Vimeo has a pretty impressive 3D channel, collecting various 3D videos from around the internet. In fact, they have a great double-HD (3840×1080) video of an Okinawan Dancer in 3D for side-by-side viewing. The resolution is twice as wide as 1080p, meaning you’ll need either:
The video is available for download as a big 450MB video file.
Thanks to Tony DeYoung for tipping me off to a new eSeminar on Acrobat X & 3D PDF. You may remember that back in May, Adobe announced they were outsourcing all of the 3D Capabilities in Acrobat to Tech Soft 3D, but I haven’t heard anything else about it since then. Sounds like things are going well, and the eSeminar sounds like it will have some good demonstrations as well.
Join Joel Geraci, Technical Evangelist, from Adobe and Craig Trudgeon, Chief Technology Officer for Tetra 4D as they talk about what’s new with Acrobat X and 3D PDF technologies. In this eSeminar, you’ll learn how Acrobat X will save time and help you standardize your product data exchange and design review processes in manufacturing. You’ll also see a demonstration of the new 3D PDF Converter plug-in for Acrobat X Pro from Tetra 4D, with updated support for the most current versions of CAD applications such as CATIA V5R20, PRO/E Wildfire 5.0 and Siemens Parasolid 23.
Those of you with Fermi-cards can head on over to NVidia’s site to download the new ‘Endless City’ DX11 Tessellation demo. They demo’ed this at GTC a few weeks back and it really is amazing to see how far they can push the tessellation in the new hardware.
Let the machines take over!
Our Endless City demo starts with a few dozen building blocks and uses an L-System to assemble these into complex structures, buildings, whole city blocks, and finally a sprawling and boundless megalopolis.
At any given time, there are hundreds of thousands of on-screen objects. The super-efficient NVIDIA® Tessellation engine scales the number of polygons for each object according to its surface detail and proximity to the camera . . . real-time,
high-resolution displacement.
So while you enjoy a leisurely glide through the city, the NVIDIA® GeForce® powering your flight will be churning through over 600 million polygons per second. Better yet, there will still be enough power to keep the lights running . . . hundreds of thousands of them, all lighting the scene dynamically.
All you need to do is sit back and enjoy the view.
Highlights of the demo include:
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• Tessellation enables a continuous ramp on the level of detail, more than doubling the total triangle count and providing up to a 500x increase in detail on the nearest objects.
• Three dimensional displacement maps allow greater detail than simple height maps.
• The demo positions and renders over 600 million triangles per second with a single GPU.
• The city is procedurally generated. The buildings are constructed from a small set of objects into a city of complex structures using a set of rules called an L-system.
• In the area surrounding the viewer, over a million meshes are arranged by the L-system, including roughly 500,000 light sources.
• As the viewer moves, the demo endlessly (hence the name) generates more of the city to keep the viewer surrounded by buildings.
• The L-system randomly selects elements to assemble so each block looks different from the last but if you return to a place you saw before, it’ll regenerate the same buildings you saw previously.
• Split screen rendering modes operate in eye space so they look correct in 3D Vision.
• Screen-space ambient occlusion enables high quality shading on randomly generated and dynamic geometry which cannot be accomplished with precomputed texture maps.
• Dynamic lighting on everything; can shift from day to night.
Recommended System:
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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 500 series GPU
2.6 GHz Quad core CPU
4 GB System memory
300 MB Hard drive space
Microsoft Windows Vista or Windows 7
Folks in the network graphing space might want to check out the latest Gephi plugin ‘OpenOrd’, specially designed to layout datasets over 1-million nodes in mere seconds.
Features:
Very fast, scales to millions nodes
Can be run in parallel, run it on multicore processors
Aims to highlight clusters
The video is impressive, although one has to ask what can you see in a mess of a graph for 1-million points? Edge Bundles anyone?
OpenOrd Layout Demo in Gephi from gephi on Vimeo.
via OpenOrd: New layout plugin, the fastest algorithm so far | Gephi.
I’ve just received an interesting rumor from a reputable source about some of the goings-on inside NVidia. It seems that, due to lack of a market, they will be trimming their drivers to only support 8 GPUs per system image instead of 16.
If you’re not aware, NVidia’s drivers right now allow you to run 16 GPU’s on a single computer simultaneously. The only real reason you’ld want to do this is for massive GPGPU work, and in the HPC arena there are some interesting uses. Companies like ScaleMP allow you to cluster multiple computers into a “single system image”, effectively turning a small cluster into one giant SMP machine, coagulating all of the resources together. Companies like SGI with their UltraViolet offering do it as well, but in hardware, allowing you to take a giant Rack of equipment and run it as one giant computer, or lots of individual computers, depending on the application. Right now, users can slap 16 GPU’s in an SGI UltraViolet machine and access all 16 of them from their 1 OS install, reaping the benefits of simple pthreads and shared memory (rather than something more complex like MPI). In fact, several of the larger labs have been pushing NVidia to raise the limit so that they can add more GPU’s to their machines. Now, NVidia is going the other direction.
