Mark Kilgard has followed up last year’s GTC presentation on OpenGL3.2 with a new presentation on OpenGL4.1. I’ve embedded it above for you to see.
Presented as a pre-conference tutorial at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose on September 20, 2010. Learn about NVIDIA’s OpenGL 4.1 functionality available now on Fermi-based GPUs.
In the presentation he covers some of the new OpenGL profiling and debugging tools you can find in Parallel NSight, Cg3.0, and much more in the 113 slides. It’s also posted online for downloas as a 17Meg PPT file. Developers can download NVidia’s beta OpenGL4.1 driver here. Gtc 2010 open_gl.
Created by AnOther Magazine with artist and filmmaker Baillie Walsh, KM3D-1 stars Kate Moss. The work continues Moss and Walsh’s journey into experimental, multi-dimensional image-making, first seen in their legendary holographic film for Alexander McQueen’s autumn/winter 2006 show.
With a performance that recalls the fantastical cinema of Ray Harryhausen, James Bidgood and Kenneth Anger, KM3D-1 places at its centre one of the most iconic female figures of the modern age. Suspended in time and space, Kate is caught inexorably in the parallax gap; a butterfly in a spider’s web.
Captured at 1,000 frames per second – a speed so slow that movement is almost imperceptible – the beauty of Kate’s face appears frozen, transforming her into an impenetrable deity. She is a figure of contemporary fantasy, shattering her own self-image.
Made with state-of-the-art Phantom cameras, specially built for the project to create extreme slow motion and a dramatic 3D effect, KM3D-1 reflects AnOther Magazine’s raison d’etre: to champion creatives pushing the limits of what seems possible.
Lots of interesting companies here at Nvidia’s GPU Conference and Scaleform certainly fits the bill but not in an obvious way. They are the leading provider of Flash-based user interface tools and middleware for video games and consumer electronics. I usually agree that Middleware is boring but it is a UI for No Glasses 3D and what is interesting is the Tegra Tablets are on their roadmap, phones are first but Tegra tablets are definitely there. Scaleform GFx combines the performance of hardware accelerated 3D graphics technology with Adobe Flash tools to rapidly create immersive 3D UI. So when gaming companies are ready, they’ll have this middleware to help bring us games just a little bit quicker.
Which would you rather see: Anna Kournikova in 3-D in the latest Maxim magazine or the new Honda CR-Z ad? The truth of the matter is that I do not like the color shifting with the red-cyan glasses, either with Anna Kournikova or the Honda CR-Z ad, or anything else. However, having Anna and the Honda in 3-D does make for a good gimmick to sell magazines. I just think that the 2-D pictures look better.
Using a new 3-D technology called a Phantaglyph, Honda is creating print advertising that makes the car seem to rise off the page. With 3-D glasses, the Phantaglyph appears more lifelike than other 3-D renderings. The first ad will appear in Maxim next to an article about former professional tennis player Anna Kournikova.
This false-color composite image, constructed from data obtained by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, shows Saturn’s rings and southern hemisphere. The composite image was made from 65 individual observations by Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer in the near-infrared portion of the light spectrum on Nov. 1, 2008. The observations were each six minutes long.
In this image constructed from data collected in the near-infrared wavelengths of light, scientists designated blue to indicate sunlight reflected at a wavelength of 2 microns, green to indicate sunlight reflected at 3 microns and red to indicate thermal emission at 5 microns. Saturn’s rings reflect sunlight at 2 microns, but not at 3 and 5 microns, so they appear deep blue. Saturn’s high altitude haze reflects sunlight at both 2 and 3 microns, but not at 5 microns, and so it appears green to blue-green. The heat emission from the interior of Saturn is only seen at 5 microns wavelength in the spectrometer data, and thus appears red. The dark spots and banded features in the image are clouds and small storms that outline the deeper weather systems and circulation patterns of the planet. They are illuminated from underneath by Saturn’s thermal emission, and thus appear in silhouette.
Think that Nvidia GPUs are just for playing games on, or for being used for GPGPU in the HPC field? Think again. Nvidia’s blog is reporting on several talks from their GPU Technology Conference that they held in San Jose, CA. One of those talks was on the topic of using Nvidia’s GPUs for processing sound, specifically, surround sound.
In a talk for audio professionals, Nicolas Tsingos, of Dolby Laboratories, described the inroads GPUs are making in 3D audio rendering and simulations. His presentation, “Interactive 3D Audio Rendering Systems” covered the ways that GPUs can be used in audio processing and in creating simulations of the way acoustics sound in three-dimensional environments.
Starting with an overview of GPUs and parallelism, Tsingos showed how he and other acoustical researchers have applied many-core processors to acoustical simulation challenges, and then shared optimization secrets they’ve learned along the way. They have found that, depending on the scenario, GPUs can accelerate processing speeds by 2x to 300x versus using CPUs on their own.
GraphicsMania has a nice compilation of resources for anyone interested in getting into the 3D Computer Graphics space. They cover first software and tools, then move through a lengthy list of important criteria for each one and then resources for training and tutorials on each.
Computer graphics have progressed significantly since the 1950s; we are now at a stage where photorealistic 3D images can be created using commercially available tools. We are in an era where 3D artists are in high demand and low supply presenting excellent opportunities for those with a creative flair to build a successful career in the industry.
Bob Zigon is developed a software program, called Kaluza, that can detect potential cancer cells in the body. By using Nvidia’s Tesla GPUs, the software can detect those cancer cells much faster. The one question that I have is left unanswered. Just because you detect cancer cells does not mean that you will get cancer and die from it. There are several cancers that doctors just leave alone because it never harms the patient. The trick is to know which is which. Still, it interests me, and is something that I would like to know more about.
He and his team use lasers to analyze cells. Through light diffraction, Kaluza can measure attributes of the cells, their internal and external characteristics, and, more importantly, the presence and absence of certain proteins. With Tesla GPUs, Kaluza has vastly greater, faster visibility into each cell. Why does this matter? Well, I’ll answer that with a question: How would it change your life, or lives of people you love, if you could just walk into a doctor’s office, get a quick screen for cancerous cells, and walk away knowing the results?
Zigon’s final, somewhat indirect, request to NVIDIA was to “just build hardware that is infinitely fast and let me look at every cell.” His dream is that infinitely capable computers will detect all cancer cells in every human being on earth, before these cells become dangerous.
Dust ground off icy bodies in the Kuiper Belt, the cold-storage zone that includes Pluto and millions of other objects, creates a faint infrared disk potentially visible to alien astronomers looking for planets around the sun. Neptune’s gravitational imprint on the dust is always detectable in new simulations of how this dust moves through the solar system. By ramping up the collision rate, the simulations show how the distant view of the solar system might have changed over its history.
GraphicsMania has a nice compilation of resources for anyone interested in getting into the 3D Computer Graphics space. They cover first software and tools, then move through a lengthy list of important criteria for each one and then resources for training and tutorials on each.
VizWorld.com 
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