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.

AI space

AI space has a nice set of introductory javascript applets to a number of AI learning techniques. It covers graph searching, Belief and Decision Networks, Decision Trees, Constraint satisfaction problems, Neural Networks and more. It is a more 'traditional' AI site.

I also came across this great SLAM visualization tool for Player. A valuable resource on this is the Robotic Mapping and Exploration book (Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics).

High Performance Graphics Slides

The slides to the High Performance Graphics conference are now available. I'm going to start on a GPU based tree search project soon so "Fast Minimum Spanning Tree for Large Graphs on the GPU" certainly looks interesting. The slides for Understanding the Efficiency of Ray Traversal on GPUs are also available
and you can now get the CUDA source code from Timo Aila's website.

Apple Hard Drive Update

I recently got a mac, and am just slowly starting to get used to it. One thing I noticed the other day was funny 'chirping' noises coming from my mac, and the hard drive would seem to write like crazy.. I thought it was just 'something wierd', but I wasn't the only one. Now Apple have released an update that is supposed to fix the issue. Just needed a reboot, let the firmware install, it shuts your computer down, power it back up and your up and running again. So far so good.

Rigid Body Simulation & Deformables

The most brilliant idea I've seen in a long time for fast general rigid body simulation,
Statistical Simulation of Rigid Bodies.

We begin by collecting statistical data regarding changes in linear and angular momentum for collisions of a given object. From this data we extract a statistical “signature” for the object, giving a compact representation of the object’s response to collision events. During object simulation, both the collision detection and the collision response calculations are replaced by simpler calculations based on the statistical signature.

I've always thought something like this could be done, now we know how. Genius.

In related rigid body news:
Anisotropic Friction for Deformable Surfaces and Solids, for the next time you need a friction model.

A Point-based Method for Animating Elastoplastic Solids is a paper that presents another method to combine fluid and solid simulation using some of the same concepts from Mullers SPH paper. The code is built up from Adaptively Sampled Particle Fluids source. No code for this method though (yet). Haven't had an indepth look, but seems like a nicer approach than I previously discussed.

Fluids & Volumes

Another catchup post:
Fluid Simulation with Articulated Bodies from gatech has some nice results, would could make a great basis for a new version of Karl Sims swimmers.
Sony has released Field3d, a open file format for volume data, which seems to take a lot of the low level work away from you when working with voxels, it supports slices,etc. as well.
Matthias Müller also has a new publication, Fast and Robust Tracking of Fluid Surfaces which describes how to efficiently generate surface meshes from fluid simulations.I've not read it fully yet, but presumably it is worthwhile.
I also stumbled accross some more open source fluid projects, Fire Dynamics Simulator and Smokeview from NIST which has some good looking fire & smoke simulations of houses burning, etc. and a new project nsproj, that has a parallel 3D Navier Stokes solver.