Archive for February, 2006

Autodesk Inventor 11

Tuesday, February 28th, 2006

There’s an “exclusive” write up of Inventor 11 available to read at MCAD Online

http://www.mcadonline.com/index.php?…Itemid=73

Topics covered include:

  • Larg assemblies & Assembly Configurations
  • Functional Design
  • Simulation
  • Advanced Shape Description
  • This version of Inventor, currently in Beta, is still a couple of months away from release which is expected in March/April.

    Microsoft plans 6 Editions of Vista

    Monday, February 27th, 2006

    Vista

    A story at the BBC news website indicates that Microsoft is planning 6 versions of Vista, its next operating system due for release towards the end of 2006, to match the differing demands of its users.

    The versions will be known as:

    • Vista Business
    • Vista Enterprise
    • Vista Home Basic
    • Vista Home Premium
    • Vista Ultimate
    • Vista Starter

    Read the article for more information on how these versions are targeted.

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4754462.stm

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    Touch and Design (T’nD)

    Monday, February 27th, 2006

    Touch and Design

    T’nD is a Research Project funded by the European Union that is looking at developing a tool for designers using haptic elements.

    Main Goals

    Today, industrial designers are used to produce physical mock-ups of products by modeling and manipulating clay. Designers have their knowledge about controlling shapes in their hands, and the skill they have developed is a high value to be preserved. Current haptic technology is mainly based on point based force feedback allowing for the simulation of a local point contact. That is not appropriate and satisfactory for simulating a full hand contact and interaction with virtual objects.
    The project aims at developing a novel system for shape generation and modification based on novel haptic interaction and intelligent shape manipulation operators in order to exploit existing manual skill of designers.

    All the details are available at

    http://www.kaemart.it/touch-and-design/

    This document Definition of Scenario and Test Cases provides an interesting insight into the project.

    http://www.kf12.com/blogs/uploads/tnd-testcases.pdf

    Partners in the project include

    think3

    http://www.think3.com/en/news/release_detail.asp?id=3584

    Alessi

    http://www.alessi.com

    and Pininfarina

    http://www.pininfarina.com

    An interesting approach but is it actually necessary to simulate the actions of a traditional craftsman to achieve a required design ? (Perhaps 3D modelling should attempt to simulate the approach used by a traditional Draughtsman).

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    Evolving Compiler Technology

    Monday, February 27th, 2006

    The IBM Systems Journal (Volume 45, NUmber 1, 2006), although aimed at aspects of online game technology, nevertheless contains an interesting hint at the possible future direction of compiler technology which is being designed take advantage of the growth in processor complexity.

    http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj45-1.html

    Using advanced compiler technology to exploit the performance of the Cell Broadband Engine architecture, describes the research that is progressing to optimise (compile) code written in a high-level language to fit a multi-processor (cell) architecture.

    The prototype compiler innovatively takes advantage of and extends existing parallelization technology to enable partitioning and parallelization across multiple heterogeneous processing elements from within a single compilation process.

    The implication is that the programmer will not have to worry too much about the machine architecture the application is aimed at relying instead on the compiler to produce code that is optimised for the hardware it will execute on (although the capability will still exist for lower-level dabbling if necessary).

    Although at an early stage, it won’t be long before this approach is likely to be adapted to the mass market of application writers for the multi-core architectures from Intel and AMD.

    http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/451/eichenberger.html

    (For those diehards there’s lots of detail about IBMs compiler research at Compiler Technology for Scalable Architectures

    http://domino.research.ibm.com/…/cellcompiler.index.html)

    Rendering - Technical Papers

    Wednesday, February 15th, 2006

    If you’re looking for some reading matter on a cold winters evening, there’s quite a collection here. Fairly technical and related to the on-going work by Henrik Wann Jenson - Associate Professor in the Computer Graphics Laboratory of the department of Computer Sceince and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. enjoy

    http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/papers/

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