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High-speed cam catches cool 3D shots of snowflakes

Now that winter has passed, those of us who live in cold climes can once again appreciate the beauty of snowflakes without feeling the urge to curse them for making us dig out the shovel. And if ever snowflakes looked lovely, it's in these images shot by a high-speed camera system developed specifically to photograph them in 3D as they fell.

"Until our device, there was no good instrument for automatically photographing the shapes and sizes of snowflakes in free fall," says Tim Garrett, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah and one of the developers of the cam known as MASC, or Multi-Angle Snowflake Camera. "We are photographing these snowflakes completely untouched by any device, as they exist naturally in the air."

MASC -- under development for three years -- takes 9- to 37-micron-resolution stereographic photographs of snowflakes from three angles while simultaneously measuring the speed of their fall, a highly influential factor in the location and lifetime of a storm. … Read more

HiLO lens for iPhone and iPad has all the right angles

Smartphones have rarely been accused of being elegant cameras. Tablets are even more troublesome. Sometimes, it would be easier to hold your device flat and snap a picture. Try that now and you'll get a lovely shot of your feet. Try it with a HiLO right-angle lens, and you'll get a real photo.

The HiLO hides three lenses and a prism inside that allow the image to bounce into the correct part of your camera. An app is also part of the Kickstarter project, so you'll be able to quickly correct for the image mirroring caused by the prism.… Read more

Turn iPhone into wide-angle action sports camera

There's a more secure way to capture your skateboarding and mountain biking exploits than by duct taping your iPhone to the top of your helmet.

Optrix, a company that once ran over one of its own cases with a very large Dodge truck, has now taken on the task of protecting your iPhone during extreme sports activities.… Read more

Smart Tools are powerful, yet simple

Even with its belt full of powerful tools onboard, Smart Tools is, for the most part, simple. The app opens up to a wall of choices, and if you've used any of Smart Tools' apps before, then all of them should look familiar. Smart Tools combines the powers of all of the developer's individual Pro tool sets.

The first set lets you measure length and angle, using a level, ruler, and two protractors (one which uses the screen, and the other your device's camera).

The second offers a Distance tool, which is a bit more complicated, as … Read more

Zeiss announces fast--but not cheap--15mm lens

Carl Zeiss, a premium maker of camera lenses, announced a new wide-angle model today, a 15mm F2.8 model that should ship in May for $2,948.

The Distagon T* 2,8/15 joins other members of the Distagon family with fixed focal lengths of 18mm, 21mm, 25mm, 28mm, and 35mm. The 15mm model should be particularly desirable for people serious about architectural and landscape photography--subjects that need a wide shooting angle and that often afford enough time for manual focusing.

With a price that high, it's not something a lot of customers will be able to afford. But … Read more

Google's Angle grows up, improving browser graphics

Angle, a Google graphics project for Windows computers, has passed an important certification milestone that could improve some browsers' graphics.

Google launched Angle in March 2010 as a way to help the fortunes of WebGL, the nascent 3D graphics technology for browsers. And yesterday, Google programmer Vangelis Kokkevis announced Angle has been certified to pass the OpenGL 2.0 certification test suite.

WebGL provides a low-level graphics interface that mirrors the OpenGL standard used on Mac OS X, Linux, iOS, and Android, but that's still a second-class citizen on many Windows machines. Windows comes with Microsoft's rival standard … Read more

Panasonic FX75 is wide, bright, extra Intelligent

It's always nice when the highlight of a touch-screen camera isn't the LCD. The Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX75, for example, has a 3-inch touch-screen LCD, but the main attraction is really the lens: a compact ultrawide-angle 24-120mm-equivalent lens with a maximum aperture of f2.2 and a 5x zoom. The 14-megapixel ultracompact features the company's Sonic Speed AF system, too, for fast focusing and low shutter lag.

Unlike some previous FX models, this one doesn't appear to have semimanual or manual shooting modes; it's got a whole lot of automatic and scene modes. Fortunately, Panasonic's … Read more

A new view of 3D graphics

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

Q&A: iRobot taps into its Warrior spirit

Corrections were made to this interview. See below for details.

The PackBot robot has made a name for itself in dangerous places like Iraq, but the future may belong to both its bigger and smaller siblings.

U.S. military forces have long made use of the PackBot to discover and disarm roadside bombs, keeping flesh-and-blood soldiers out of harm's way. Now its maker, iRobot, is looking to make inroads with two variations on the design.

The SUGV (short for small unmanned ground vehicle) may be one of the technologies that emerges in good shape from the Army's massively … Read more

Samsung ultra-wide-angle 12-megapixel cameras for control freaks

Samsung announced two 12-megapixel cameras this Monday morning--the TL320 and HZ15W. I've come to expect innovation from Samsung when it comes to its digital cameras (though sadly, I don't expect great photo quality), and these look promising.

The TL320:

12.2 megapixels 24mm wide-angle lens with 5x optical zoom 3.0-inch hVGA AMOLED (460K dots) with a contrast ratio of 10,000:1 Dual image stabilization 720P HD video With HDMI connectivity via optional dock Dual analog gauges for memory and battery (like last year's TL9) Aperture priority, shutter priority, and manual modes Advanced Picture Mode for adjusting the color temperature from 2,800-10,000K or manual control of color space shift May 2009 at an MSRP of $379.99

The HZ15W:

12.0 megapixels 24mm wide-angle lens with 10x optical zoom 3.0-inch LCD (230K dots) Dual image stabilization 720P HD video With HDMI connectivity Manual mode (aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and exposure controls) March 2009 at an MSRP of $329.99

Full announcement with more details on the various features after the break.… Read more