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Wednesday NVISION: Last Day |
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Thursday 28 August 2008 - 10:59AM
Renee Dunlop
The last day of NVISION was an absolute blast. There was a World Record set, lots of awards were given out and Speed Painting hit a new exciting level. The 203 gamers striving for the Guinness Book of World Records were in their weary home stretch, striving to reach 36 hours of straight gaming with only 10 minute breaks per hour and had to be playing someone over the network all the time. The ESWC 2008 Electronic Sports World Cup were battling it out for the prize. The GeForce LAN Bring You Own Computer (BYOC) LAN Party was in the Quarter Finals, Semi Finals, and Finals. There was surprising amount going on all at once, and the excitement was contagious.
I tried to be everywhere at once. Here are some of the moments I was able to capture. A quick talk with Mental Images about the Reality server was pretty amazing. It’s a platform for developing 3D web applications using service side rendering technology. All the imagery on the screen was coming from a server in Santa Clara, nothing was rendered on the client side. Instead it sends images back as a jpg stream. By doing this they can have unlimited complexity on the server side, so on the client side they can use pretty much anything, even scale from a laptop to an iPhone.
I made a “quick” stop over in the gaming area to grab a few quotes. There were some very happy people. I spoke with Amber Dalton, aka Athena Twin, clan leader of the PMS clan, and Daniela Lao, or Gypsy 5 of PMS, and also part of Pandora’s Mighty Soldiers of the PMS clan. The clans’ mission was to provide a competitive positive environment for women in gaming. They were raising money for Childs Play, and NVision was matching them dollar for dollar. They had already raised over $2000. They had a lot of support from the community. Alienware gave Area 51, Patriot Memory gave some Patriot memory units and USBs, NVidia gave cards as did EBGA. Plantronics gave them 180 headsets which they gave out throughout the event. To keep up the spirits, they held nightly “Panjamarama’s” from 12:00 to 1:00. “We got in our PJ’s, threw out some prizes, we spun some wheels, we had dance contests and raffles,” said Dalton. “It’s our way of giving back to the communities supported by our sponsors.” She gushed over the teams and effort to make everything run smoothly “This event had pretty much everything you could want.”
One of my favorite encounters was a father, Alan Wiseman who was there with his son Dain. The father had come in support of his son, and was quite impressed with what he found. “I think it was a very good meeting here, everybody was very helpful and everything ran very smoothly. It was much larger than we ever expected, and it covered more stuff than we could ever dream of.” Dain, surrounded by team members and friends added, “This is the best event you could ever come to. It’s a lot better than most of the other events that other people do, because this is the biggest. I’m part of the H20 clan, that’s part of the PMS clan. I flew in from Arizona to come to this event. Been here since the 24th.” And then Dain added something that I realized I was hearing often today, a genuine kindness an appreciation for another team member. “That the leader of the PMS clan is one of the best people you could ever want to talk to.”
The awards were flowing everywhere. NVScene included art, Machinima, and Demoscene, a community of artists, programmers, and musicians who create realtime animated art, while Machinima uses game engines to create animation. The Best Demoscene Demos first prize went to Stargazer, by Andromeda & Orb, and the second to Into the Pink, by Plastic. The Best Demoscene 4K Demos went to Texas, by Keyboarders with second place going to Receptor, by TBC. The Machinima award went to Server Side, by Cyphermind, and the NVISION 08 Judge's Award went to The Ship, by Mednios.
But it was the closing ceremonies that really topped off the three day event. The Guinness Book players began filing in, row after row after row after row of exhausted players. They did win the record of the longest continuous LAN party. More prizes and thanks were handed out. And then Mythbusters’ Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage took the stage to demonstrate the difference between a CPU and a GPU is what is certain to become a YouTube classic. A robot was driven out on stage. A plastic curtain was dropped from above, and the robot began firing paintballs one by one in rapid succession, painting a blue smiley face on a canvas. It then retreated behind stage. That was to represent the CPU.
Now, even the 203 Guinness winners sat up to take notice, roused from their bleariness in anticipation. The curtain rose. Plastic sheeting was spread across the first few rows of the audience. A huge contraption under a white sheet waited on stage. Revealed, it was a gigantic air pressured contraption with plastic tubing, aimed towards a board to paint it’s own smiley face- the Mona Lisa. The Guinness winners woke up enough to cheer, and the entire theater was going nuts. With an enormous explosion, in a split second of time, paintballs flew and exploded against the screen. When the paint vapor settled, there was the Mona Lisa, smiling at the audience. That is the speed of a GPU. It was a memorable way to end a show.
