Intel has launched a Web site to help game and visual content developers create software for its graphics silicon and processors. Intel's next-generation Larrabee graphics chip is also slated to become part of the focus.
"Supporting the new Intel 4 Series chipset family introduced at Computex, Intel has launched the Intel Visual Computing Developer Community, a technical resource to enable developers...to create innovative graphics and video applications," Intel said in a statement.
The Intel 4 Series includes the G45 Express chipset and GMA X4500HD graphics media accelerator, which has built-in support for Blu-ray 1080p high-definition video playback. The chipset also supports Microsoft DirectX 10 and game-centric graphics technologies such as Shader Model 4.0.
Intel says these improvements deliver "everyday gameplay for the most popular game titles."
Intel Visual Developer Community Web site
(Credit: Intel)Intel is clearly ratcheting up its presence in the gaming and visual computing segments. In a video posted on the site, Roger Chandler, director of marketing for the Visual Computing Software Division, said that though Intel works with developers in the digital content creation space, "We're really focused on the game industry...The big focus we have right now is the game space."
Chandler's team is focused on processors, integrated graphics products, and mobile platforms.
"We're entering this era where folks have been so focused on making games look real, (but) they're now realizing that we need to make them act real," he said. Chandler cited artificial intelligence and game physics as two pillars of this "act real" strategy.
The video also indicated that the upcoming Larrabee graphics platform looms large. "This effort is supporting a platform we don't talk about all that much--Larrabee," said Paul Steinberg of Intel, who participated in the video. Intel has described Larrabee as a "many core" Intel Architecture graphics chip that is expected to debut in the second half of 2009.
The site also contains white papers on high definition audio and video, discussion forums, blogs, and wikis, Intel said.
(Credit:
YouMail)
YouMail, a free visual voice mail solution to organize cell phone messages like e-mail for online playback and response, announced on Thursday that customers can start viewing those same voice mail messages from their mobile phones.
By pointing the mobile browser to YouMail's home page, fans of the service can access their account with the usual login and pin to view contact's images, play back messages in any order, and forward or reply to voice messages in a form factor tailored from YouMail's servers to many high-end smartphones.
YouMail certainly isn't the first visual voice mail service to succeed in delivering transcribed messages to smartphones, which it does through a separate e-mail or SMS feature. Unlike some competitors for mobile voice message management, however, like PhoneTag (previously SimulScribe) and CallWave, YouMail's new service will retain the audio and organizational features of its rich online product.
The service will be ready for a wide variety of smartphones, YouMail said in a statement, including models from Research In Motion, Nokia, HTC, Morotola, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, and Palm. YouMail claims that YouMail's smartphone formula "even" works on iPhones, which already run on the full mobile Web with manufacturer Apple's Safari browser.
What happens when you don't have good image processing in your search engine? You get inconsistent results, as seen in this page returned for the query "McDonalds".
(Credit: Google)Google is starting to provide a fuller picture of the work it's undertaking to create a practical tool for image searches.
On its Google Research blog Thursday, the company offered a brief introduction to VisualRank, a system that sorts out images by means of visual cues rather than by text associated with the images. The write-up is a distillation of a much longer paper (PDF), "PageRank for Product Image Search," that two Google researchers presented last week at a conference in Beijing on Web technologies.
The VisualRank system is not yet live, and Google intimated that the image search technology would not become more widely available anytime soon. It did say that "in the coming months" it would offer more details on an "approach that has an easy integration with both text and visual clues."
In its initial VisualRank efforts, Google's research focused on product queries. That's in part because product queries correspond well to the type of "image features" that were central to the study. In addition, the company said, those types of queries are "popular in actual usage" and users have strong expectations about the results they expect, which gave the researchers key examples to address.
Google's VisualRank algorithm sorts images by how similar they appear to an inferred original.
(Credit: Google)Google has also begun to broaden its initiative to take in other query types, including those related to travel.
As it moves forward, the search giant says it's exploring three main directions:
First, estimating similarity measures for all of the images on the Web is computationally expensive; approximations or alternative computations are needed. Second, we hope to evaluate our approach with respect to the large number of recently proposed alternative clustering methods. Third, many variations of PageRank can be used in quite interesting ways for image search. For example, we can use some of these previously published methods to reintroduce, in a meaningful manner, the textual information that the VisualRank algorithm removed.
Over the years, image search has been a significant challenge for Google and others, like start-ups Polar Rose and Riya, with most of the progress being in a fairly limited set of facial recognition characteristics. Last year, for instance, the company said that its Google Image Search could tell the difference between a picture with a face in it and a picture that lacked a face, though it couldn't distinguish between one face and another.
That sort of feature is increasingly common in digital cameras, which in some cases even recognize when a person is smiling or not. Camera makers are also working toward technology that knows who you photographed.
But recognizing a face or other object is a different order of business from delivering meaningful search results based on facial features or on object type.
Hewlett-Packard, meanwhile, has opened a lab at Tsinghua University in Beijing to delve into a wide range of media search types, including still images, video, and music.
Dust off your college calculus, because Google's image rank (IR) formula involves eigenvectors and iterative matrix multiplication.
(Credit: Google)Microsoft's Live Labs, a standalone product research group, released on Wednesday Volta (download it from CNET Download.com), a development tool designed to make it easier to partition an application's component pieces across a network.
