Microsoft’s DirectX11 came with big fanfare for tesselation, compute shaders, and several other features, however there are many more tiny features that have gone largely unnoticed by the larger community. Over at the Danger Zone they take a look at some of these like Conservative Depth Output and Programmable Interpolation that even the simplest of applications can benefit from.
1. Conservative depth output: this is something you use for pixel shaders that manually output a depth value. Basically rather than using SV_Depth, you use a variant that also specifiea an inequality. For instance SV_DepthGreater, or SV_DepthLessEqual. The depth you output from the shader must then satisfy the inequality relative to the interpolated depth of the rasterized triangle (if you don’t, the depth value is clamped for you). This allows the GPU to still use early-z cull, since it can still trivially reject pixels for cases where the depth test will always fail for the specified upper/lower bound. So for instance if you render a quad and output DepthGreaterEqual, the GPU can cull pixels where the quad’s depth is greater than the depth buffer value. Don’t bother looking for this one in the documentation…it’s not in there.
Google has a neat & simple tool online as part of their massive Google Books undertaking called the ‘Ngram Viewer’. Simply enter a comma-delimited list of words and see the frequency of those words in printed literature going back to the 1800′s and earlier. In the example above I compare ‘napoleon’ to ‘caesar’, and you can see how prior to 1920 Napoleon was pretty popular, but afterwards Caesar takes over.
The “Google Million”. All are in English with dates ranging from 1500 to 2008. No more than about 6000 books were chosen from any one year, which means that all of the scanned books from early years are present, and books from later years are randomly sampled. The random samplings reflect the subject distributions for the year (so there are more computer books in 2000 than 1980). Books with low OCR quality were removed, and serials were removed.
Our own Tiago Veloso has another post up on InspiredMag where he reveals a few of his secret sources for infographics and visuals.
As the Christmas Season arrives, and 2010 comes to an end, nothing more proper than a “gift” for all you awesome Inspired readers. No, I’m not making a Christmas infographic round-up this time, as perhaps some of you might expected for my monthly contribution. Instead, today I bring a selection of Infographic blogs that are not as popular as the main ones, simply because most of them are new, but nevertheless, worth following. So, I hope you enjoy this selection, and add some of these blogs to your must-read list.
The Noun Project aims to build a complete language with simple, clear, and concise visuals of common things. Many of them are obvious and already in use in various signs and such, but several are more difficult. For example, how does one visualize ‘Handle with Care’? Or distinguish ‘Car Rental’ from ‘Car’ ? It’s a tricky problem, and they have some clever solutions.
All of the visuals are available in vendor SVG format, and are freely available under a Creative Commons license.
The New York Times has an article on ESPN’s 3-D broadcast of the Miami Heat and the Knicks at Madison Square Garden. This is the first N.B.A. game broadcast in 3-D. As such it is interesting to note that it takes two people to operate a 3-D camera. The first person is in charge of pointing the camera to follow the action on the court. The second cameraman is called a convergence engineer. They focus the camera on the action. The article has more information on some of the challenges that are faced in shooting an N.B.A. game in 3-D:
3-D cameras have to pan slower than standard cameras, because of the more complex focus issues. In a game where the ball was moving up and down the court quickly, there were times when they could not keep up.
While I am not a huge fan of 3-D, I think that a lot of these issues will be resolved. What remains to be seen is whether consumers will watch 3-D, or is this just another fad like the 50′s and 80′s.
This isn’t really Viz related, but I know we have a lot of science and astronomy geeks reading here, so I wanted to share this rare event! Tonight will be a rare 72-minute long Lunar Eclipse!
The eclipse begins on Tuesday morning, Dec. 21st, at 1:33 am EST (Monday, Dec. 20th, at 10:33 pm PST). At that time, Earth’s shadow will appear as a dark-red bite at the edge of the lunar disk. It takes about an hour for the “bite” to expand and swallow the entire Moon. Totality commences at 02:41 am EST (11:41 pm PST) and lasts for 72 minutes.
We have been talking for awhile about ATI’s Eyefinity and how great it is for gaming. Recently AMD has enable 5×1 Eyefinity where the screens are set up in portrait mode instead of landscape mode. Widescreengamingforum.com has posted a nice video showing off the benefits of this new Eyefinity mode, assuming you have the money to purchase such a setup.
This demo real shows setting up the new Eyefinity 5×1-Portrait Eyefinity mode. It also shows off footage of: - Heaven Demo (v1) - HAWX - Half-Life 2 - Just Cause 2 - Battle Forge
running on five screens. The gameplay video is off an HD Cam, so you can see how it looks while playing.
Note that while you are seeing screens in a 1080p video, the actual setup spans a diagonal of approximately five feet. You’d have to play the video on a 60″ TV and sit about 18″ from it to get the full immersion. The setup is 5x1080x1920 – 10.4M pixels. These five 1080p screens offer 5 the pixels and resolution of an HDTV.
Oliver Kreylos has taken a Microsoft Kinect and used it as a 3-D camera to for a pseudo-holographic 3-D video chat. Obviously this is just a proof of concept, and still has a way to go, but it sure does look interesting. Now if they could only keep her face from tearing in two. I find that a bit, distracting.
Real-time “holographic” video chat using two Kinect cameras to capture one participant, and a custom compression algorithm and network protocol to stream the resulting 3D video data across the Internet.
The other side of the conversation was filmed off a consumer 3D TV with a regular video camera; I apologize for the bad video quality.
Note: the Wiimote was not used for head tracking; only to control the program and to move through the virtual space.
The network protocol uses lossless compression using a Hilbert-curve traversal and run-length and delta encoding for the depth stream, and a Theora video codec for the color stream. The resulting bandwidth is about 750 kB/s for one Kinect camera.
The 3D office model was provided by VITAL Environments.
Commuting by car can be really expensive in America, and our first graphic of the week, brought by Bundle, shows us in which cities its best and worst. We then cross the Atlantic to take a look at Great Britain’s great Big Debt, with a help from Money.co.uk, and with an explanation of new tuition increases in the UK, by Postgrad. From Tech King comes a look at the most popular fonts by Operating System, and to close today’s selection, My Coupon Codes questions the effectiveness of Groupon’s promotions for business.
Microsoft’s DirectX11 came with big fanfare for tesselation, compute shaders, and several other features, however there are many more tiny features that have gone largely unnoticed by the larger community. Over at the Danger Zone they take a look at some of these like Conservative Depth Output and Programmable Interpolation that even the simplest of applications can benefit from.
Google has a neat & simple tool online as part of their massive Google Books undertaking called the ‘Ngram Viewer’. Simply enter a comma-delimited list of words and see the frequency of those words in printed literature going back to the 1800′s and earlier. In the example above I compare ‘napoleon’ to ‘caesar’, and you can see how prior to 1920 Napoleon was pretty popular, but afterwards Caesar takes over.
Our own Tiago Veloso has another post up on InspiredMag where he reveals a few of his secret sources for infographics and visuals.
The Noun Project aims to build a complete language with simple, clear, and concise visuals of common things. Many of them are obvious and already in use in various signs and such, but several are more difficult. For example, how does one visualize ‘Handle with Care’? Or distinguish ‘Car Rental’ from ‘Car’ ? It’s a tricky problem, and they have some clever solutions.
This isn’t really Viz related, but I know we have a lot of science and astronomy geeks reading here, so I wanted to share this rare event! Tonight will be a rare 72-minute long Lunar Eclipse!
Commuting by car can be really expensive in America, and our first graphic of the week, brought by 
VizWorld.com 
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