SuperComputing 2011 is in Seattle this year and I think it’s no surprise to anyone that this year will be heavily influenced by the success of GPU-based supercomputers. To further emphasize this, they keynote will be presented by the man driving most of these machines, NVidia’s own Jen-Hsun Huang.
“Jen-Hsun Huang’s demonstrated leadership in parallel computing is well suited to the data-intensive thrust of the conference and the sustained performance focus of the Technical Program,” said Scott Lathrop, general chair of SC11 and director of outreach, and training for the National Science Foundation Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) project. “As we look to a world of rapid collection and analysis of data with computational resources reaching exascale proportions, we value the opportunity to hear Huang’s vision for how the community can address the huge demands for data-intensive computing and faster time-to-discovery.”
It’s a move that really cements NVidia’s place in the HPC ecosystem. Already driving several of the Top500′s biggest systems, I suspect they’ll continue to remain prominent on the list for some time.
Russian company YUVsoft has a new After Effects plugin that can analyze video footage to create dynamic depth maps, making 2D to 3D conversion faster and more accurate.
YUVsoft’s Depth from Motion uses multiparameter projective transformations to analyse camera motion ensuring that zoom, scene rotation and camera pans are correctly processed.Slow motion scenes are automatically detected the process continue to work flawlessly.
The first picture above is from a 2D input sequence. The second one shows the final depth map created from camera motion during the shot. To reach that result, several steps are needed. The first step is to estimate motion from the first four frames and to use the obtained motion vectors to compute the camera motion parameters.
The plugin will be demonstrated at IBC later this week (Booth 11.F74).
Unity has been picking up a lot of steam lately for it’s simplicity and ability to quickly prototype impressive 3D visuals and games, but has been locked out of several platforms because it requires the Unity Player. That may change soon, however, thanks to a newly demonstrated feature that allows you to export Unity projects directly to Flash.
While we are not quite ready to ship with Flash support yet, we just couldn’t resist sharing this video with you, as this has been a major milestone for us. We’ve taken the project, changed the build platform to Flash, hit build; magic happens…and the game runs in the Flash Player.
Performance is great and things are looking very promising. Keep in mind, this is a sneak peek; many things are still rough around the edges. Rest assured we are working hard to ship this, there is nobody who likes to see this in your hands as soon as possible more than we do.
I believe Unity already has an iPhone exporter, so adding a Flash exporter pretty much brings Unity to every single computing/gaming platform out there.
Visualization Sciences Group, VSG, has just announced that they are acquiring image processing group Noesis and their Visilog flagship product. Both Noesis and VSG are big names in the Oil & Gas industries, and this will even further their position in the space.
“This acquisition reinforces VSG’s strategy to deliver the most advanced software solutions for 3D data imaging and analysis” said Jean Bernard Cazeaux, CEO of Visualization Sciences Group. “Noesis’ expertise provides VSG with a comprehensive and unique offering where visualizing and understanding ever more complex data is key to discovery”.
Robby Ingebretsen of NerdPlusArt has a great video of what may be the first ever 3D graphics, a manually-digitized rendering of Ed Catmull’s Hand done back in 1972.
The film fell into my hands because Ed and my dad were good friends and office mates at the University of Utah in the 1970s where they were both pursuing upper graduate degrees in computer science. My dad was focused on digital audio and Ed (of course) on computer graphics. Either because of their friendship or possibly because they were renting time on the same computer, my dad ended up being responsible for the 3D morphing titles at the beginning and end of the film (his credit is at 6:15). I guess that entitled him to a copy of the 8mm reel (it was rendered to actual film; this, of course, predated any kind of real time digital playback by many years).
Seeing the hand scanned really makes you glad for tools like 3dsMax.
If you’re a fan of SmithMicro’s Anime Studio tools, you can now get them in the Mac App Store via direct download. For a mere $29 (a far discount from the usual $49), you can download the app directly to your favorite Mac and start creating your own animated masterpieces.
Over at Fell in Love with Data, Enciro has a great interview with Processing guru Miriah Meyer. In the interview they get into some of the best and worst features of the tool, and provide some great insight into how to get started with Processing and what you can expect to get from it.
In short, the best aspect of Processing is the amount of code it takes to get a simple scene with callbacks going — it is a small fraction of what it would take with OpenGL. Simple primitives like circles, squares, text, etc. are nicely abstracted into one-line function calls. Mouse and keyboard callbacks are automatically handled. There is a wide variety of common graphics helper functions available, like lerp-ing colors. Full-screen apps work without having to grab weird OS handles.
Over on YouTube, you can see some great videos of the new RayFire. In particular, they have some fantastic examples of the new Dynamic feature in action.
The Animation Guild 839 has published their latest TAG Wage Survey, and this year they show the comparison against the 2010 survey showing how fields have risen or fallen. The number of responses is still fairly small, but their survey is currently the only real compilation of this data I know of.
A fun piece of augmented reality from Ben Purdy brings Minecraft to the real world with some clever projection kit. Projecting classic 8-bit graphics onto a cardboard box you can then take a stick and mine away the projected block.
Block animation is handled by a piezo sensor, an Arduino and a Processing sketch. From earlier posts on [Ben's] blog, we’re going to guess that he used the keystone video projection library his own solution to map the Minecraft block onto the cardboard box. Animation is handled just as in Minecraft – overlaying the breaking animation onto the block and adding some particle effects.
SuperComputing 2011 is in Seattle this year and I think it’s no surprise to anyone that this year will be heavily influenced by the success of GPU-based supercomputers. To further emphasize this, they keynote will be presented by the man driving most of these machines, NVidia’s own Jen-Hsun Huang.
Russian company YUVsoft has a new After Effects plugin that can analyze video footage to create dynamic depth maps, making 2D to 3D conversion faster and more accurate.
Unity has been picking up a lot of steam lately for it’s simplicity and ability to quickly prototype impressive 3D visuals and games, but has been locked out of several platforms because it requires the Unity Player. That may change soon, however, thanks to a newly demonstrated feature that allows you to export Unity projects directly to Flash.
Visualization Sciences Group, VSG, has just announced that they are acquiring image processing group Noesis and their Visilog flagship product. Both Noesis and VSG are big names in the Oil & Gas industries, and this will even further their position in the space.
Robby Ingebretsen of NerdPlusArt has a great video of what may be the first ever 3D graphics, a manually-digitized rendering of Ed Catmull’s Hand done back in 1972.
Over at Fell in Love with Data, Enciro has a great interview with Processing guru Miriah Meyer. In the interview they get into some of the best and worst features of the tool, and provide some great insight into how to get started with Processing and what you can expect to get from it.
A fun piece of augmented reality from Ben Purdy brings Minecraft to the real world with some clever projection kit. Projecting classic 8-bit graphics onto a cardboard box you can then take a stick and mine away the projected block.
VizWorld.com 
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