August 11, 2015, Siggraph, Los Angeles—Tim Foley from Nvidia provided an overview of the latest generation of APIs for graphics work on various platforms. These new APIs are emerging as systems become performance and power limited. The new generation of APIs include Vulkan, D3D12 (or DX12) and Metal. The rationale for the new languages is…
June 2, 2015, Society for Information Display Symposium, San Jose, CA—Jitenda Malik from UC Berkeley presented details on current work in information extraction from color plus depth images. The addition of the depth information eases much of the effort needed to extract features within the images. When we assume the sensing is done with and…
March 3, 2015, Game Developer Conference, San Francisco—Luiz Kruel from Certain Affinity talked about changing development pipelines to address the growing needs of al games. The games are getting more complex and visually realistic, which requires more detail in the images. The challenge is to have a pipeline that allows materials and models to be…
February 9 2015, Electronic Imaging Conference, San Francisco—Peter Nugent from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory described the efforts in incorporating big data techniques to detecting and observing super nova phenomena. The two major conflicting problems are in observing the whole sky for changes and the need for higher power telescopes, which have smaller field of view,…
October 10, 2014, Audio Engineering Society Convention, Los Angeles—Fraunhofer IIS and their partners techicolor and Qualcomm have released the latest specification and standard for sound. The standard is gearing up for the more immersive 4k and 8k TVs and cinema productions. The new standard changes sound from a baked-in mix to a 2-D output format…
October 10. 2014, Audio Engineering Society Convention, Los Angeles—A panel of experts from standards organizations and industry considered the issues of matching audio with the emerging 4k and 8k displays. Fred Willard from Univision moderated the panel, and panelists were Skip Pizzi from NAB, Robert Blerdt from Fraunhofer, Jeff Riedmiller from Dolby, Tim Carrol from…
October 15, 2013, Imagination Developer Connection, San Francisco—Imagination Technologies described the flows and technologies involved in ray tracing for images. Wikipedia notes that in computer graphics, ray tracing is a technique for generating an image by tracing the path of light through pixels in an image plane and simulating the effects of its encounters with…
September 18, 2013, Storage Developer Conference, Santa Clara, CA—Sam Fineberg from HP and Simona Rabinovici-Cohen from IBM talked about combining cloud, tape, and container format technologies for long-term big data retention. With the move in big data to use historical information as part of the analytics, long-term data retention becomes a necessity. Big data is…
July 23, 2013, Siggraph, Anaheim, CA—The production of “OZ, the Great and Powerful” involved a lot of visual effects work to merge the live and CG characters. Visual effects supervisor, Scott Stokdyk from Sony Pictures Imageworks, along with Francisco de Jesus digital effects supervisor, and Troy Saliba, animation supervisor, described the various challenges involved. Their…
December 4, 2012, Churchill Club, Menlo Park, CA—Chris Anderson from 3D Robotics and former editor at Wired talked with Carl Bass from AutoDesk about 3-D printing and the new industrial revolution. This exchange was obviously a continuation of a long-standing and ongoing conversation between kindred souls. The first industrial revolution made it possible to manufacture…