Felix Woitzel
software engineer
Real-time planet rendering VIII: forests (video of Eurographics 2012 paper) Augmented Visualization with Natural Feature Tracking :: Institut für Computergraphik und Algorithmen - Arbeitsbereich Computergraphik. Information Publication Type: Conference Paper Date (from): 7 Dec 2011 Date (to): 9 Dec 2011 Event: 10th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM 2011) ISBN: 978-1-4503-1096-3 Lecturer: Gábor Sörös Location: Beijing, China Publisher: ACM Keywords: human computer interaction, Handheld augmented reality, natural feature tracking, interactive visualization systems Abstract Visualization systems often require large monitors or projection screens to display complex information.
Even very sophisticated systems that exhibit complex user interfaces do usually not exploit advanced input and output devices. Additional Files and Images Additional images and videos: Additional files: BibTeX Download BibTeX-Entry. Giliam de Carpentier | Scape: Rendering terrain. Giliam de Carpentier GAME GRAPHICS, PHYSICS and AI Scape: 1. Rendering terrain December 13, 2011 Graphics Scape is the name of a proof-of-concept terrain editor I developed as part of my thesis work at W! Games in 2008. This article is the first of a series and covers the techniques used in Scape to render the edited terrain. Scape was designed around mid-spec hardware a few years back, before OpenCL and CUDA hardware support was commonplace. The original source code will be made available as BSD-style open source, as soon as I get around to it (which will probably be a month or two from now).
Rendering terrain geometry Scape imposes no hard limits to the terrain size (other than requiring it to fit in virtual memory), supporting terrains consisting of tens of millions of height samples. Without LOD system With distance-dependent LOD Each single tile is responsible for rendering a square patch consisting of a fixed number of height samples. Shading the geometry Lighting without texturing Links. Freeform vector graphics with controlled thin-plate splines. ACM Trans. Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia), 30(6), 2011. Rich set of curve and point controls for intuitive and expressive color interpolation. Abstract: Recent work defines vector graphics using diffusion between colored curves. We explore higher-order fairing to enable more natural interpolation and greater expressive control. Specifically, we build on thin-plate splines which provide smoothness everywhere except at user-specified tears and creases (discontinuities in value and derivative respectively).
Our system lets a user sketch discontinuity curves without fixing their colors, and sprinkle color constraints at sparse interior points to obtain smooth interpolation subject to the outlines. ACM Copyright Notice Copyright by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. The Process of Creativity - Design Informer. Advertisement The creative attribute has always been a highly debated and researched component of the human psyche. The “designer” job title seems to be one that calls to the more creative minded among us and according to some, requires the highest level of creative processing. This idea does lend itself to the truth, web designers are called upon to find creative solutions every day. However, we certainly aren’t alone.
Contrary to previous belief, creativity does not limit itself to the “right-brained” artistic types. The ability to find creative and innovative solutions to problems holds value in almost all aspects of life. Even those with highly analytical jobs and hobbies benefit from the ability to approach a complex issue from different perspectives and foresee alternate outcomes. Image credit: Ferdi Rizkiyanto In one way or another we have all experienced that classic “aha” moment.
The Not-So-Random Spark Down time can be a powerful tool in the creative process. Practicing Creativity. Interactive Exploration of a Dynamical System. CAMP: Advanced Medical Imaging and Visualization Technology. Man Builds $5,200 Hobbit House. Last week, we saw a lodge in Chile that looked like a hobbit hotel and this week we bring you a woodland home with a similar aesthetic.
Though this domain doesn't gush gallons of water, it is an alternative living space for a natural homestead. Photographer Simon Dale is responsible for the design and construction of this eco-home, despite his inexperience in architecture and carpentry. The 32-year-old photographer was tired of mortgage payments and had a passion for nature. Equipped with a chainsaw, hammer, and 1-inch chisel, the determined family man began construction on a plot of land in the woods, which the family luckily gained ownership of in return for their care of the area. With the help of his father-in-law, who just happened to be a builder, Dale set forth to build his ecological dream home on a budget. The home, which was constructed for a grand total of £3,000 (approximately $5,200) features plenty of sustainable materials. Simon Dale's website via [Daily Mail] When an Angeleno architect meets a Roman one. Interview by Ilaria Mazzoleni Photo by Art Gray Drawings by Tighe Architecture Young firms in Los Angeles often have the privilege of working for forward-thinking clients as well as the ability to interact with colleagues involved in innovative design processes.