This is a tricky subject. Yes, the market for 16+ GPU’s in a Single System image is small, but it’s a market with very deep pockets and a market that is at the forefront of what you can do with GPGPU computing. While they’ll probably save money on reduced driver development , they’re going to burn a bit of their credibility with the HPC community if this really happens.
Also, they might wind up alienating a few of their vendor partners. Folks like NextIO are preparing big PCI Express Expansion Chassis’ that will allow up to 24 GPU’s to be connected to a single PC. I’m sure they were hoping the driver limit would go up rather than down as well.
I’ve got a call out to NVidia for any more details.. I’ll update when I hear more.
Update 8:14pm: Lots of information from multiple sources.
First off, seems I might have been mistaken in some of my comments above. Currently, only 8 GPUs are supported in most platforms but vendors have been promising 12 and eventually 16 in the near future. So the “Reduction” to 8 is really just a freeze at the current capabilities.
Then, an official response from Nvidia (which isn’t really surprising given the above correction):
NVIDIA has never offered support for 16 GPUs within a single image, so nothing has been ‘trimmed’.
As NVIDIA has demonstrated in the past, we pay close attention to the needs of our customers. If we see significant market demand for this functionality, then we will re-evaluate the need to support it.
So, it’s disappointing to see things stopping at 8 GPUs per image, although the usage of such systems is pretty small. Hopefully, tho, more systems will come online (either in super-workstations, UltraViolets, or PCI Expansion chassis) and they’ll re-evaluate this.
Virtual Environments in training are a frequent topic of research, but an article in the Washington Post actually gets down to the detail of one in real use: Surgical Training at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
For example, the University of Maryland Medical Center has transformed an entire wing of its seventh floor into the Maryland Advanced Simulation, Training, Research and Innovation (MASTRI) Center, which officially opened at the end of 2006 and has been growing ever since. Every Tuesday, surgical residents meet for training in once-functional operating rooms converted into simulation labs. The trainees are presented an emergency scenario — say, a “patient” with a blocked airway — and must respond using either a virtual reality computer program or a hybrid that includes a mannequin simulator.
There is still lots of research to determine how best to integrate these patient simulators into surgical training, but it sounds like they’re making great strides. However, the article lost a little bit of credibility from me with this phrase on Page 2:
At Johns Hopkins, Gregory Hager, a computer science professor who researches medical devices, is using the da Vinci Surgical System — the only robot approved by the FDA to help perform minimally invasive surgery — to deconstruct surgical procedures into measurable components and imitable parts.
Now, in my previous life I worked for a medical robotics company (not the da Vinci, however) and I learned a few things:
As the FDA is a government entity, it never “approves” anything because that would mean the government was endorsing a product (which they won’t do) and they would be liable if something went wrong (which they don’t want to be), so they just ‘clear’ it. It’s a fine point, but an important one.
Anyway, the article goes into some good detail about the concerns and successes of virtual patient training, should be worth reading.
via Playing doctor: Learning about slips of the knife better on ‘patients’ than patients.
NVidia is a few years late to the party, but at last week’s PDXLAN event announced that the upcoming GTX580 would come complete with Vapor Chamber Cooling technology, guaranteed to keep the card cooler and quieter under load.
The cooler is quite interesting this time as Nvidia decided to go for Vapor chamber cooling technology and made some quite bold claims regarding the noise output of the upcoming card. The cooler itself is pretty simple, at least if you had a chance to see one of the vapor chamber based coolers, as Sapphire did that a couple of times on its AMD based card
AMD did this a few years back, and other technology has played around with it. Hopefully it’ll stick around for NVidia.
Also, they demonstrated the new card playing the upcoming ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops‘ game, with impressive results.
Over at BenchmarkReviews they put the new “Call of Duty Black Ops” ProGaming Glasses through their paces. The glasses are actually just rebranded Gunnar’s, glasses specifically made for extended computer usage through colored lenses & special construction. I’ve been eying a pair of Gunnars for quite some time, although I would need prescription ones which seem to clock in around $400 or more, but his final conclusion does make it a bit more tempting.
Would I pay $79.99 for a pair of glasses that improve clarity and reduce eye strain? Before experiencing the positive effects first hand, I would have certainly been skeptical. However, in the aftermath of several sixteen hour days behind my computer while wearing the Mad Catz Call of Duty: Black Ops ProGaming glasses, I would gladly pay the asking price without thinking twice. If it were an option, I would also go back and ask my expensive laser eye surgeon to give me a Mad Catz ProGaming Riddick-style shine job… which cost a lot more than twenty menthol Kools.
So, $80 vs $400 is still a big difference, but I’m glad to hear they actually do most of what they claim.
We start this week’s daily selection with some environmental infographics, starting with The Guardian’s take on the Climate Change Vulnerability Index 2011, followed by The Climate Change‘s pollution price tagging. From The Scientific American comes the controversial graphical view of limited lab testing of some chemicals in America, and The Health News Daily brings some more U.S. adult cigarette smoking population statistics. We close with the interesting Mexican drug cartel Network Map, made by Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán and featured on the Edge.org.
A special thanks today to some of the VizWorld Sponsors, without which I wouldn’t be able to continue to bring you the great news, insights, and fun finds here on a daily basis.
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