If you've flown on a commercial airline since 2000, you've probably seen people wearing Bose QuietComfort headphones. They're expensive and large, and I don't like them.
Their noise-cancellation circuitry actually generates noise of its own, and my ears are good enough to hear it as long as I'm not seated too near the engines.
I started wearing earplugs on airplanes in the 1980s when I discovered the squishy memory-foam type. They block noise better than headphones ever could, and they don't make any noise themselves.
But when I bought my first iPod, that strategy didn't seem quite so perfect anymore. The ear-bud headphones that came with the iPod never fit me at all; they just fell out. After some experimentation with small folding travel headphones, I decided I was happiest with in-ear headphones. They gave me most of the noise reduction of the foam earplugs along with the ability to listen to music.
The problem with in-ear headphones is finding a model that fits me. I gather that this is a common problem with this type of product. I went through several low- and mid-priced models before settling on the old Apple In-Ear headphones--they just worked the best for me. (Interestingly, I had the same experience as CNET's Steve Guttenberg when he reviewed them: they only fit well when inserted upside-down.)... Read more
Have we reached the end of the road for conventional 3D rendering?
Siggraph 2009 ended Friday, and I've spent the last few days digesting what I learned there. Although I've been involved in the graphics industry since 1990 and I've attended Siggraph most years since 1992, a crisis of sorts seems to have snuck up on me.
At the High Performance Graphics conference before the main show, keynote speeches from Larry Gritz of Sony Pictures Imageworks and Tim Sweeney of Epic Games showed that traditional 3D-rendering methods are being augmented and even supplanted by new techniques for motion-picture production as well as real-time computer games.
Gritz reckoned that 3D became a fully integrated element of the moviemaking process in 1989 when computer-generated characters first interacted with human characters in James Cameron's "The Abyss."
Gritz described how Imageworks has moved to a new ray-tracing rendering system called "Arnold" for several films currently in production, replacing the Reyes (Render Everything Your Eyes See) rendering system, probably the most widely used technology in the industry.
According to Gritz, Reyes rendering led to unmanageable complexity in the artistic component of the production process, outweighing the render-time advantages of the Reyes method. But Gritz says even these advantages diminished as the demand for higher quality drove Imageworks to make more use of ray tracing and a sophisticated lighting model called global illumination.
The bottom line for Imageworks is that Arnold, which was licensed from Marcos Fajardo of Solid Angle, takes longer to do the final rendering, but is easier on the artists and makes it easier to create the models and lighting effects--a net win.
Sweeney echoed this theme the next day, which surprised me considering Sweeney's focus is real-time rendering for 3D games--notably with Epic's Unreal Engine, which has been used in hundreds of 3D games on all the major platforms. Game rendering uses far less sophisticated techniques because each frame has to be rendered in perhaps one-sixtieth of a second, not the four or five hours on average that can be devoted to a single frame of a motion picture.
It seems that Sweeney is also ... Read more
Two companies--respectively (I believe) the smallest and largest makers of graphics chips--announced on Sunday that they are developing new standard APIs (application programming interfaces) specifically for ray-traced computer graphics.
Caustic Graphics introduced CausticGL, an API designed to leverage the best aspects of OpenGL, the most widely supported 3D API on the market. CausticGL ties in with Caustic's accelerator chips and boards, which the company says can deliver some 20X the ray-tracing performance of a conventional CPU.
Nvidia offered OptiX (pronounced like "optics"), a name designed to resonate with PhysX, the physics API acquired last year when
Nvidia bought Ageia, a company that was developing both the software API as well as a companion accelerator chip. (Nvidia doesn't have a Web page on OptiX yet; I'll update this post when one appears.) (The OptiX page is now online.)
James McCombe (founder and CTO of start-up Caustic Graphics) and Austin Robison (a research scientist with Nvidia) made their announcements in presentations during the Hot3D session I chaired at the High Performance Graphics conference in New Orleans over the weekend. The big Siggraph 2009 conference opens here this week.
The third presentation in the session was from Larry Seiler, a senior principal engineer with Intel, who described new details of how Intel is optimizing 3D-rendering software for its forthcoming Larrabee GPU.
I'll have more analysis of these announcements later, but I didn't want to miss this chance to break some significant industry news.
I have tremendous respect for Jerry Lewis. He's a great entertainer, a ferocious intellect, and perhaps the greatest charity fundraiser in history.