The problem that Microsoft researchers are trying to address is the difficulty of deciding which part of the application runs under which tier--either the client or server.
Typically, developers need to write code to handle the communication between those tiers. And they need to decide during development on how to best architect their applications for optimal performance.
With Volta, developers can make "irreversible decisions as late as possible," said Alex Daley, group product manager for Microsoft Live Labs.
The software, which is an add-in to Visual Studio 2008, lets developers write client-side code and then assign with annotations which code runs where, he explained.
Volta is written using Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL) which means that people familiar with Visual Studio languages, including Visual Basic and C#, can work with it. It also is integrated with tools in Visual Studio, including the debugger, and can make applications for Internet Explorer or Firefox.
Volta hasn't been integrated into Microsoft product plans yet, but it stands to have a major impact on how they design tools, Daley said.
"This kind of idea--where we can share a single code base across client server and manage the complexity of communicating between them--is pretty new and has big implications on how we build tools," he said.
Microsoft on Monday made its flagship development tool, Visual Studio 2008, available for download to its developer subscribers.
The product line include several editions, ranging from the low-end Visual Studio 2005 Express for students and hobbyists to Visual Studio Team System, a suite with a server geared at teams of programmers.
Formally code-named Orcas, Visual Studio has features for developer productivity, workflow, data handling, and front-end development for Windows Vista.
The release includes technology called Language Integrated Query (LINQ) which is aimed at making it easier to build applications that tap into different data sources.
The product also includes visual modeling tools, a step in the company's plans to simplify application modeling and make it mainstream. It is based on the latest version of the .Net Framework, the underlying software for developing and running applications written with Visual Studio.
S. Somasegar, vice president of Microsoft's tool division, said that the company sought to include regular customer feedback in the development process.
"When I look back over the last few years at how we were able to ship these two products, I truly believe that both our customer input and our renewed focus on intentional engineering allowed us to release a great product in the timeline that we originally set out to hit," he said in his blog.
Visual Studio 2008 will be formally launched on February 27 next year along with Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008.
I suppose "resurrected" is a bit harsh, since ActiveGrid never really died. More than anything else, ActiveGrid had a hard time explaining just what it was meant to do/be. I'm not very technical, so maybe it was just me, but I heard it explained as an application server and various other things. The true meaning never settled as an easy-to-explain elevator pitch for me.
Now ActiveGrid is back, but this time it's called WaveMaker and its mission is much clearer: help migrate noncompliant client/server applications to the Web. It also has a new CEO/management team, new technology, and a new market: Fortune 2000 developers.
This seems intuitively to be a Very Good Thing (applications are no longer resisting the Web's gravitational pull, and gravity always wins), but it becomes even more so when one considers some blog commentary from WaveMaker CEO Chris Keene:
... Read MoreMicrosoft said on Monday it will release the latest version of its flagship development tool Visual Studio 2008 by the end of November.
The company also announced that it has changed the licensing terms for Visual Studio 2008 to allow its partners to build add-on products that work with operating systems other than Microsoft Windows.
It is also allowing its Premiere-level partners to view the source code of Visual Studio 2008 for debugging.
Also, Microsoft announced the community technology preview of its Sync Framework, a software kit designed to make it easier to build peer-to-peer applications.
It also released Popfly Explorer, a tool to integrate Silverlight gadgets built with Popfly into Web pages built with Visual Studio.
Microsoft loves developers, just ask CEO Steve Ballmer. But while the company has been making some of its tools available for free, it also likes to draw the line on just how much gets given away.
According to a report in The Register, the software company has taken an aversion to TestDriven.Net, an add-on to its Visual Studio developer tools. In particular, Microsoft doesn't like the fact that the software works with Visual Studio Express, the free version of the tools. E-mail exchanges between Microsoft and the small, U.K.-based software maker have gotten increasingly testy, having reached the "cease and desist" letter stage.
The dispute seems to center on the fact that TestDriven works with Express, rather than just with the paid versions of Visual Studio. According to the e-mails, Microsoft has given TestDriven's creators until Wednesday to remove that feature from its product.
There's been a lot of teeth-gnashing of late about photojournalists for the Toledo Blade or Reuters doctoring photos, but photo manipulation is alive and well--not to mention perfectly legitimate--in artistic circles as a way to dramatize. One compelling message is delivered in a batch of photos is by Chris Jordan.
A portion of Cans Seurat by Chris Jordan shows U.S. can consumption
(Credit: Chris Jordan)Jordan created several images for an exhibit called Running the Numbers--An American Self-Portrait that could be considered a brute-force approach to the visual display of quantitative information. Each image is a montage of a gargantuan number of various objects that people in the United States consume.
One shows the 426,000 cell phones that are retired daily. Another, the 60,000 plastic bags used every five seconds. My favorite is the reconstruction of George Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Le Grande Jatte made from the 106,000 aluminum cans the country uses every 30 seconds.
"My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books," he said. "
The real images can be up to 25 feet wide, though most are merely 6 or 8 feet. Johnson helpfully has included versions at various magnifications on his Web site. But the Web has its limits.
"The prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little Web images," Jordan said.
The exhibit opens June 14 and runs through the end of July at the Von Lintel Gallery in New York.
(Via Mike Johnston)
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