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3D Visualization Moves Forward
Chris writes "Showing for the first time at the Society for Information Display (SID) conference in Boston was a three-dimensional display with 100 million volume pixels or "voxels". The Perspecta is a hardware and software combination that projects 3D images inside a 500 mm transparent spherical dome. Images 250 mm in diameter can be seen from a full 360 degrees without goggles, allowing the viewer to walk around the image. It can be used to visualize protein structures and to plan surgical and radiation treatment by locating the exact position of a tumour on an x-ray or mammogram. It could also be used in air traffic control, prototype designing and security scanning of luggage. Perspecta uses Texas Instruments' digital light processor technology and a spinning projection screen, which sweeps the sphere." We've done some previous stories about this globe from Actuality Systems. The trend seems to be toward simulating 3D with high-resolution flat screens, though.
http://www.opendx.org
Data Explorer. Formerly from IBM. Runs on Linux, and Windows.
3D protein modelling for the rest of us with only flat-screen monitors.
I want a holodeck!
Lots of petrified grits
Now if only they can get it larger than a snow globe.
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
It can also be used to show to a group of people the design flaw in the Death Star.
Displays that require the user to wear glasses aren't what I'd call and adequtes solution. There is a big difference between having to stand on one side of a flat 3D rendering and being able to walk around a real 3D image.
by locating the exact position of a tumour on an x-ray or mammogram.
Porn is the killer app. First the next-generation Internet and now this.
Volume Graphics has some interesting software to go along with the kind of display hardware talked about in the article. With VGs stuff you can "capture" a three D displayed image based on voxels and slice-and-dice it...
/.'d already! :(
... [Insert decent Sig]
Ok, its cool and all.. yeah, being able to project something volumetrically, but is it really _useful_ ? I fail to see how paying $20,000 for a bleeding edge "display sphere" makes more sense than rendering something in stereo, and crossing your eyes, which most visualization packages are capable of doing nowadays anyway.
Where I used to work, we had a number of visualization packages that allowed researchers to view molecules/proteins/DNA sequences in stereo. It was routine, and required no specialized hardware.. You just render two views of the same object, side by side on the screen, with one view taken slightly from the left or to the right of the other. You can manipulate them in realtime, in stereo. Doesnt require glasses.. Just have to cross your eyes. Hell, go visit my site, i've got a couple stereoscopic wallpapers up, and theres nothing stopping me from producing stereoscopic 3D animation in Blender.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
that's a cube of 464*464*464 pixels. It's a great start, but i'd rather have a Radeon 7000 :)
I despise any company that twists the truth to take advantage of people's fears.
In case you were wondering, the term for 'the need to create new words and catchphrases' is "stupid".
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The Fortune Tellers Association of America called. They want their idea back. They're claiming "patent infringement" or some such.
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
Jumping to Conclusions.
This could revolutionize the pr0n industry!! Just think of the implications... (and where you could zoom).
Time to start investing in 3D pr0n companies!
Holodeck here we come!
It can be used to visualize protein structures and to plan surgical and radiation treatment by locating the exact position of a tumour on an x- ray or mammogram.
Finally, something to get geeks interested in breasts.
RMN
~~~
100 millions sounds big, but you have to take the cube-root of this to get the resolution in one axis - a whopping 465. In 2D, this is like a 465x465 display; not terribly exciting. This is the "curse of dimensionality" volume graphics needs to deal with.
Will it let you see the Death Star from the other side of Yavin befor Massassi gets within range?
Software Wars
"The Perspecta is a hardware and software combination that projects 3D images inside a 500 mm transparent spherical dome."
I was tired of being told that renderings were in 3d... yet projected onto a flat screen. Yes, you can rotate it around in your program, but when you put it on a flat screen, it's really not 3d, it just conveys the idea of being 3D.
Not enough for ait traffic control imho.
I did a contract coding job similar to this about two years ago - for an exhibit at a tech expo, we rigged up a pair of curved mirrors and a plexiglass semisphere with a hinged hatch. A projector shot a 1024x768 image through the pair of mirrors, producing an image that gave you roughly 270deg FOV horiz and 90deg vertical. Add a joystick and a rudimentary tunnel shooter... :)
My part of it was hacking up the game engine (Virtools' kit) to render from two in-game viewpoints each frame and distorting the image in a third rendering pass so you'd get a correct image on the screen - lots of optimization, since we were rendering at that resolution two years ago when the Geforce2GTS and 1GHz P3s were the height of consumer technology. That, and some other blocks for the scripting language for level transfers and whatnot.
(The engine used to be marketed under the name Nemo, now called just Virtools Dev. Not too impressive graphically by today's standards, but it has the most artist-friendly scripting system I've EVER seen. If they strapped a decent rendering tech onto it and some network code, they'd have an absolutely outstanding project on their hands.)
