Google Building Maker

Google has just released their building maker, it looks like they finally found a use for the videotrace technology they acquired from the University of Adelaide.

This should help putting content together quickly for simulators, etc.

Check it out:

Nearest Neighbor

A bunch of links on the nearest-neighbor problem, for higher dimensions:
http://www.mit.edu/~andoni/LSH/
http://www.cs.umd.edu/~mount/ANN/
http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~algorith/implement/ranger/implement.shtml

And, for good measure a set of comparisons of optical flow algorithms:
http://vision.middlebury.edu/flow/eval/

I'll probably stick to the OpenCV defaults anyway, but its nice to know there are options. It would seem Bruhn et al. is the most accurate..

Talking Piano and AI

Daniel Wedge sent me this interesting link on a talking piano!


A great idea, I wonder if it had been done before..

In other news, the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence archive has been made open to the public covering all the way from 1969 - 2007!

nVidia: OpenCL , Nexus, Fermi

There's been a fair bit of news flowing out of nVidia, biggest first:
nVidia has released a GPU OpenCL implementation compatible with all devices that support CUDA (no surprise).
You can get the nVidia OpenCL from the nVidia OpenCL Developer Website.

Next in nVidia news, Nexus has been released. I haven't had a chance to try it, but apparently it allows you to debug GPU programs via Microsoft Visual Studio in the 'normal' way - this would certainly make GPU programming a little easier.

Finally, nVidia has released information on Fermi their next-generation architecture. Basically it seems to be more of the same (which is always good) without all the bad bits for GPGPU programming (even better!). The biggest changes are allowing multiple kernels to execute in parallel, and having decent double-precision support. This should really open up the scientific&engineering computing to GPGPU, and will probably do good things for getting accelerated raytracing happening. AnandTech has a good write-up on Fermi, although it looks like we will see Larabee before Fermi...

I had a chance to play with a 3xC1060 Tesla boards for the GPU fluid simulation project on a 64bit machine. This threw up a whole bunch of problems, since I was using MSVC express edition, which does not support 64bit (apparently.) Problem was solved by using the 32 bit CUDA wizard, redirecting the CUDA libraries to the 32bit versions (ie: c:\CUDA\lib, not C:\CUDA\lib64), and some other tweaks.

Catchup

I've been quite occupied with ECU (Exams and mid-semester marking), Transmin, GPU Pathfinding, and the DSTO MAGIC 2010 competition. The WA team I've been organizing has teamed up with Flinders university and got some significant assistance from Thales Australia. The submission has been made, will have to see if we are successful...

GPU Collision Detection

There is a new paper from the pacific graphics conference hybrid parallel continuous collision detection (HPCCD). I've been wanting to write GPU collision detection system for a while, but was always held back on how to do this efficiently, and easily (ie: not much effort on my part). The hybrid approach proposed sounds great: do all the hard (not-very-easily-made-efficiently-parallel) on the CPU, and just use the GPU for some edge-edge and vertex-face primitive tests. This keeps the GPU doing what it does best, and the CPU doing what it does best.

The paper is available from the above link, and you can download thecollision detection API. UNC maintains some collision detection benchmark scenes.

Shader X2

The entire Shader X2 book and source code has now been released and can be downloaded for free! Hot off the press, get it while you can! It is still a worthwhile resource, even if it is DX9-era (2004) technology.

If your in the process of looking for good graphics,games, and physics simulation related books, the Mr. Elusive website has a great list with some fantastic books, and also a few duds.