I was pleased to see Lewis receive the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award during the Academy Awards ceremony in February, principally for his work with the Muscular Dystrophy Association.
Jerry Lewis accepts the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Academy Awards.
(Credit: Michael Yada/Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)I had no idea that the annual Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon had raised more than $2 billion over the years. There are larger charities, but I don't know any that owe so much to the fundraising efforts of one man.
The technical side of my brain was intrigued to hear that Lewis had received a patent for "video assist" technology--the use of closed-circuit television to allow a film director to review scenes as they're filmed.
It seemed to me the story of Lewis' invention of video assist technology would make a good post for Speeds & Feeds. I figured I'd also be able to mention another famous movie-star patent, Hedy Lamarr's 1942 patent (US 2,292,387) on frequency-hopping communications (as Hedy Kiesler Markey), and Walt Disney's 1940 patent on animation (US 2,201,689).
I ran a Google search for "'Jerry Lewis' patent" and found many references to such a patent, including an article by a Mark Adler of VAIdigital offering the title "Closed Circuit Television Applied to Motion Pictures." Adler said Lewis came up with the idea in 1956 and first used it in 1960 on his first film, "The Bellboy."
An article by Michael Frediani titled "On the Set with Video Assist" from an issue of The Operating Cameraman (then the magazine of what is now the Society of Camera Operators) includes a picture of a video assist system, complete with ... Read more
Disney/Pixar's latest film is being shown in 3D using state-of-the-art Sony projectors in some theaters.
(Credit: Disney/Pixar)I went to an opening-day screening of the new Disney/Pixar film "Up," on Friday. I had a great time and not just because of the movie. There was an interesting technology story, too.
The Camera 7 theater in the Silicon Valley city of Campbell recently installed four new digital cinema projectors. They're the best on the market today: Sony's SRXR220, which lists for about $200,000 with the usual required accessories.
Sony also has a slightly less expensive model, the SRXR210, for smaller screens. What puts these projectors ahead of the competition is their native resolution: 4,096 pixels x 2,160 pixels, a standard known as "4K." That's over four times as many pixels as HDTV, which displays 1,920 pixels x 1,080 pixels.
I wrote about 4K technology back in August 2007 ("After HDTV, what's next?") and predicted that "you'll be seeing it in theaters within the next few years." I'm pleased to say that 4K is ahead of that schedule.
I wrote that post after attending a screening of some of the earliest 4K content at the ACM Siggraph conference in Los Angeles, including "Crossing the Line," a short film by "Lord of the Rings" director Peter Jackson. The Siggraph demonstration also used a Sony projector, the much smaller SRXT105.
I was amazed by the picture quality in that screening, and I'm even more impressed by what I saw from the newer SRXR220. As I wrote in 2007, these projectors create smooth, sharp images using LCOS (Liquid Crystal on Silicon) technology, which I think is inherently superior to TI's DLP (Digital Light Processing) micro-mirror chips, which are used in other digital-cinema projectors.
On Friday, we got to see more than just a movie, too. Sony has provided the Camera 7 with a bunch of PlayStation 3 game consoles and configured the projectors to display multiple games up on the big screen so that up to 64 people can play at the same time.
Before the movie, we got to see just one game, Sony's "Gran Turismo 5: Prologue," filling the whole screen. Coincidentally, that's my favorite game on the PS3 (though I must admit to limited experience with that platform since I don't own one), so I was happy with the choice.
Although the PS3's native output is limited to HD resolution, the image quality was very impressive. The movie itself was even better. I don't know what the movie's native resolution was, but it looked great, with bright, saturated colors and good detail in both highlights and shadows.
The movie was presented using RealD's 3D technology, re-branded as Disney Digital 3-D in the advertising for "Up," though the glasses we received were marked RealD as usual. Now that I've seen movies in state-of-the-art theaters using both RealD and Dolby 3D Digital Cinema, I think they're both fairly similar in overall quality.
While I'm on the subject, I'd like to make another comparison: between Sony's 4K technology and the new small-screen "IMAX Digital" theaters that are popping up around the country, generally as one or more screens out of several in a multiplex.
I've seen a couple of movies ("Watchmen" and "Star Trek") in IMAX Digital theaters now, and the quality didn't measure up to my expectations. According to the Wikipedia article on IMAX Digital, these theaters use a pair of HD-resolution (also called 2K) projectors--but I don't think this approach will produce better than HD-equivalent resolution. Two superimposed images can be brighter than one, but the resolution can't be twice as good as a single projector.
