Techno Babble

Strata Foto 3D a tool for creating 3D content from still images.

A wide range of objects can be modelled, including those with holes and “difficult” organic shapes.

This is achieved using a conventional camera with photos taken from a number of different viewpoints.

The shape of the object and its surface color are extracted from each photo and the information is used to build a 3D object.

LINK: http://www.strata.com/foto3d.asp

A new type of TV set-top box has been announced by researchers at the University of Wollongong in Australia.

The device will recognise hand-gestures and sends a relevant signal to a remote-control which has been designed to work with different makes of television, video recorder, DVD player, hi-fi and digital set-top box.

LINK: http://internationalreporter.com/…

These courses are available at SIGGRAPH 2007.

1. Computational Photography
Sunday, Full-Day, 8:30 am – 5:30 pm

2. Mesh Parameterization: Theory and Practice
Sunday, Full-Day, 8:30 am – 5:30 pm

3. Sketch-Based Interfaces: Techniques and Applications
Sunday, Full-Day, 8:30 am – 5:30 pm

4. State of the Art in Massive Model Visualization
Sunday, Full-Day, 8:30 am – 5:30 pm

5. Introduction to Direct3D 10
Sunday, Full-Day, 8:30 am – 5:30 pm

6. Anyone Can Cook: Inside Ratatouille’s Kitchen
Sunday, Half-Day, 8:30 am – 12:15 pm

7. Introduction to SIGGRAPH and Computer Graphics
Sunday, Half-Day, 8:30 am – 12:15 pm

8. High-Quality Rendering Using Ray Tracing and Photon Mapping
Sunday, Half-Day, 8:30 am – 12:15 pm

9. From “Shrek” to “Shrek the Third”: Evolution of CG Characters in the “Shrek” Films
Sunday, Half-Day, 1:45 – 5:30 pm

10. An Interactive Introduction to OpenGL Programming
Sunday, Half-Day, 1:45 – 5:30 pm

11. Practical Least-Squares for Computer Graphics
Sunday, Half-Day, 1:45 – 5:30 pm

12. “Surf’s Up”: The Making of an Animated Documentary
Monday, Half-Day, 8:30 am – 12:15 pm

13. A Gentle Introduction to Bilateral Filtering and Its Applications
Monday, Half-Day, 8:30 am – 12:15 pm

14. Urban Design and Procedural Modeling
Monday, Half-Day, 8:30 am – 12:15 pm

15. Example-Based Texture Synthesis
Monday, Half-Day, 8:30 am – 12:15 pm

16. Practical Global Illumination With Irradiance Caching
Monday, Half-Day, 8:30 am – 12:15 pm

17. Spatial Augmented Reality: Merging Real and Virtual Worlds
Monday, Half-Day, 8:30 am – 12:15 pm

18. Résumés and Demo Reels: If Yours Don’t Work, Neither Do You!
Monday, Tutorial, 3:15 – 5:30 pm

19. Sorting in Space: Multidimensional, Spatial, and Metric Data Structures for Computer Graphics Applications
Monday, Tutorial, 3:15 – 5:30 pm