All in all, roughly 9,200 people attended this first year event. Over 1,200 professional graphics people were there with 320 hours of technical training and workshops. 350 were in the Cuda conference, and over 100 visual artists in the NVScene room. 350 people from 60 different companies attended the Emerging Technologies. The gaming area had over 10 miles of Ethernet cable, and connected over 2,000 gamers. I can’t wait to see what happens next year.
Related links:
NVIDIA
SLIDE SHOW Final Day
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NVISION: Second Day |
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Wednesday 27 August 2008 - 09:05AM
Renee Dunlop
Spending a day at NVISION 2008 is to live the wonder and the weirdness of Silicon Valley. The three-day conference on visual computing is taking over a big chunk of downtown San José.
It seems the word is out. Where yesterday the turnout for NVISION was pleasing but moderate, today there is a marked increase. I noticed there were more geeks wandering all areas of the convention and surrounding buildings and many more taking control of the streets. The local businesses seemed pleased, and the local populace seemed somewhat perplexed at the groups that traveled in mass with cell phones in hand and stuffed packsacks filled with freebies. Ah, yes, freebies. Finally, those silly little advertising trinkets and prized gadgets that fills every geeks bookshelf were back.
It was a good day for geeking so I dove right in, hitting the exhibition floor. PNY was first, where I was educated about their product portfolio, starting with the high end Quadro graphics card, ideal for geologists, the medical field, and high end graphics; and the GeForce, ideal for gaming. Gaming cards are designed to do one thing well - play games. Everything about the design is geared for optimal results in high frame rates and high quality graphics to pull you in to the experience. By comparison, the Quadro is designed to create the content within those games, supporting OpenGL and the user manipulating OpenGL through several windows.
A new product of PNY, due to ship in the next four to six weeks, has roughly twice the power of the current high end FX 5600. This new card sports the industries first 4Gb frame buffer, with dedicated high-speed graphics memory. It supports realistic color and a 10-bit grey scale that will allow for better gradation, ideal for the medical communities. The film and TV communities will find it useful because of its color grading, and the ability to non-destructively perform color grading in real time.
PhysX is NVIDIA’s simulation solution to things like fluids and fire, but it runs on the GPU. Ageia Tech made PhysX originally, but after NVIDIA acquired the software they ported it over to run on all the GPU’s. They just recently released the driver to run the software on all the GeForce 8 series and later GPU’s.
A quick stop to see iClone 3, debuted at the beginning of August. It’s been enhanced with realtime depth of field for cameras or realtime water effects with reflection and refraction. They’ve brought in elements from video game play into the world of animation. iClone has married the video game technology with the power of animation, making it an ideal previs tool.
As I traveled through the hall, I ran into none other than John Gaeta, who confessed he will occasionally attend the new or smaller events like this to see what technologies are available that might apply themselves to his long list of creative sparks, or will perhaps fire off a few new ones. Calling gaming the very fabric of VR, he was looking forward to the future when games and film became one complete form of entertainment.
Gaeta pointed me to Mental Image’s Mental Mill, based on the Meta SL shading language, a full blown universal shading language which can be used to create a shader once then used across any platform, hardware or software. In the current beta, they have the Meta SL specification with 100 plus pages of information including math and color function, illumination, matrix manipulation, vector tools, everything you would expect in a mature shading language. It’s open specification so anyone can take the Meta SL language and work with it. Sitting on top of that language is the Mental Mill GUI. There are currently three versions of Mental Mill. The artist edition which comes with FX Composer, the standard edition currently in beta, and the integrator edition, the SDK, which allows developers to embed it in their own tools.
On my way to a Massive demo, I wandered past UMC, a wafer foundry, and manufacturer of the silicon wafers for NVIDIA and several others including Texas Instruments. The client designs the chip and sends it to UMC for manufacturing.
At Massive, I learned how they were expanding into new directions, one of which is the LACMA projects, simulating evacuation behaviors to try to save more lives during an emergency. By building the behaviors of crowds in a panic, they learned that the stress level rapidly drops once the individual gets outside. This causes them to slow down and stop, thus hindering those who are still trying to escape. One trick they discovered is to keep the crowd urgently moving away from the doorways in order for the others to safely escape.