What is perhaps harder to access in the city’s architectural landscape is the opportunity to engage with history and use study and observation to unlock lessons that can inform one’s design. This marvelous opportunity, however, is given to select individuals by the American Academy in Rome with a Prize that allows them to move to Rome for eleven months. In 2007, Patrick Tighe moved to Rome after being selected for the prestigious Rome Prize. I met Patrick to converse about this very poignant work that suggestively points to historical influences and new technological opportunities: IM How did your Italian experience influence your most current work: “Out of Memory”? The foam was used as a total wall assembly. Coca-Cola, Nexus Interactive Arts Unveil Digital Waterfall In Ecuador.
Cascada means waterfall. But there's not a drop of H2O falling on visitors to the Cascada exhibit in Quito, Ecuador. The 52-foot-tall installation is part of an interactive sensory experience that leaves viewers surprised that they’re still dry, and, as the idea goes, in dire need of a Coca-Cola. The global soft drink titan teamed up with London-based production studio Nexus Interactive Arts to create what both partners are calling the largest interactive screen ever. After eight months of preparation and construction, the installation launches November 17 at the El Condado shopping center in Quito, Ecuador. Beyond just a visual spectacle, the waterfall is designed to provide an immersive experience, a feedback loop of happiness. This technology, developed by NIA, allows real-time 3-D generative images to mimic the look of liquid sluicing down right before viewers’ eyes.
Cascada offers users a silent invitation to come play with it, and the waterfall actually gets “happier” as you do. Current Opinion in Neurobiology : Neuroaesthetics: a review. Volume 19, Issue 6, December 2009, Pages 682–687 Motor systems • Neurology of behaviour Edited By Abdel El Manira, Krishna Shenoy, Catherine Dulac and Giacomo Rizzolatti Neuroaesthetics is a relatively young field within cognitive neuroscience, concerned with the neural underpinnings of aesthetic experience of beauty, particularly in visual art. Neuroscientific investigations have approached this area using imaging and neurophysiological techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance (fMRI), magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG). The results produced so far are very heterogeneous.
Nonetheless, an overall view of the findings suggests that the aesthetic experience of visual artworks is characterized by the activation of: sensorimotor areas; core emotional centres; and reward-related centres. Copyright © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. György Ligeti (1923-2006) - Volumina (1961/62) part one. Quantum theorem shakes foundations. Andy Hair/iStockphoto Mathematical device or physical fact? The elusive nature of the quantum wavefunction may be pinned down at last. At the heart of the weirdness for which the field of quantum mechanics is famous is the wavefunction, a powerful but mysterious entity that is used to determine the probabilities that quantum particles will have certain properties. Now, a preprint posted online on 14 November1 reopens the question of what the wavefunction represents — with an answer that could rock quantum theory to its core.
“I don't like to sound hyperbolic, but I think the word 'seismic' is likely to apply to this paper,” says Antony Valentini, a theoretical physicist specializing in quantum foundations at Clemson University in South Carolina. Action at a distance occurs when pairs of quantum particles interact in such a way that they become entangled. Historical debate The debate over how to understand the wavefunction goes back to the 1920s. Quantum information. Lossless and Transparency Encoding in WebP. In September 2010 we announced the WebP image format with lossy compression. WebP was proposed as an alternative to JPEG, with 25–34% better compression compared to JPEG images at equivalent SSIM index.
We received lots of feedback, and have been busy improving the format. Last month we announced WebP support for animation, ICC profile, XMP metadata and tiling. Today, we introduce a new mode in WebP to compress images losslessly, and support for transparency – also known as alpha channel – in both the lossless and lossy modes. With these new modes, you can now use WebP to better compress all types of images on the web. New lossless mode Our main focus for lossless mode has been in compression density and simplicity in decoding. New transparency mode Today, webmasters who need transparency must encode images losslessly in PNG, leading to a significant size bloat. You can find a more detailed compression study for these modes here and sample images in the WebP-Gallery.
