The New York Times brings us the sad news that Benoit Mandelbrot, famous mathematician and creator of the ‘fractal’, passes away Thursday after a bout with pancreantic cancer.
Dr. Mandelbrot traced his work on fractals to a question he first encountered as a young researcher: how long is the coast of Britain? The answer, he was surprised to discover, depends on how closely one looks. On a map an island may appear smooth, but zooming in will reveal jagged edges that add up to a longer coast. Zooming in further will reveal even more coastline.
“Here is a question, a staple of grade-school geometry that, if you think about it, is impossible,” Dr. Mandelbrot told The New York Times earlier this year in an interview. “The length of the coastline, in a sense, is infinite.”
I’m sure everyone in computer graphics has played with a Mandelbrot fractal generator. RIP.
In an interesting turn for NASA, they’ve discovered that the same technology they use to enhance long-distance images returned from their many satellite and telescopes can be used to scan things much closer to home: Mammograms.
“My original concept was geared to Earth science,” Tilton said. “I never thought it would be used for medical imaging.” In fact, he initially was skeptical; that is, until he processed cell images and was able to see details not visible in unprocessed displays of the image. “The cell features stood out real clearly and this made me realize that Barton was onto to something.”
They’re announcing this in coordination with Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Shown above, the left image is what doctors and medical experts typically see in a Mammogram result, while the right image is NASA’s enhanced version. Named the ‘MED-SEG’ system, it’s already in use at a few places like the New York University Medical Center, Yale-New Haven Medical Center, and the University of Maryland Medical Center.
They are already working on a 3D version of the algorithm.
An article over on GameDev.net from Dzmitry Malyshau starts off light with a discussion of Particle Systems and pitches a way to build Particle Systems that run entirely on the GPU for blinding speed and a huge jump in the number of concurrent particles. Then he adapts this to do Fur simulation, and finally adds lighting effects. In the end, he has a simulation of 50,000 connected hair strands running in real-time at 24fps.
Due to the fact that each fur strand is rendered independently, the vertex processing load may be higher than that of shells for some scenes. However, fur rendering operation is generally fill-rate limited (not counting the artificial test-case). This, combined with Unified Shading Architecture of the current-generation GPUs, balances increased vertex load with an absence of the pixel shader overhead on empty areas.
Get all the gory details and pseudocode at the link below.
With a trick similar to the Infiniti M unveiling, these guys brought the Toyota Auris to live in the “Get Your Energy Back Campaign.”. A lonely Auris parked in an alley comes to life with some clever projected overlays from 7 nearby projectors, at first transforming then unveiling the various electrical and power systems.
If you watch the Making Of video below, you’ll see some of the Maya UI in how it was built.
FirstPartner has some large “Market Maps” Available for download for several interesting markets like Augmented Reality, Location Services, and Mobile Media. The maps are available as large-sized PDF’s in a watermarked free version and paid printable version.
To “buy” the free ones, you will have to supply a name and email. The price is a bit high (65 €) but they would make nice wall-posters.
The Human Media Lab has some rough plans on how to build your own rudimentary spherical display using a short-throw projector, half-sphere convex mirror, and some cleverly utilized webcams.
Our spherical display prototype is a low cost, easy to build setup that can be constructed in a short time with easily available parts. The sphere detects touches using a diffused illumination (http://wiki.nuigroup.com/Diffused_Illumination) approach to multi-touch sensing, a popular approach in the DIY community. To project over the entire surface of the sphere a projector is pointed at a half sphere convex mirror mounted at the top of the sphere . This mirror also allows the infrared camera to sense touches at any location on the sphere.
They couple it with the open-source ‘Community Core Vision’ project and a modified Screen Capture plugin to put the entire desktop of a Mac system on the sphere and allow some basic multi-touch interaction. You can see some use cases in the video below. (Unfortunately, it’s a very low-quality video but you get the point).
Exlevel has a new tool called ‘GrowFX’ for 3dsMax that allows you to interactively “grow” trees in your scene that can animate with the wind and grow around objects.
GrowFX lets you create broadleaf trees, conifers, palm trees, flowers, ivy and many other vegetational compositions. Its unique model building tools will help you create creeping plants, entwining scene objects, and shearing plants of any shape. Plants may bend around different objects.
The results look beautiful. However, I suspect it won’t work well for a “forest” of thousands of trees, that probably remains the realm of tools like Speedtree. Perhaps a good mix of GrowFX for the large trees in front, and Speedtree to fill in the background. Just a thought.
The New York Times brings us the sad news that Benoit Mandelbrot, famous mathematician and creator of the ‘fractal’, passes away Thursday after a bout with pancreantic cancer.
In an interesting turn for NASA, they’ve discovered that the same technology they use to enhance long-distance images returned from their many satellite and telescopes can be used to scan things much closer to home: Mammograms.
The Human Media Lab has some rough plans on how to build your own rudimentary spherical display using a short-throw projector, half-sphere convex mirror, and some cleverly utilized webcams.
VizWorld.com 
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