20. Visualizing Quaternions
Monday, Tutorial, 3:15 – 5:30 pm

21. Database Techniques With Motion Capture
Monday, Tutorial, 3:15 – 5:30 pm

22. LucasArts and ILM: A Case Study in Film and Game Convergence
Monday, Tutorial, 3:15 – 5:30 pm

23. Geometric Modeling Based on Polygonal Meshes
Tuesday, Full-Day, 8:30 am – 5:30 pm

24. GPGPU: General-Purpose Computation on Graphics Hardware
Tuesday, Full-Day, 8:30 am – 5:30 pm

25. The Mobile 3D Ecosystem
Tuesday, Full-Day, 8:30 am – 5:30 pm

26. The Morphology of Digital Creatures
Tuesday, Half-Day, 8:30 am – 12:15 pm

27. Anyone Can Make Quality Animated Films! The Eight Basic Steps to Success
Tuesday, Half-Day, 8:30 am – 12:15 pm

28. Advanced Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games
Wednesday, Full-Day, 8:30 am – 5:30 pm

29. Crossing The Line: Moving From Film to Games (and Possibly Back)
Wednesday, Half-Day, 8:30 am – 12:15 pm

30. Digital Art Techniques
Wednesday, Half-Day, 8:30 am – 12:15 pm

31. Fluid Simulation
Wednesday, Half-Day, 1:45 – 5:30 pm

32. Interaction Tomorrow
Wednesday, Half-Day, 1:45 – 5:30 pm

33. Strands and Hair: Modeling, Animation, and Rendering
Thursday, Full-Day, 8:30 am – 5:30 pm

Noted this option when passing through the features of FreeWheel from Autodesk

Rendering Service (http://dwfit.com/DWFImage.aspx)
This is a raw rendering service that provides no GUI. The service accepts an URL to a DWF, view parameters, and returns a rendered image file. You can build your own interactive or multi-platform viewer from this service. The “dwf.aspx” service above uses this service internally to produce the various views.

The DWF-to-image rendering service takes the same parameters as the interactive serivce, along with the following additions:

• &width = <integer> The width of the image to produce (in pixels).
• &height = <integer> The height the image to produce (in pixels).
• &bg = <integer> Color of background in hexadecimal (bg=ff0000 for red or bg=80808080 for semi-transparent gray) or t (bg=t) for the original color in transparent.

For example, the following URL will render an image small enough to fit on most cell phone screens. It will view the center of page 3 of the Hotel5 zoomed in to a factor of 4 and generate a image that is 200×200 pixels:

http://dwfit.com/dwfImage.aspx?cx=0.5&cy=0.5&scale=4&sec=3&width=200&height=200&path=http://dwfit.com/sample/Hotel5.dwf

and here’s the picture generated from that html.

(Tip: Click on the image to view a dynamically created image at 1000×1000)

More of a Marketing/Sales oriented event than a technical event, but can reveal further insight into what is happening at Microsoft.

Steve Ballmer outlines Microsoft’s Software-As-A-Service plans in his keynote speech. Video highlights from the show are available at:

LINK: http://members.microsoft.com/partner/digitalwpc/

Ballmer says, Microsoft have the following offerings

Personal Services
Windows Live, Office Live, Popfly, MSN, Live Search, Virtual Earth

Business Services
Exchange Hosted Services, Managed Communication and Collaboration services,Office Live Small Business, Dynamics Live CRM, Titan

(Titan is an Application Development Platform for CRM (customer relations management)

Developer Services
Windows Live Cloud Infrastructure Services, Silverlight Streaming, BizTalk services

Service Enablers
Web Sites: Windows Server, SQL, VS, AdCenter. Click to run client: ActiveX, Ajax, Silverlight, .NET, Win32 Softgrid

NTT Comware has developed a real-time 3D display system which relies on a pair of cameras that capture and process data about an object. which is the basis of Tangible-3D Technology.

LINK: http://www.nttcom.co.jp/english/news/en07062001.html

This technology is an improved version of the NTT Comwares tangible 3D system without requiring special glasses which was originally developed in 2005.

From a recent report in the New Scientist

LINK: http://www.newscientisttech.com/….images-touchable.html

A system that makes three dimensional images solid enough to grasp has been unveiled by Japanese firm NTT. It could let businesspeople shake hands from across the globe or allow museum visitors to feel precious exhibits that are normally out of reach, the company says.
The prototype Tangible 3D system combines a 3D display with a “haptic glove”. The display creates lifelike images appear in just in front of a flat screen. It creates the illusion of depth by showing slightly different images to each of the viewer’s eyes. This means no special glasses are needed.
Attached to the display is a haptic glove. Once inside, a user’s hand is touched by numerous force-feedback components to make it feel as if it interacting with something solid.

Claimed to be the largest multitouch interactive table in the world, the Serendipity table is installed in the Eureka Tower in Melbourne Australia.

The multi-touch functionality allows a number of users to access information about the building by pointing to a variety of icons on the table display area.

developed by GestureTek

LINK: http://www.gesturetek.com/gestpoint/businesscases/eureka.php

Also a video available at

LINK: http://www.gesturetek.com/videos/eureka_press.wmv