HTML5 2D gaming performance analysis. Update March 2012: read our updated benchmarks here Yesterday we released our new beta WebGL renderer in r68 . The release notes cover it briefly, but some of the technology is really cool, so I thought I would go in to more detail in a blog post - this is be pretty long and technical, but it's always good to know what's going on under the hood! I'll also compare the performance of different renderers and engines. Here at Scirra we're also in the fairly unique position of having three renderers to compare: the Canvas 2D renderer , the new WebGL renderer , and our old C++/DirectX renderer from Construct Classic. It's certainly interesting to compare all three, since they have all been written in a similar way for a practical, real-world engine.
What is WebGL ? How GPUs draw 2D First of all, let's cover the rendering process so you can understand what's happening in the tests. Graphics cards are sophisticated technology. The performance test The Canvas 2D renderer The WebGL renderer Conclusion. Mostly shaders » Post process voxels filter. This is a pixelshader that takes depth and outputs a new depth and normals that represent the scene made up of voxels. This can be useful for giving bone-animated objects a voxel style look. (animating with voxels is bothersome). It could also be applied to complete scenes. The “popping” that is visible at the silhouette of the object is hard to hide with a rotating perspective camera. It would be absent seen trough an orthographic non-rotating camera. I still have to fix the black separation lines that are sometimes visible.
It roughly works like this: -Every screen pixel will belong to a cube (a cube can contain multiple pixels). -Each cube needs to be completely drawn (the tricky part- because the silhouette of the object(s) will change). -a pixel samples a number of pixels in an area that should be about as big as the biggest cube you would expect. -It is sampling with a grid with a spacing of 16 pixels. -it does a ray-cast against every samples containing cube. Alpha 1. WebGL Experiments: Texture Compression | Illyriad - Beneath the Misted Land.
15 Nov 2011 Author: Ben Adams | Filed under: Development, Graphics Lilli Thompson from Google asked us how we were doing texture decompression in the pixel shaders and what algorithm we were using. We thought we would share our answer… Texture compression was a bit of journey – as no one at Illyriad had ever implemented anything in 3d before; to us texture compression was mostly a tick box on a graphics card. It started when we found out our 90MB of jpegs expanded to 2GB of on-board memory and we were worried we’d made a terrible mistake, as this was certainly beyond the possibilities of low-end hardware! Half of it this was due to Three.js keeping a reference to the image and the image also being copied to the GPU process – so essentially the required texture memory doubled.
Dropping the reference Three.js held after the texture was bound to WebGL resolved this. In the end we compromised on 256 colour pallettized textures (using AMD’s The Compressonator to generate P8 .DDS textures). Why Is China Building These Gigantic Structures In the Middle of the Desert? (Update 3) WebGL GPU Landscaping and Erosion. A while ago I finished playing From Dust which I enjoyed a lot. What impressed me about that game was the application of landscape changes by erosion. One drawback of the tool Lithosphere I wrote earlier is that it can't do any form of hydraulic erosion. I decided to write a test in WebGL to see if a few simple algorithms could be used to shape a landscape according to hydraulic erosion. Contents Demo You can try the live demo.
Video Screenshots At the start it looks like this. Starting the rain. After a while of raining and erosion. Mesh I am using vertex shader texture lookups to displace the Y axis of a flat plane to represent the terrain and water. The mesh is regularly tessellated into 512x512 cells. If(all(greaterThan(bc, vec3(0.02)))){ gl_FragColor = vec4(color, 1.0);}else{ gl_FragColor = vec4(1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0);} Terrain The initial terrain is generated by layering 10 octaves of simplex noise. Snoise is a good implementation of simplex noise for WebGL by Ian McEwan. Ambient Occlusion. Psychedelic Saturn storm! Late last year, a huge storm erupted in the clouds of Saturn’s northern hemisphere.
Huge even at the beginning, it grew even larger rapidly and eventually wound itself all the way around the planet! It grew to the incredible length of 300,000 km (180,000 miles) — end-to-end, it would’ve stretched 3/4 the way from the Earth to the Moon! The folks at the Cassini mission have just released a treasure trove of new pictures of the storm, and they are very, very cool. Check this out: [Click to encronosenate.] It looks like it’s a ghost running from Pacman, doesn’t it? Taken in late December 2010, this image shows Saturn in the infrared using a combination of 3 different filters. But it grew.
This time, 12 separate filters in the infrared were used, but the color scheme is largely the same. This next picture, though, is the one that made me really smile: More of these amazing images are available at the Cassini website. … and, of course, there’s no substitute for being there, too. Related posts: Christopher Warnow / » A Thousand Milieus.