The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has just completed a 5-year project called “Urban Photonic Sandtable Display”, or UPSD, that creates realtime, color, 360-degree 3D holographic displays. Without any special goggles, an entire team of planners can view a large-format (up to 6-foot diagonal) interactive 3D display.
UPSD is based on full-parallax technology, which enables each 3D holographic object to project the correct amount of light that the original object possessed in each direction, for full 360- degree viewing. Current 3D displays lack full-parallax and only provide 3D viewing from certain angles with typically only three to four inches of visual depth.
Looks like the technology was developed by Zebra Imaging, and is currently being deployed to an Air Force lab and two Army labs for use.
AMD is backpedaling on their earlier statements about DirectX and graphics API’s, stating that they were taken out of context. As I originally suspected, the number of developers eager (or willing?) to code to bare metal is a startling minority.
The previous interview claimed that developers want the API to “go away,” that it’s getting in the way of creating some truly amazing graphics. Huddy himself was even quoted saying that developers have admitted this in conversations. But in this latest interview, he said that only a handful of high-end gaming developers were looking to bypass DirectX and code directly to hardware.
“It’s not something most developers want,” he said. “If you held a vote among developers, they would go for DirectX or OpenGL, because it’s a great platform. It’s hard to crash a machine with Direct X, as there’s lots of protection to make sure the game isn’t taking down the machine, which is certainly rare especially compared to ten or fifteen years ago. Stability is the reason why you wouldn’t want to move away from Direct X, and differentiation is why you might want to.”
I’m sure some people want that kind of access to the hardware, but they’re predominantly in the research world. Most developers would happily trade away that tiny bit of performance for the ease of development and portability of a good api. I just don’t think DirectX is a particularly good API.
I think everyone knows by now that the amazing images NASA shows from the Hubble Telescope are actually composites made from dozens, sometimes hundreds of images. In a rare behind-the-scenes, NASA has released a timelapse of someone doing the work in the greatest of all image editors, Photoshop.
Hubble images are made, not born. Images must be woven together from the incoming data from the cameras, cleaned up and given colors that bring out features that eyes would otherwise miss. In this video from HubbleSite.org, online home of the Hubble Space Telescope, a Hubble-imaged galaxy comes together on the screen at super-fast speed.
Microsoft has created an app for your Phone that allows you to create a 3-D model of an object by simply walking around it and taking pictures. They walked around a car and took 40 pictures in order to create a fairly decent 3-D model of it. The technology does not work with objects in motion, instead the object needs to be static.
If you have the new Geforce GTX 590, then you need to be careful when overclocking the graphics card with the 267.52 drivers. Otherwise, you may burn up your card. Then again, overclocking the graphics card with 1.025 volts being sent to the core might not be that smart either. Anandtech used just 0.987 Volts on the GPU core.
IMPORTANT: The supplied Geforce Drivers 267.52 for Geforce GTX 590 will not stop the card from overheating when overclocking. Please use newer versions from the Nvidia website and stay away from 267.52. Otherwise this may happen …
Settings used during card failure: GPU Clock @ 772 MHz GPU VCore @ 1,025 V
Our last selection of the week takes a look back in time, throughout the history of technology. Before that, a quick note about the recent numbers released by Twitter, and formatted into an infographic, by Kissmetrics. Then, Tech King presents the History of Web Browsers, while the folks at Beaty of the Web focused on an Internet Explorer timeline, from the beginning to the recent release of IE9. Our journey continues with The History Of Operating Systems , presented by Make Use Of, and ends with the History of Computer Viruses, brought by F-Secure.
Lifehacker has a short glowing review of the Open-Source video editing program “Lightworks” for Windows.
If you’re looking for capable video editing software on a budget (or not), Lightworks is definitely worth checking out. I tried it out on a Windows 7 nettop, which is about as slow of a computer as you can buy these days, and it performed phenomenally well. Lightworks handles most of what you’d expect from a professional editing application, such as video capture and import, GPU-accelerated real time effects (that you can layer on top of one another), color correction that doesn’t suck (which is more than I can say for Final Cut’s plug-ins), broad format support, and an autosave that just happens instantly without bothering you.
If you want to try it out, you can head on over to their site (currently down, probably overwhelmed).
Kitware’s VTK was one of the lucky selections in this year’s “Google Summer of Code”, and they’re now accepting applications for lots of different little projects in everyone’s favorite visualization API. A few of them so far (check out the full list here)
So Nvidia’s newest card has hit the street, the new GeForce GTX590 dual-GPU card. Meant to compete against AMD’s Radeon 6990 offering, it simply can’t keep up. NVidia makes some excellent single-GPU chips but once you start packing multiples onto a PCB, the heat and power dissipation become a liability, letting their competitors take the lead.
NVIDIA’s new flagship graphics card, the GeForce GTX 590 3GB, is without a doubt the fastest NVIDIA product we have ever tested and competes in the super-high-end market very well against the Radeon HD 6990 4GB. The downside to this release is that quite clearly the GTX 590 isn’t up to the task of beating the performance of the HD 6990 at the highest resolution tested, 2560×1600. At both 1680×1050 and 1920×1200, the GTX 590 was either better than or equal to the results from AMD’s new flagship. The problem as I see it is that most users willing to shell out the $700 for either option are more likely to be planning for a 30-in panel or an Eyefinity/Surround monitor configuration than they are comfortable sticking at the 1080p single display resolution. If my hypothesis is true, then most will lean towards the Radeon HD 6990 than the GeForce GTX 590, all else being equal.
Check out their video review below, and hit their website for all the charts and details.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has just completed a 5-year project called “Urban Photonic Sandtable Display”, or UPSD, that creates realtime, color, 360-degree 3D holographic displays. Without any special goggles, an entire team of planners can view a large-format (up to 6-foot diagonal) interactive 3D display.
AMD is backpedaling on t
Our last selection of the week takes a look back in time, throughout the history of technology. Before that, a quick note about the recent numbers released by Twitter, and formatted into an infographic, by 
Lifehacker has a short glowing review of the Open-Source video editing program “Lightworks” for Windows.
Kitware’s VTK was one of the lucky selections in this year’s “Google Summer of Code”, and they’re now accepting applications for lots of different little projects in everyone’s favorite visualization API. A few of them so far (check out the full list 
So Nvidia’s newest card has hit the street, the new GeForce GTX590 dual-GPU card. Meant to compete against AMD’s Radeon 6990 offering, it simply can’t keep up. NVidia makes some excellent single-GPU chips but once you start packing multiples onto a PCB, the heat and power dissipation become a liability, letting their competitors take the lead.
VizWorld.com 
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