Saturday, March 14th, 2010
Stereo Studio is a lightweight stereo pre-visualization tool that provides a high performance shader driven framework for decoding
and encoding stereo content for all display types. In addition to its functionality as a stereo movie player, this tool also provides
support for motion matching, floating window and stereoscopic calibration adjustments, and collaborative workspaces. At a high level,
the top features of this tool include:
Shader driven codec system
Support for all major stereo formats
Expanded media format support
High performance renderer
Custom motion matching (tracking)
Dynamic and adjustable stereo settings
Automatic camera calibrator
Comfort zone hinting
Collaborative annotation system
Scriptable settings system
Multiple monitor support
Hardware accelerated playback
Stereo content re-formatting
Debug menu system
Macro and batch processing
Adjustable playback modes
Friday, December 18th, 2009
Over the last several days I've been pouring over the reviews of Avatar, hoping to find one that offered an in depth analysis of the stereoscopic quality. I haven't found one yet, so I decided to write at least a basic one. Tonight I watched the movie twice - first using Real-D technology, and second (and immediately after) in IMAX 3D. I expected the Real-D experience to be better due to the following (perhaps gross) assumptions:
Saturday, August 8th, 2009
In 2001 the Vision 3D engine featured large outdoor environments supported by smooth and dynamically deformable terrain. The initial version of this engine was PC only,
but almost eight years later I decided to update the engine to run on mobile devices. At the start of this process I quickly realized that the terrain system
was both a storage and performance hog, and a number of features would need to be dropped.
The most significant cost to contend with was the file size of terrain maps and textures. These files were massive, as they supported very large open worlds with
a high degree of detail. Optimizing this content for mobile meant sacrificing a number of features in order to significantly reduce the size of each terrain vertex.
Thursday, July 14th, 2005
The Vision Engine supports a number of different texture space effects including bump mapping and specular mapping. In addition to these, it also supports extruded heightmaps. These heightmaps add extra visual detail to the geometry, particularly when viewed at fairly wide angles - where normal bump mapping often breaks down.
As a result of this effect, any shadows cast onto an extruded surface will flow naturally over detailled contours, rather than fall flat along the plane of the underlying geometry. The following video shows this technique in action:
Friday, January 9th, 2004
A crucial aspect of realistically modelling the interactions between light and participating media is subsurface scattering. This process takes into account the subsurface characteristics of absorbed light, with respect to the microfaceted absorptive and reflective properties of a material. The most recognizable visual result of this process is translucency.
This post describes a very simple technique for simulating the effect of subsurface scattering for use at interactive frame rates inside a game engine. While not a robust solution, if it happens to fit your needs it can be cheap and effective.
Thursday, August 7th, 2003
You're walking through a casino and you spot a roulette table. Next to the table is a list of past results that indicate
that the past 9 outcomes were all black. You have a preference for betting on red, so you pause for a moment
to think. If you decide to make the bet, then you've just committed the gambler's fallacy.
Each spin on a roulette wheel is an independent event, so the past history does not provide any indication of future
outcomes. If you rely on the past results, then you are incorrectly assuming that the next spin is a dependent event.
Probability is the study and measurement of uncertainty. This concept is crucial to the study of many areas of computer science, including cryptography, compression, and artificial intelligence (to name a few). The following article provides a brief discussion of independent and dependent events that illustrates the nature of the gambler's logical fallacy.
