Techno Babble

Philips 3D Solutions have introduced a 20-inch 3D 4YOU frame-mount display. It is based on Philips WOWvx technology to provide the appearance of 3D viewing without the need for special glasses, using slanted lenticular lens screen technology and connects to a PC through a standard DVI interface.

http://www.business-sites.philips.com/3dsolutions/About/Index.html

A sheet of transparent lenses, is fixed on an LCD screen. This sheet sends different images to each eye, and so a person sees two images. These two images are combined by our brain, to create a 3D effect. Because the sheet is transparent, it results in full brightness, full contrast and true color representation

In order to generate a 3D image, the display requires a regular 2D representation of the image and a depth-map. This depth-map indicates the distance between each pixel and the viewer. The 2D image and the depth-map are used to create images on the screen, and these images are then merged by the viewer’s brain into a 3D sensation.

Read more about the technology in the attached document

http://kf12.com/blogs/uploads/philips-3d-display-technology.pdf.

Plug-ins are available for the popular 3D modelling applications that enable users to export 3D animations in the 2D-plus-depth format. Content creation tools are also available for visualizing stereoscopic video content.

The 20-inch display is available for purchase from October 2006 onwards. Also available (now) is a 42-inch version of the display.

What is it ?

COLLaborative Design Activity is described on its web-site as

a royalty free, open standard for the interactive entertainment industry that defines an XML-based schema for 3D authoring applications to freely exchange digital assets without loss of information

and is supported by the non-profit organisation the Khronos Group.

http://www.khronos.org/collada/

Various presentations made at Siggraph 2006 are available from

http://www.khronos.org/developers/library/siggraph2006/COLLADA_Tech_Talk/

Read the full Collada Specification in the attached document

http://kf12.com/blogs/uploads/collada_specification_141.pdf

A couple of items I noted

COLLADA FX

is the first cross-platform standard shader and effects definition written in XML. It targets high-end systems running OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) and Cg (HLSL coming), as well as resource-constrained systems (OpenGL ES 1.x profile).

It provides:

• Next generation lighting, shading and texturing
• High level effects and shaders
• Support for all shader models (1.x, 2.0, 3.0) under CG and GLSL profiles

Some more detail

This enables authors to describe how to apply color to a visual scene. It is a flexible abstraction for describing material properties across many platforms and application programming interfaces (APIs).

The COLLADA FX Loader project is a sample that was developed to load a basic COLLADA FX document, and to make all of the calls to the Cg / CgGL runtime to create and initialize the materials and effects defined in COLLADA. It also provides an API to apply those effects through calls to set and reset the pass state of an effect. The framework is easily extensible to add implementation for any types or states that are needed and currently unsupported. The sources for the COLLADA FX loader build into a library called libcfx.a that must be linked into the application. The loader uses the COLLADA DOM when loading assets directly out of COLLADA, or the effects and materials can be converted into a binary format native to libcfx.

COLLADA Physics

• Rigid Body Dynamics
• Rag Dolls
• Contraints
• Collision Volumes
• Enables data interchange between Ageia (PhysX), Havok, Bullet, ODE and other game physics middleware

Google has recently added support for COLLADA to the Google Earth KML file format (which is used for importing models into Google Earth).

Z Corporation, maker of 3D printers, recently unveiled (during Siggraph 2006) the first handheld, self-positioning 3D scanner on the market that can digitize 3D surfaces in real time.

Full details which describe the complete specification for this new device are available at

http://www.zcorp.com/products/zscanner700.asp?ID=1

Accuracy is rated at up to 0.05 mm (0.002 in) and output is in STL or a RAW format.

I found that the system was easy to use, but at a retail price of almost $40,000 this may be a bit too rich, but you do get a specially configured Laptop included in that price

Quite impressed with the EON Touchlight, a bare-hand 3D interaction virtual reality display system based on an invention from Microsoft Research.

See the movie at

http://www.eonreality.com/video/touchlight

Image processing techniques are used to combine the output of 2 video cameras behind a semi-transparent plane in front of the user. The resulting image shows 3D objects which appear to float in space. Users interact with the displayed objects either by touching the screen or moving their hands just off the screen surface.

More details about this device are available at

http://www.eonreality.com/news/news_archive/press_releases07_18_06.htm

Read details about other products from EON at their website

http://www.eonreality.com/

including:

• EON Sales Assistant - an authoring tool for creating sale material from 3D Models.
• EON Display Systems - various display systems for immersive and stereoscopic viewing
• EON Professional - an authoring tool that brings Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) product data to life with real-time photo realistic features, advanced physics engine and realistic human behaviors.

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sidenote: EON Reality Inc work closely with the Digital Knowledge Exchange (DKE) who are based in Doncaster (uk). Their objective is to introduce emerging technologies to industry in Yorkshire and the UK, and have founded the Interactive Visualisation and Research Centre (IVRC) a collaborative venture with funding from Doncaster College, EON Reality Inc and the European Union (Objective 1).