In my experience, IMAX Digital theaters fall short of the quality of these Sony 4K projectors...and, of course, they're vastly inferior to real IMAX theaters. Every time I've attended a showing in an IMAX Digital theater, I've heard other customers expressing their disappointment. I don't know why IMAX is diluting its brand this way.
Similarly, I don't know why Sony hasn't established a new brand for these 4K projectors. I know I'm going to be tracking the arrival of this technology in other Silicon Valley theaters, but Sony isn't helping.
Anyway, the new Sony 4K technology is out there. If you can find it, I bet you'll like it.
I miss the old SGI. Silicon Graphics was widely regarded as the greatest computer company in Silicon Valley back in the 1990s. Sometimes forgotten--but not gone--SGI was one of our greatest success stories and one of our greatest tragedies.
(Credit:
Boxx Technologies)
Apple may have had more revenue by virtue of shipping millions of small systems, but SGI's hardware spanned the range from video-game consoles (the Nintendo 64) to workstations to supercomputers. SGI's Unix-based operating system, IRIX, was one of the most sophisticated in the industry.
I used to lust over SGI machines. I'd obsess over lists of used SGI gear, looking for a great deal that would let me have my own IRIX box at home. In 2004, I finally bought an Octane with MXI graphics... but that was years after these machines were effectively obsolete, and I paid less than 0.5% (1/200th!) of the original retail price of the machine.
In the mid-to-late 1990s, SGI was not well managed, losing huge amounts of money because its leaders would not... Read more
In a story on PC Pro, Nvidia architect John Montrym (whose name was incorrectly spelled "Mottram") quoted my recent blog post on Larrabee as concluding that "the 'large' Larrabee in 2010 will have roughly the same performance as a 2006 GPU from Nvidia or ATI."
Alas, this isn't really what I said or meant.
What I actually described as equating to "the performance of a 2006-vintage...graphics chip" was a performance standard defined by Intel itself--running the game F.E.A.R. at 60 fps in 1,600 x 1,200-pixel resolution with four-sample antialiasing.
Intel used this figure for some comparisons of rendering performance. If Larrabee ran at 1GHz, for example, Intel's figures show that... Read more
Earlier this month, I traveled to Denver for Denvention 3, the 66th World Science Fiction Convention. I first attended Worldcon in 1977, when it happened to take place in Miami, where I was living at the time.
Since then, I've been to 15 more Worldcons, including in Denver. (I've been pretty lucky--the Worldcon has been held in my home state six times.) I've also been to four North American Science Fiction Conventions (NASFiCs), which are held in the United States when the Worldcon is overseas.
A good fraction of the attendees at a Worldcon are San Francisco-based professionals--writers, agents, editors, publishers, artists, and others. Along with some of the more well-known fans, they participate in panel discussions on a variety of topics. These panels are my favorite part of the Worldcon.
This year, it seemed that there was a panel on issues related to e-books and electronic publishing in virtually every time slot. I went to several of these sessions. It seems to me that there's a serious conflict between the preferences of some professionals and... Read more
Intel announced on Monday that it will be presenting a paper at Siggraph 2008 about its "many-core" Larrabee architecture, which will be the basis of future Intel graphics processors.
The paper itself, however, has already been published, and I was able to get a copy of it. (Unfortunately, as you'll see at that link, the paper is normally available only to members of the Association for Computing Machinery.)
Intel's Larrabee includes "many" cores, on-chip memory controllers, a wide ring bus for on-chip communications, and a small amount of graphics-specific logic.
(Credit: Intel)The paper is a pretty thorough summary of Intel's motives for developing Larrabee and the major features of the new architecture. Basically, Larrabee is about using many simple x86 cores--more than you'd see in the central processor (CPU) of the system--to implement a graphics processor (GPU). This concept has received a lot of attention since Intel first started talking about it last year.
... Read more
As I described in my recent blog entries about Siggraph 2007, there's a lot of cool stuff going on in hardware and software development for graphics processors (GPUs).
GPUs are programmable devices like the more familiar CPUs, but the programing model is very different. A CPU core implements a simple linear model; programs consist of one instruction after another, though a good CPU scans the instruction stream for opportunities to execute a few instructions in parallel. A busy GPU, on the other hand, always ... Read more
