VizWorld.com

If you happen to be in Rhode Island this week for IEEE VisWeek, flag down a Kitware developer and check out their latest foray into OpenGL ES 2.0 support with “VES”.  Already at the core of their iPad app “KiwiViewer”, they’ve been busily working on it adding lots of features.

And so, here we are, iterating on our code at high speed to prepare demos for VisWeek. Last week I added support for 2D text annotations using VTK’s freetype classes. The annotations can be anchored to 3D points on a mesh, allowing for updated annotation positions as the camera moves around the scene.  This feature was demonstrated in the demo video linked above.

The video also shows some impressive slicing and mesh clipping, adding in new degrees of interactivity with your data.   Once they get the Animation support added in, this could be a great way to “share” your data with others in a tight setting.

VES Demonstration from Kitware on Vimeo.

via The Kitware Blog – VES: Development in Iterations.

Science ipad, kitware, opengles, visweek

Update 8/3/2010: Read a followup to this post here.

I just got a press release from Khronos about the first OpenGL ES2.0 driver for Desktop systems coming to market from AMD.  Upon further inspection, this looks a bit fishy.

At SIGGRAPH 2010, AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced availability of the first software driver for desktop computing environments to support the WebGL industry standard, which is designed to bring plugin-free 3D graphics to the Internet. The AMD OpenGL^® ES 2.0 driver is intended to help developers easily create exciting 3D content that can be rendered more quickly for consumers using open-source web browsers, thereby helping create an application-like browser experience.

Ok.  So where do I get it?  Read further down the press release and see:

The OpenGL ES 2.0 driver from AMD will be generally available with the upcoming ATI Catalyst™ 10.7 beta for OpenGL ES 2.0, expected to be available later today.

So it’s not “official”, it’s “Beta”.  But, how did AMD beat NVidia to the punch on this one?  In fact, why is a special OpenGL ES2.0 driver needed anyway?  OpenGL ES is a subset of regular OpenGL targeted at embedded systems, and in fact that’s exactly what NVidia did with it.  NVidia’s OpenGL ES2.0 support is right where it’s designed to be, in the development kit for their embedded system Tegra.

So why do we care about it?  WebGL, the coming common standard for 3D on the Web, is based on OpenGL ES2.0 (presumably to make it an option for smartphones and other portable devices that lack full OpenGL compatibility).  So most companies haven’t focused on putting OpenGL ES on the desktop, because that’s not where it belongs.

Not that it matters too much anymore, thanks to another press release that I got mere minutes after the accolades came rolling in for AMD.  Khronos, the group behind the OpenGL and OpenGL ES standards has just announced the standard for OpenGL 4.1, with one fascinating addition:  Complete compatibility with the OpenGL ES 2.0 APIs.  This means that being OpenGL4.1 compliant means you’re already OpenGL ES2.0 compliant.  So what has NVidia been doing the last few months?

“The release of OpenGL 4.1 just five months after OpenGL 4.0 shows that collaborative innovation to build market opportunities for high-performance GPU acceleration is not slowing down.  The ARB is also working hard to ensure backwards compatibility with each release so developers can absorb new functionality at their own pace,” said Barthold Lichtenbelt, OpenGL ARB working group chair and senior manager Core OpenGL at NVIDIA.  “I am also pleased to announce that NVIDIA will release OpenGL 4.1 production drivers on our developer site for all Fermi-based graphics accelerators, including the GeForce GTX 400 series, during SIGGRAPH.  OpenGL 4.1 is not just a specification – it’s here and now.”

Myth Busted.

See both press releases after the break.

Read more…

Science amd, khronos, opengl, opengles