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Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories is the North American arm of the Mitsubishi Electric Corporation’s Corporate R&D Group. A long time technical contributor to the computer graphic community, MERL conducts application-motivated research and development in computer and communication technologies. A recent development is MERL’s DiamondTouch table, the first multi-user touch technology.

http://www.merl.com

The MERL DiamondTouch table is a multi-user, debris-tolerant, touch-and-gesture-activated screen for supporting small group collaboration, including gaming. It is the first touch screen that allows multiple users to interact simultaneously, and it knows who is who, making it perfect for multi-user touch-interactive arcade games.

http://www.merl.com/projects/DiamondTouch

The DiamondTouch developer’s kit includes a relevant SDK.

I attended the presentation of a series of papers related to Image Manipulation. Aimed primarily at tools for the digital darkroom, the papers were nonetheless interesting.

Color Harmonisation

Input Image

harmonized background (buildings)

Colour Harmonisation, is related to ensuring harmonization of the colours used in images using a series of Hue Harmonic Templates (for the colour hsv colour wheel). Ensuring that all the colours used in the image lie within a segment of the color hue wheel will ensure colour harmonization. (Harmonic colors are sets of colors that are aesthetically pleasing in terms of human visual perception).

Details of the paper are available at

http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~sorkine/ProjectPages/Harmonization/.

Drag and drop pasting

Click the image to see the dragged region and then the pasted result
unfortunately this will only work in IE (not Firefox) )

Drag and drop pasting – of one image within another (seamless image composition). It was not possible to tell that the image pasted was not part of the original image. Some more detail is available at

http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/…/drag-and-drop_pasting.html

Two-scale Tone Management for Photographic Look

Two-scale Tone Management for Photographics Look – employed a technique to merge the appearance (tone) from one image with another.

Abstract
We introduce a new approach to tone management for photographs. Whereas traditional tone-mapping operators target a neutral and faithful rendition of the input image, we explore pictorial looks by controlling visual qualities such as the tonal balance and the amount of detail. Our method is based on a two-scale non-linear decomposition of an image. We modify the different layers based on their histograms and introduce a technique that controls the spatial variation of detail. We introduce a Poisson correction that prevents potential gradient reversal and preserves detail. In addition to directly controlling the parameters, the user can transfer the look of a model photograph to the picture being edited.

Read more at

http://people.csail.mit.edu/soonmin/photolook/

Interactive adjustment of tonal values

Interactive adjustment of tonal values – showed the possibility of adjusting the tone in selected parts of the image interactively. Here’s a paper on the subject

http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~danix/itm/

Image-based material editing

Image-based material editing – was a presentation of the techniques described in an earlier article in this blog, where the material of objects in images can be replaced by other materials.

http://www.kf12.com/blogs/techno/?p=310

Summary

In summary – All the above techniques are interesting in that they are done in “real-time” as post-processing operations. Although they are applied primarily for photographic images, there is no reason, as far as I can determine, why they could not be equally applied to rendered images as post-processing operations.

Attended the presentation of a paper entitled Interactive Decal Compositing with Discrete Exponential Maps

Abstract
A method is described for texturing surfaces using decals, images placed on the surface using local parameterizations. Decal parameterizations are generated with a novel O(N logN) discrete approximation to the exponential map which requires only a single additional step in Dijkstra’s graph-distance algorithm. Decals are dynamically composited in an interface that addresses many limitations of previous work. Tools for image processing, deformation/feature-matching, and vector graphics are implemented using direct surface interaction. Exponential map decals can contain holes and can also be combined with conformal parameterization to reduce distortion. The exponential map approximation can be computed on any point set, including meshes and sampled implicit surfaces, and is relatively stable under resampling. The decals stick to the surface as it is interactively deformed, allowing the texture to be preserved even if the surface changes topology. These properties make exponential map decals a suitable approach for texturing animated implicit surfaces.

The full paper is available here

http://kf12.com/blogs/uploads/expmapsiggraph06.pdf

About the author: Ryan Michael Schmidt is currently an Master’s student in the Computer Science Department of the Unviersity of Calgary, being supervised by Dr. Brian Wyvill. He does research in computer graphics, particularly shape modeling with Implicit Surfaces and is due to commence a PhD at the University of Toronto (Summer 06)

Other Items
Possibly of equal interest were references to

ShapeShop

ShapeShop is a tool for creating 3D models using sketches. It incorporates much recent work in interactive implicit surface modeling, implicit sweep surfaces, and sketch-based modeling.

http://unknownroad.com/shapeshop/

There is a paper available ShapeShop: Sketch-Based Solid Modeling with BlobTrees which was presented at EuroGraphics 2005. Read it here

http://kf12.com/blogs/uploads/shapeshop_hires.pdf

and CrossY

CrossY is a crossing-based drawing application where instead of point-and-click “crossing” is used as an interaction method.

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/crossy/

To trigger an action a target is crossed instead of being clicked on. Additional information is available in the following paper CrossY: A Crossing-Based Drawing Application

http://kf12.com/blogs/uploads/crossy_finale.pdf

Another tool to assist when searching for, or examining, patents.

The aim of the Gauss Project, is to open up the patent system to Software Developers by allowing them to browse Software Patents granted by the European Patent Office.

http://gauss.ffii.org

… and here is a link to their search page

http://gauss.ffii.org/Search/All