siggraph

What makes Paris look like Paris? Hint: it ain't the Eiffel Tower.

It is instead the details woven into the urban fabric that form a pattern, according to a machine learning system that's part of a U.S.-French visual data mining project. Yes, computers are learning to ID your city just by looking at random photos.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and INRIA/Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris had the system look at 40,000 Google Street View images of Paris, London, New York, and Barcelona, as well as eight other cities to find frequent and unique elements. … Read more

What if that ball you're tossing around could take photos? German researchers have developed a camera sphere that grabs panoramic pics in mid-air.

The Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera houses 36 phone cameras of 2-megapixel resolution. It also has an accelerometer that allows it to snap a shot at its highest point when it's barely moving.

Developer Jonas Pfeil, a graduate of Technical University of Berlin, and colleagues created the ball to make it easier to capture a full spherical panorama. You simply toss it up and then retrieve the pics via USB and see them in a special viewer. … Read more

MIT researchers have improved a gel technology that can image microscopic features without expensive equipment, opening up applications in forensics, medicine, and other fields.

Developed by Edward Adelson, Micah Johnson, and colleagues, GelSight acquires surface textures and shapes by pressing a block of clear rubber onto them, revealing striking 3D details. It can even visualize a pulse when pressed on a wrist.

Originally presented in 2009, the technology has been improved to resolve features as small as 2 microns across and is being presented in a paper (PDF) at this week's Siggraph 2011 computer graphics conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. … Read more

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are working on an inexpensive way to use smartphones to quickly detect early-stage cataracts, the clouding of the eye lens that is the leading cause of blindness worldwide.

Developed by Media Lab Camera Culture group director Ramesh Raskar and colleagues, the Catra system is made of off-the-shelf components. Users peer through an eyepiece that slides onto a smartphone or other smart device like an iPod Touch, and they view lines displayed on the screen.

When the lines appear cloudy, the user presses a button. In that way, the device scans the lens of the eye to create a map of the cloudy areas, which are produced by proteins clumping together.

Identifying the position, size, shape, and density of the clouds, Catra can produce a diagnosis of cataracts in minutes. Check out the promo video below.

The idea is that Catra could be used in the developing world, where few have access to the expensive slit lamps and clinicians used to diagnose the disorder. That could lead to earlier detection of cataracts and better treatment results following surgery. … Read more

If you've seen the film "Avatar," you may have noticed one of the characters plucking a display panel from a desktop and continuing to use it as a standalone control screen. While we probably won't witness epic wars between human colonists and sapient humanoids in the near future, the technology depicted in the science fiction film is available in our current time, albeit in unrefined form.

At the recent computer graphics event Siggraph Asia 2009, a pair of researchers from the University of Tokyo's Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory demonstrated their Volume Slicing Display, a screen prototype … Read more

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 … Read more