3D Visualisation and Graphics Programming Interest Group

This piece of news is somewhat old, dating back to Siggraph 2011 in August, however, posting it now makes a lot of sense since the drivers from Nvidia and ATI should just about have released. In the press material, some of the highlighted features are related to texture handling and manipulation such as: 

• enabling shaders with atomic counters and load/store/atomic read-modify-write operations to a single level of a texture
• capture GPU-tessellated geometry and drawing multiple instances of the result of a transform feedback to enable complex objects to be efficiently repositioned and replicated
• modify an arbitary subset of a compressed texture without having to re-download the whole texture
• packing multiple 8 and 16 bit values into a single 32-bit value for efficient sharing processing with reduced memory storeage and bandwidth

More news on the Khronos specification page.

[source: BusinessWire via AnandTech]

As espected, IDF 2011 brought a lot of news, mostly good, about the future Intel products.

This article on Engadget.com caught my interest. Accoring to the article, Intels next generation microarchitecture, code-named Ivy Bridge, will support resolutions in excess of 4K.

Sounds like a resonable next step, after all 1920x1080 has been around for sometime, and it is expected that higher resolutions will be commonplace relativly soon.

[source: Engadget via AnandTech via VR-Zone]

Engadget is reporting that flexible AMOLED screens may be arriving to the stage before you know it. Samsung is putting effort into R&D, and has shown some interesting stuff both at FPD 2008 and this years CES.

Check out the full article from Engadget and Phys.org.

[source: Engadget via Phys.org]

A very interesting product indeed from Samsung this, a transparent IPS LCD (with full HD resolution of course) with multitouch support. We will be investigating how the multitouch capabilities can be used in a third-party application, since this will be key for this wave to progress we think. Look out for an update.

Have a look at the cool video from Youtube:

[source: Engadget via OLED-Dislpay.net]

There are some great new technologies about  to burst onto the web to really spice up our online experiences. HTML5 is finally giving web developers access to a native graphics context to use as they please, webGL is finally bringing the awesome power and flexibility of hardware accelerated graphics into the domain of open web standards, and Adobes  forthcoming molehill API for is making openGL ES available to the flash player. This is all going to have a massive impact on the way we use the web both as an audience and as a broadcaster.

Obviously real time 2 and 3d graphics on the web is nothing new, it’s been with us in one form or another for over 10 years, but it’s the ‘one form or another’ that’s changing. Some might say that real time 3d on the web has had a number of false starts in the past because whilst there have been many perfectly good browser plug-ins available, in particular Unity3d which has provided an exceptionally robust 3d gaming platform, none of them have really fit into the category that the masses would consider to be an open standard, thus there has never been a single open standard that web community as a whole can get together to discuss and draw upon each others knowledge. I believe that WebGL and molehill will finally change that.

Now all of this brings another consideration to the fore, that is the increasing debate as to ‘Where the web will go’ in terms of open standards, there are those who believe that battle is about to commence between open standards and native apps such as flash, unity and the like, there has been disquiet among some of the internet purists out there that perhaps the web has been drifting away from it’s original specification as a singular open standardised platform, and the appearance of WebGL and Molehill on the scene in very close succession is bound to highlight this debate, although for my own part, I consider the presence of flash to be practically an open standard in its own right.

So how will we use this new technology, and do we consider it to be new technology? I believe that as the power of real time 3d on the web is now to be handed to web development masses, ‘new technology’ is currently a fitting term, and as this is ‘new technology’ there is bound to be a certain period of bedding in while the web developers get to grips with what they can do with it, and their clients and management teams begin to realise that the data that they need to present to their clients and so forth can be extracted and represented more dynamically than ever before. The web development community will undoubtedly need time to establish their best working practises before taking to the skies with these great new tools.

Yes these are undoubtedly exciting times that I’ve been dream of since I can remember.

An example of the forth coming Adobe molehill functionality.