Before there were raster-scan TV-like screens on computers, we had vectorscopes, also known as stroke writers and calligraphic screens. They drew straight lines, one at a time, and were used for early warning systems, FAA monitoring, and CAD back in the 1960s and up till about 1990. A near cousin was the first oscilloscopes, and one of the most popular … Read more
courtesy of PTC Khronos has integrated Ray Tracing Pipelines into the Vulkan open standard API together with the option of ray launching from any shader and some new ways of offloading intensive setup tasks to multi-core CPUs Microsoft announced the development of a ray-tracing extension to DirectX 12 called DXR in March 2018 at the same time that Nvidia … Read more
New ANARI API will streamline data visualization Analytic rendering is image generation performed primarily to gain and communicate insights into complex data sets. Scientific visualization is the primary application domain using analytic rendering today, followed by the emerging data analytics space. Recent advances in rendering technology for image generation—especially the introduction of real-time ray tracing—significantly advanced data visualization and … Read more
The Khronos Organization is a consortium creating open interoperability standards to foster cross-platform development. Their roots are in OpenGL, so graphics will always hold a special place in the organization’s growing list of interests. Khronos has recently announced a collaboration with the Smithsonian on the Open Access Initiative, which will open the floodgates to new content and easier content creation. … Read more
Ultraleap has emerged as the offspring of the acquisition of Leap Motion by Ultrahaptics in the Spring of 2019. The merger joined two companies with different approaches to enable spatial interaction for digital devices. Ultrahaptics had the Stratos platform using ultrasound to provide tactile feedback and with the acquisition of Leap Motion, it added hand tracking using optical sensors and … Read more
Last month I wrote about a new book on Data science and visual computing. The book tells us, as we already well know, we are awash in data. It’s like the weather, we know it, we can’t manage it. We are struggling to get a grip on it, understand it, use it and exploit it, but it is being generated … Read more
Driving to stay at least in step, if not ahead of the virtual, mixed, augmented, and yet to be named and marketed realities, the Khronos OpenXR working group has released their working API which covers various OS, and presumably all devices. OpenXR—solving the VR–AR fragmentation if not confusion. (Source: Khronos) OpenXR is a unifying, royalty-free, open standard that provides … Read more
At this year’s SIGGRAPH in Vancouver, The Khronos Group has launched its new interoperability standard for neural networks. The Neural Network Exchange Format (NNEF) is an open, implementation-independent way to describe neural networks designed to cut through the current tangle of framework-specific formats. The new standard was released in provisional form in December of 2017 and, after a period of … Read more
Open and free with lots of backers The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) formed in September 2015, with the goal of developing a royalty-free, open-source video format as an alternative to fee-based formats such as H.264 and HEVC. At the time, the Alliance’s initial seven Founding Members—Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix set out to advance video codec … Read more