I don't think this would work to well for ATC. You need to be able to see large amounts of infomation and viewing it in 3D would be more of a hinderance than a help. besides controllers viewalize it in there minds eye anyways. Not to mention they are a weird breed they hate change ... that why they haven't switched to QWERTY keyboards they still use some funky propritary setup (US).
2.5 dimensional data? I thought 3D was X,Y,Z .. could be mistaken.
at last I can finish my Dragon's Lair cocktail cabinet! I will only charge 1,000 tokens per game, just like the original!
The trend seems to be toward simulating 3D with high-resolution flat screens, though.
These are completely different technologies. The first is an "actual" 3D display. The voxels have a true location in 3D space, for instance. People can view it from any angle with no equipment.
The second appears to be just a large screen. People wear shutter or polarized glasses to send different images to the left and right eyes.
While the second techology is great, especially for high-resolution display to a single person, it really is annoying when used with multiple people with different locations in space.
Since there is only one set (left and right) images on the flat screen, only one viewpoint can be chosen. If a group of people is sufficiently far from the screen, or sufficiently close together in the room, it's fine. But if you let the people wander around the room, you start getting perspective problems that really make collaborative viewing troublesome.
I have a feeling that we will be seeing voxel-based visualization like the one mentioned in this post more and more often. It's just more natural to use.
As someone who is in the field of high-resolution scientific visualization (that's me on the left), I certainly hope that technology will move in this direction.
I really am amazed.
Years ago I just didn't believe we'd really see volumetric 3D because the jump from (say) 640x480 to 640x480x480 just seemed too wide.
If we can get a stationary image 400 x 400 x 400 image for $20,000, it doesn't seem all that much of a stretch to 400 x 400 x 400 x 30 frames per second... or from there to 1600 x 1600 x 1600 x 30 frames per second... or from there to 1600 x 1600 x 1600 x 30 frames per second for $200.
And disk speeds and Internet speeds are coming along just fine...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I am curious...does any kind of projected Visualization exists which does not require a sphere or sum such projection media?
By these I mean...think R2D2's projection unit, the panels used in Final Fantasy: Spirit within, or based on the trailer, the computer screen used by Tom Cruise in Minority Report.
I was thinking projectors exist, but it has to project on something. I was thinking maybe you could have something such as some kind of mist which is projected on. Is it possible when projecting from two locations to have a 3d pixel (I think the term is voxel but I'm not sure)?
Just curious...any additional links to these types of technology (and any terms referring to them to know what to look for) are greatly appreciated.
Eric B
ebresie@gmail.com
But anyway, that is besides the point - I think technology like this is limited (with the exception of entertainment) unless you can get your hands into the 3D image and use it as if it were truly virtual reality. It is one thing to look at a 3D image of a brain tumour, but if you still have to use a 3D-mouse to manipulate it, then there is still an intuitive leap to be made when using applications written for the display - just like the intuitive leap between the 2D mouse and the 2D display. What this needs is to be combined with technology like Reachin [troll warning] where you can actually see the data in the same space where you hands are working on it. Much more appropriate :)
2.5D is when one of the dimensions is limited from having a full range. X and Y could be given a full axis(any number from x to -x), but z is only top or bottom with nothing in between(or just a limited amount of layers, like 5).
I'd like to point out that the space battles in the upcoming strategy game Master of Orion 3 will be rendered using voxels, according to posts made by the programmers in the discussion boards (which are too poorly organized to search through quickly, but the posts ARE there.) Hopefully, this will not cripple the game.
Actually, it isn't a cube of 464*464*464...
Its a sphere with a radius of 768 pixels and
198 slices.
That means it is about 768*768*198.
Now, niftyneat as it looks, I see a few problems...
First and foremost, you're going to be stuck representing solid 1-color materials, wireframes and ghosts with this. You're also not going to be able to make objects appear to be lit correctly. Why? Because the display has no idea what angle you're viewing it from. I'll explain.
Hold your thumb in front of the screen. It's blocking some part of the display, right? Move your head back and forth a little, and it will block different parts. Raise your head up a little or drop it down and it will block different parts again. The thing is, the display has no idea where you're looking from, so every part needs to be visible at all times. It can't clip out bits that are behind other things like a traditional 2D display. The result is that if you show a screen full of text, and draw a thumb in front, you still see the text through the thumb. Both will appear to act like ghosts.
