Last week’s annual SIGGRAPH conference was, as usual, a place where dazzling visual displays were commonplace. But solid-state storage firm Fusion-io’s demo of an ultra-efficient drive took overstimulation to a new level, playing 2000 DVD-quality movies simultaneously. Eyedrops recommended. [Fusion-io via Core77]Photo by Paul Fraser
I used to be excited about iPhone turn-by-turn navigation, but the Pull-Navi system (straight from Tokyo University of Electro-Communications’ crazy folks) is way better. It comes with a stylish helmet and will yank on ears until they look like Dumbo’s.
Some scientists at University of Manchester in the UK and Dolby Canada in Vancouver have worked out a way to capture 3D info of complex-textured objects really simply with a camera flash. You should care about this because it’s likely to make the textures applied to characters and objects in computer games way more realistic: normally texture capturing needs expensive devices like laser scanners. Instead this technique uses something a bit like high dynamic-range photography, with two photos taken of a real-life texture: one with flash, one without. After some nifty image processing later, working out where the light and shade come from on the object for each pixel in both the illuminated and unilluminated shots, and they reproduce 3D depth and colour info for the texture. It covers the whole field of the frame, and since it’s 3D it lets you change the angle of illumination and shadowing when the texture is re-rendered in 3D graphics. Though it’s still a work in progress, it’s pretty impressive, and apparently fooled a test group of viewers who couldn’t distinguish images made with the flash technique from laser-scanned imagery. It was demoed at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles recently. [New Scientist]
newVideoPlayer("/oasissiggraph2008.flv", 475, 266,""); Here’s something that you might miss among all the crazy junk at SIGGRAPH. It’s an interactive aquatic life table called Oasis, by designer Yunsil Heo, that is completely covered by fancy black sand. Why is it covered, you ask? Well, that’s what makes it interactive. By moving the sand so it will show the LCD screen below you begin to grow aquatic life. At first only little guppies appear, but over time the guppies start to grow into fish and other crazy aquatic creatures. Make the sand-less hole bigger and it starts to populate with more life. Then once your little fishies are all grown up, just cover them up with sand and they’ll be dead. [Oasis]
newVideoPlayer("/bouncingstarsiggraph.flv", 475, 266,""); Forget Beijing—the future of sports is appearing at Siggraph 2008 in LA. This softball-sized Bouncing Star rubber ball has a cluster of full-colour LEDS, an infrared transceiver and an accelerometer under its impact-friendly shell. By combining these components, the ball can create bright interactive games that you play by themselves, or with an interactive display. Here, the floor itself is a screen with the form of a court projected onto it, that responds to the ball’s movement.
ATI’s Nvidia-slaying Radeon HD 4870 X2, previewed last month, will get official tomorrow at SIGGRAPH says the WSJ, who notes that some reviewers are calling it the most powerful card around. It’s an interesting test of ATI’s graphics card strategy: Cheaper, less power-hungry GPUs that can be easily strapped together (like the dual-GPU 4870 X2) versus Nvidia’s penchant for obscenely powerful single GPUs. The best part? Whoever you go with, you can’t really go wrong anymore. [
newVideoPlayer("smartimage_gawker.flv", 475, 376); Take a look at this smart image resizing algorithm introduced at the SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group: Graphics) convention. Ariel Shamir of the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science in Herzliya, Israel, aims to make images just as dynamically resizable as text is on a web page by using a technique he calls “scene carving.” We’re also thinking it would make a convenient Photoshop plug-in. We really can’t stand looking at stretched images, but this is a smart way to stretch or compress them. Bring it on! [Ariel Shamir, via YouTube]
Here’s a video of the multi-touch tablet PC prototype that Jazzmutant showed off last week at Siggraph. It’s got the pinch and spread features that Apple popularized on the iPhone, but this can actually take an unlimited number of contact points. You can use as many fingers (or styluses) as you were born with to move and spread stuff around. We could see this in a tablet, but replacing the traditional mouse and keyboard in a laptop is pretty unlikely. [Jazz Mutant]
British site The Inquirer is reporting from Siggraph 2007 that the next version of DirectX, 10.1, requires spanking new hardware to support its sort of spanking new features. The spec revision basically makes a number of things that are optional in DX10 compulsory under the new standard – such as 32-bit floating point filtering, as opposed to the 16-bit current. 4xAA is a compulsory standard to support in 10.1, whereas graphics vendors can pick and choose their anti-aliasing support currently.