Tomorrow is the last day on NVISION. If you are in the area, I suggest you stop by and see what its all about.
Related links:
NVISION '08
PNY
mental images GmbH
Massive Software
SLIDESHOW Day Two
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NVISION: Day One |
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Tuesday 26 August 2008 - 11:07AM
Renee Dunlop
This is the opening day at NVISION in San Jose, CA, the amassed crowd moved into the darkened exhibit rooms ahead, where we found, among other attractions, the French based ESWC (Electronic Sports World Cup) Tournament.
Teams traveled from all over the world to compete for a substantial cash award. Upon entering the vast room, you see nothing but dark and saturations in light of every hue, flashing off the faces of gamers intent on wining the prize. Wearing headsets for the audio, the room was a fury of clicking, the occasional color shift of splattering virtual blood, a fleeting look of satisfaction before the drive to continue took over again. Either on LAN tournaments or over the Internet, two players or teams per country come to compete creating a large number of participants. The event has been in France since 2003, and this was the first time it had been elsewhere. Most of the PCs were dedicated for the most popular game called Counter Strike. Those players get the most prestige, and therefore the most money.
One volunteer assistant said the prize was $50,000 for men and about $35,000 for women. The difference was apparently due to the lack of female competitors and related sponsors. According to Louise Thomsen, nickname ‘Aurora’ of the MYM.CS team, who traveled all the way from Sweden, Denmark, and Norway for this event, “There are more males than females, so if you look at the ratio, the chances of finding better guys in one group is better than finding girls at the same talent level.” Blinking in the bright sun, the girls in pink were a stark contrast to the intensity inside where row upon row of teams or individuals from around the world competed.
The tournament took up an enormous space and the exhibition had yet to open, so I went over to see the Keynote speaker with his list of impressive guests and demos. The sheer size of the event required the Center for Performing Arts. 3D glasses waited on each of the seats. The mayor of San Jose first greeted the attendees and thanked NVIDIA for recognizing Silicon Valley as the location for this event.
Then out came co-founder, president, and CEO of NVIDIA, Jen-Hsun Huang. He took the stage with his assorted guests for the next 90 minutes, sharing insights about the innovation of the GPU in the last 10 years. The computational ability has reached the teraflops. “To put that into perspective, a teraflop is equal to 1000 Cray X-MPs. He talked about Folding@Home, a Stanford project that, in shared cooperation with public volunteers and their 2.61 million, representing 288 teraflops, computing the massive information to better simulating protein folding.
Huang went on to introduce Peter Stevenson, the COO of RTT to discuss the sold out but not yet built Lamborghini, a 1.5 million dollar sports car that sold on the real time video alone. Raytracing on the car was so perfect that even the headlights, design by jewelry designers, were completely correct.
Huang went on to give some background on Google Earth and how it developed into what it is today, and used that as a launching point to extol the widespread use of MMOG’s. or Massive Multiplayer Online Games, a form of entertainment that now has roughly 100 million active players. He said that analysts project that in another ten years there will be 2.5 billion PC users, and out of that, one of every three people will be involved in virtual worlds.
Other guests to steal the show was Tricia Helfer of Battlestar Galactica who shared some funny tales about working with virtual actors; and Buzz Aldrin, one of the first men to step out onto the moon. He was there to introduce a screening of the 3D 'Fly me to the Moon.'
A demo with the CTO of Sport Vision’s technology gave an overview of how the graphics are added to the screen during sporting events. Football fields were measured via camera to provide all the information needed to change the point of view to a quarterback to show instant playbacks from various angles. Racecars had wind tunnels reaching out behind them to show resistance using computational fluid dynamics.
One of the most interesting to me was a demo using HDR and merging multiple exposures in a program called Photosynth. Joshua Edwards from Microsoft gave the demo of something that had just been released 90 hours earlier. It organizing images taken in a common space. The free software will analyze each photo and find the common points, puts those images together in 3D space, creating a point cloud. Another amazing demo was with Jeff Han, research scientist at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He was one of the main developers of the interface-free touch-driven computer screens, now so popular in the iPhone. Working on an enormous screen, he could tap anywhere and have the menu pop up, cut, scroll, and even animate, even while sharing the work space with Huang.
Related links:
NVISION '08
SLIDE SHOW DAY ONE
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NVART3: Design Fusion WINNERS |
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Monday 25 August 2008 - 02:50AM
Paul Hellard
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