Viewzy

Viewzy is a website that allow you to make text based research and display result content in a different way ( chronologically, spatially... )

I have made a test that allow to see image cluster based on text information. I start with architecture, and add "Paris" and "Tour Eiffel" keywords and you see the result clusters.

The cronotron allow to see the emergence of ideas and concept across time :

Let's do a try with the project "Building Rome In A Day"

http://www.viewzi.com/search/cronotron/building%20rome%20in%20a%20day

First we will find the starts (the CVPR09 paper) and the buzz around the project, the user review and the fact that a lot of people do not speak anylonger about the project.

The birth, the live, the death... cycle

Try the different alternative, web screenshot... and others ... You will like it

Source Viewzy

SnapDragon Javascript powered Seadragon

SnapDragon is a Flickr tag explorer from Microsoft Live Labs.

It's a concept about interactive and keyword based navigation. Search a given keyword will give you photos. Click on a picture will give new keyword... and etc.

Click a word to see related images.
Click an image to see its tags.
Click an image's title to go to its Flickr page.
Click the background to go back up the chain.
Drag to pan, scroll-wheel to zoom.
Or just hit the spacebar and enjoy.

It's nice and well done.

Smooth and efficient zooming and panning

It quite hard to find publication related to microsoft labs project (Seadragon, Pivot, DeepZoom).

I have found one about DeepZoom: Smooth and efficient zooming and panning 

The paper explain how to smoothly go from one view to another one (MultiScale space observation).

Photosynth Silverlight 3D

Natively Silverlight do not support 3D display and so I have got this question in head for a while "Which tech use Photosynth to display 3D things in Silverlight ?"

I have found a piece of anwer on a blog about Deep Zoom, a subpart of Seadragon. "Photosynth goes Silverlight"

We can read the name of the person in charge of the silverlight port "Mark Dawson" and also we know the name of the framework that have been used and surely modified : Kit3D

Since the project Kit3D seems to not have been modified for a long time.. I think they have incorporate it in their framework... and maintain it as closed source.

OpenCL debugger

Graphic Remedy announce the future release of gDEBugger for OpenCL™.

Beta subscription here

Selected Features
gDEBugger CL enables OpenCL developers to:
• Locate parallel computing performance bottlenecks
• Edit and continue OpenCL kernels "on the fly"
• Break on OpenCL errors, function calls, memory leaks and more
• View the application's OpenCL memory consumption
• View OpenCL images and buffers data as an image or as "raw data"
• View OpenCL command queues activities and timing measurements
• View the OpenCL calls history
• Display OpenCL and OpenGL interoperability shared objects
• And much more...

The debugger is multi platform as usual ;)

Source : Here

The perfect Macro focus camera

Some people invent some strange machine to make macro photo of flying insect...

But the result looks very good ! Here

The camera setup is explained here . A special part is designed to determine the good focus ! Awesome.

Source : Here

WEB GL javascript engine

WebGL seems gives a lot of javascript library in the past month.

We could see many initiative :

• http://spidergl.org/code.php (Nice Streaming Multi Resolution demo)
• http://www.ambiera.com/copperlicht/index.html
• http://www.glge.org/

All the approach consisting in designing an interface to give access to OpenGL functions. So each initiative is a little High Level 3D engine.

The only drawbacks for the moment is that only nightly build of Firefox and Chrome have WebGL support but it's nice to see so many people want to have something 3D on the web !

But you can see other initiative in flash (no webGl, pure flash rendering) Here

You must definitively see this demo in flash : Here

Good SSE intrinsics informations

In software development we always think about performance (sometimes quality comes after due to short road map )...

So it's important to find rapidly information about what we do, to do it cleaver and get time to test the code after.

It's why I share here a good SSE documentation :

MMX, SSE, and SSE2 Intrinsics doc

The website is well documented and will give you good pointer for doing your own code...

As an example I add an example that I have made to compute L2 distance with SSE optimization : here

Comparative time ( 900000 distances on 128 float long histograms) :

• SSE : 0.05 ms
• Naive method : 0.12 ms
• Naive Optimized : 0.09 ms

3D camera

3D camera start to be real.

Sony, and other manufacturer start to make commercial product. And HD is not forgotten. (Source)

Technical Side :

2 x 1920 x 1080 pixels stored as individual files in RAW sequences. DNG format
Weight: 2,8 kg incl. memory cartridge and battery.

Distance between optical axis: 91,5 mm
Colour depth: 12 bit
Mount: IMS,PL or C
FPS: 25 or 30
Built on order.

Other approach for research purpose built Camera Array :

The world record seems to be near 160 lenses !

This model get 158 lenses and be used to study irregular flames.

It took the team a total of six months to finish this monster. The lenses are attached in four rows on the body of the device, which is 7.2cm high and 47cm in diameter. Each lens costs $2.10.

The camera can also shoot 3D pictures of a flame by using CT technology. (Source)

Those camera make me think about camera used in film production and called "Time Tracking Camera" .

Pixar is 24 year old

Pixar knows as Pixar Animation Studios... have published a lot of titles and is now 24!

Tin Toy, Cars, Ratatouille, Incredibles, finding nemo, monster Inc, Bugs Life.... Toy Story, Wall E, Up ! A long story and a lot of work and research (I think to the paper library ... here. So many people ignore publish research papers and make it accessible to public).

For the small story :

Pixar was created in 1979 as the Graphics Group, a service of the Lucasfilm Computer Division (computer division of Lucasfilm) before being bought by Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, in 1986. The Walt Disney Company bought Pixar in 2006.

So Steve Jobs have changed the world also by allowing a great company to make great film... and not only by making usable and polish designed products (knows as Mac, Ipod, Ipad)...

The whole story : here

I3D 2010 papers

RealTimeRendering blog have selected some papers that seem interesting...

Here

For my part my preferred papers are :

Parallel Banding Algorithm to Compute Exact Distance Transform with the GPU here

Volumetric Obscurance (like Ambient Occlusion) here

Radiance Scaling for Versatile Surface Enhancement here

The entire collection of paper is available here

Energy like rain

I think it's time to expose a small idea for our big world. The kind of idea that one should think of crazy but Future is not so far and who can really predict what will happen ?
Nowadays green Energy creation is one of the most important topic discussed on all the planet. How to generate energy without any pollution, and furthermore the less expensive possible.

Here is the idea:

Why not use the power of the rain ? Yeahh, seems stupid, or at least foolish isn't it ? How can these small tiny drops of water generate energy ?
Could you imagine a system where the fall of the drops could activate a tiny generator ? Imagine this on every house roof, public building or wherever. You can choose between Solar energy or Rain energy, use the power of the monsoon, or tempest.

A recent study from Princeton brings some clear water to this theory. This convert 80% of the energy in electricity.

The future is coming fast !!! And I predict a lot of rain !

AirMouse

This mouse concept is wireless and do not impose you an object to move on the table...

I do not know if the human body feels better to move with this kind of glove... and I do not garantee the smell if you sweat a lot...

This project for sure have been inspired from Minority Report and the magic gloves... But it's interesting to see the approach to remove classic device and purposing a more natural way of moving to give order to our dear computer...

Source : link