NaturalMotion makes physics technology for realistic motion in football games such as the upcoming Backbreaker video game.
And Now, There's Visual Computing
December 2008 / January 2009
Volume 6 Number 6
Move over video games and Hollywood special effects. The visual computing era has begun. So said Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive officer of graphics chip maker Nvidia, at Nvidia's first annual Nvision 08 Visual Computing conference.
This doesn't mean that there are a ton of new graphics hardware companies sprouting out of nowhere. There were once 50 such companies in the 1990s, but now the only stand-alone graphics chip maker is Nvidia itself. But Huang made a convincing case that there is a growing ecosystem of companies that have grown up around the 3-D graphics that his company's chips make possible.
"The first step is to create the enabling technology," Huang said in an interview. "The second step is to use that technology. Using the graphics processors that we have created is a far more interesting thing to do now."
The Nvision conference drew more than 6,000 people to San Jose, Calif., to celebrate the ecosystem, ranging from professional computer game players to medical imaging specialists. The conference also included an accompanying Emerging Companies Summit. There, more than 60 companies showed off visual computing applications. The offshoots beyond games and special effects include engineering design, image processing, computational photography, virtual worlds, video editing and physics processing. Nvidia sponsored the event so that it could help define visual computing.
The reason that so many companies can prosper is that visual computing is spreading to many different places, as evidenced by the growth of displays around the world. A market researcher, DisplaySearch, calculated that the number of pixels on display screens in the world will hit 8 trillion in 2008, up four-fold from 2 trillion in 2002.
Huang brought up numerous examples of how visual computing is changing the way we do things. He noted, for instance, that Google Earth has been downloaded 400 million times and can transport us to the "Bird's Nest" Olympic Stadium in Beijing within seconds.
He highlighted technologies such as Microsoft's Photosynth technology. The technology allows users to upload a series of related photos, such as dozens of pictures of a house, all taken from different angles. Photosynth can take those photos and arrange them so that the user can view a 360-degree view of the home.
The users can then maneuver through the photos to see all of the different aspects of the house. Huang classified this as an example of computational photography, or something that wouldn't be possible without the computing power of the graphics chip.
"It takes hours to organize photos," Huang said. "It ought to be instantaneous. You can use Photosynth to sort things not just by time, but by space."
Huang also pointed to Nurien, a Seoul, South Korea-based 3-D social networking startup which is creating a fashion-oriented world with highly realistic graphics based on Epic Games' Unreal Engine 3, used to make games such as "Gears of War." The game avatars, or characters, have as many as 150 simulated bones in their bodies, said Taehoon Kim, CEO of Nurien.
Huang said there are already 100 million people playing virtual worlds or massively multiplayer online games such as Nurien. Kim said he sensed excitement about visual computing because graphics is evolving much faster and the platform lets start-ups reach mass market consumers more quickly than they could before.
By the year 2015, Huang and others estimate that one in seven people will be playing in virtual worlds.
Like Epic Games, other startups are building graphics-related middleware that can be exploited by visual computing companies. Geomerics provides middleware that could create much more realistic lighting and shadows in video games. The company has developed techniques such as "global illumination," which makes games look as if there is a virtual sun shining in the world, casting accurate lighting and shadows. The company was founded in 2005 by former Cambridge University researchers in England. It can license its technology to game makers so they can make more realistic games.
Huang also highlighted the work of Sportvision, which created the still-frame "augmented reality" images used to visualize the performance of athletes at the Beijing Olympics. It showed, for instance, how Nadia Liukin proceeded through the air during a gymnastics routine. With the technology, Sportvision can insert graphics pointers into images, such as showing the path of a football pass during play. It can also show the flow of air over race cars in the midst of a race. That takes a lot of computation and thus maximizes the use of Nvidia's graphics chips.
Also participating at Nvision 08 were NaturalMotion and Pixelux Entertainment, whose technologies are used in the upcoming LucasArts video game "Star Wars: The Force Unleashed."
NaturalMotion, based in Oxford, England, has created an animation technology dubbed Euphoria. It allows for the accurate simulation of human bodies. It embues animated bodies with accurate movement as well as artificial intelligence. In the upcoming "Backbreaker" football game, NaturalMotion says its technology enables unique tackles of football players in every play. The technology was also feature in Grand Theft Auto IV, where it let wounded characters to move in a realistic fashion.
Pixelux Entertainment, meanwhile, embues the environment with realistic physics. In the Star Wars game, for instance, the Pixelux "digital molecular matter" technology enables trees to sway realistically in the wind or wood to break upon being struck.
A good thing about the middleware companies is that they don't require as much investment as hardware or chip start-ups. But they typically license their technologies to a small group of players and it remains to be seen whether the markets are big enough to justify venture investments.
Jeff Han, founder and chief scientist of Perceptive Pixels, had the most interesting technology: a futuristic multi-touch display which he controlled by moving his hands over its surface. The New York company spun out of New York University in 2006 to focus on creating a touch user-interface for computers.
Much like Microsoft's Surface computer tables and Apple's multi-touch iPhone displays, Han's man-machine interface (with 60 inch and 100 inch screens) is much more intuitive and it allows multiple people to collaborate on the same machine. Every pixel on the display is a pressure-sensitive sensing element.
It's something to behold, like the scene where Tom Cruise moves images on a screen around on a screen in the sci-fi film "Minority Report."
Just a few years ago, the technology would have been considered science fiction. Han said a number of government agencies are already using his displays, which cost around $60,000 to $200,000 now. The displays started shipping in January 2007.
Han said he can't identify which agencies are using it, but he hinted that they have three letters. Han's focus is on the software, but he had to develop the displays as well because no one else made such screens. Pretty soon, Han will face competition from Microsoft, which is introducing its Surface table computing technology this year. With the tables, users can move their hands over it and make various things happen, thanks to the movement-sensitive cameras underneath the table.
"The market is ready for this now," Han said. "There is so much untapped graphics processing power that is available in these machines."
Dean Takahashi is the lead writer for digital media at VentureBeat at http://venturebeat.com. He reports from Silicon Valley for Innovation.
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