He said “wall of touch” will not be widely available to consumers until 2011, and would likely come with a hefty price tag: anywhere from a couple thousand dollars up to $100,000 for more advanced systems with technologies like HD video conferencing.

I would expect that the cost would be a couple thousand dollars for a single screen, since 42″ LCDs are hovering around one thousand dollars.

via The Wall Street Journal : H-P Testing a Touchless “Wall of Touch”

Hardware displaywall, hp, touchscreen

It took CGSociety a while, but Paul Hellard has just published a big retrospective of what happened in 2009 in the CG industry.

While in 2009 the CG industry was active and progressive in many ways, last year saw the demise of many studios working in games and motion pictures. In many ways, 2009 was a watershed year. The community has now given their view on the year and the burgeoning technologies. Other suggestions were products, mergers, movies, games, shorts and even influential people.

If they pulled enough votes, they made it onto the list. Let’s cut to the chase. CGSociety presents the public-voted Top 20 CG happenings of 2009.

It’s a great list, covering technology like Stereoscopics and realistic head replacement, movies like Avatar and Cloudy, video games like Batman: Arkham Asylum and Killzone2, software like Mudbox and Maya 2010, and much much more.

via CGSociety – 2009 CG RETROSPECTIVE.

Graphics 2009, list

Tony DeYoung pointed me to an interesting post on the StudioGPU blog showing off work from Chad Wanstreet, Technical Director at Speedshape Detroit.  In the post he shows some architectural renderings made with Machstudio Pro, after modeling with 3dsMax, that were rendered in 5 separate passes in a total of 5 minutes.

“Machstudio provides me with a quick feedback loop for my concepts, and the ability to create animations very quickly, which I love. Too many of the tools which designers and architects use for quick concept work focus only on volumes and materials, and miss out on light, time and the relationship of the two.” (bold is my editorial)

It was all done on a single PC, rather than the traditional farm.  A great example of what GPU acceleration will mean in the near future.

via StudioGPU Blog: Too many of the concept tools for architects miss out on light, time and the relationship of the two.

Graphics 3dsmax, architecture, machstudio, studiogpu

Michael Deal has released a beautiful collection of visualizations of the Beatle’s history and influence on his website.

These visualizations are part of an extensive study of the music of the Beatles. Many of the diagrams and charts are based on secondary sources, including but not limited to sales statistics, biographies, recording sesion notes, sheet music, and raw audio readings.

He shows four large charts:

• Authorship & Collaboration, based on William J. Dowdling’s Beatlesongs
• Self Reference, showing how later music refers back to earlier songs
• Song Keys, showing the various keys in several songs
• The Working Schedule 1963-1966

Go check them out in all their glory, then hit the Flickr group for even more.

via Michael Deal ◊ Graphic Design.

Graphics infographic, music, timeline

Financial Infographics has a pretty infographic online showing “Consumer Fraud in the USA”.  In it they show the likelihood of being a victim of fraud, by age, the number of incidents by product, and how victims made payment in these fraudulent transactions.

Consumer Fraud in The United States |. viz Chart Porn

Graphics financial, fraud, infographic