Now, consider drawing a Coke can with a flashlight shining on the side. Again, it has no idea which side you're viewing from, so it's got to draw all sides of the can. The thing is, as you move about it, the logo on the front of the can shouldn't be visible when looking at the back of the can. Similarly, when you look at the side opposite the flashlight, it should be all dark. But since the display uses volumetric texels, it has no idea about the facing of each texel. Every texel's going to be drawn, so a you'd see the backward logo when looking from the back, and you'd see what boils down to a really confusing lighting situation when viewing from the non-flashlight side. It's like ghosts or colored X-Rays.
If you're still with me, that covers the reason for no shadows or non-uniform dull, not-too-shiny surfaces.
Next problem is - it's gonna be SLOW! Sad, but true! If it were a 3D bitmap representing equal units of a cube, that would be one thing. Unfortunately, it represents slices of a bitmap rotating through space.
Now, let me say this: Computers hate round things. Arcs, swooshes, ribbons, none of these are much fun for a computer to draw (comparatively speaking), much less, to render into.
Normally, polygon raster operations boil down to setting up a bunch of lines, one per scanline, and for each, figuring out how you progress across the line in measured, discrete steps. "I'm starting here in the texture, and I'll be there in the texture. I need to get there in 32 screen pixels, and I advance n units through regular steps of screen, texel and 1/z space." This tells the computer do the expensive calculation once, and just do 32 iterative steps to render the 32 pixels on that scanline. Any modern 3D engine is actually optimized to do the expensive stuff 1-2 times, creating the per-scanline numbers iteratively as well.
The only places where this approach doesn't work are where you're clipping against the edge of the display area. Clipped triangles are traditionally an order of magnitude more expensive to render than non-clipped ones. So much so, that terrible tricks are used to avoid them or reduce them to categories of special cases that can be tackled to attempt to avoid reverting to a true clip. For example, many display systems actually create waste RAM in a border around the screen. If a triangle doesn't penetrate the waste area, the rasterizer will go ahead and draw (or pretend to draw) the dummy pixels. It's only in the case where triangles are partly on screen, but go even beyond the dummy area that the hideously expensive render functions are called. Drawing millions of pixels per second that you know the user will never see? That sure points to a problem!
Enter the circular slice-based display space.
Here, for every single pixel, you've got to find which bits of a render go through. Essentially, you have to clip against the front and back of every single triangle you render as you calculate each slice. You're taking the worst hit on every single triangle!
What's even worse is that a single 'frame' (half rotation, assuming the rotating display plane is visible from front and back) consists of just shy of 200 renders. This means you're taking that 1% worst case scenario and repeating it 100% of the time, and repeating it about 200 times per frame. And because you're dealing with an arc for the rotational advancement (remember, computers like even, linear, discrete steps), you're dealing with curved surfaces instead of little cubes and the planes of a view frustum. Essentially, you're looking for the union of an arbitrary material and a stuffed piece of macaroni instead of merely finding the portion that fits within a little box. This makes the checks for pixel penetration several orders of magnitude more expensive and makes it even more expensive to attempt to reuse data from one slice to the next.
Hee. Plus the display is connected to your PC via SCSI2W, which is also a not-too-minor detail. You've got over 100 million pixels to send across per 'frame'. Even if they're just 1-byte pixels (256 color), and partial updates, that's asking a lot of a dual-channel 20MHz(?) bus.
Mind, we're still discovering things today which would have sped up rendering on our Commodore 64s. The computational cost will come down over time as more ways are developed for rendering in non-uniform/curved space, and as different spatial representation methods are explored. This is a nifty advance, certainly a step closers than the silly lenticular lens based 3D systems and the layered LCD-over-CRT approaches.
Still. Think of a ghosty AutoCAD on a 286. Look, but don't touch. We've still got a ways to go before 3D games and movies become a reality.
But don't get me wrong: It's a neat advancement, and it gives me hope. If I could borrow one, I think I'd make a noisy whirring ghost town snow globe. The shape just begs for it. And I'd love to get cracking on trying to find efficient algorithms for the unusual render space. *sigh.* $60k though. Maybe eBay can help me out on this one in another 20 years.
Says the RIAA: When you EQ, you're stealing bass!
Are you say that altitude isn't reported? because I know the data blocks contain the plains alt. As for the layers ... it depends on the system some area spaces aren't broken up (real low traffic) and all ATC is handled by one center. Others break it up so different centers control different layers. Like in the Northeast (US) there are many local center that control there own traffic like boston, JFK (its a little different there because they control the traffic for the all 3 airports in the area at one site). They only control trafic up to a certain altitude after that its taken over by the site in NH (enroute center).
:)
furthermore there are places in the world that have ATC systems and ARE below sea level
Internet pr0n will never be the same again.
since this is spinning, it's not going to be 464^3, but more like refresh_hz*x*y of screen. but, in either case, 100e6 is not so many voxels these days. a more 'reasonable' case might be in the neighborhood of an order of magnitude more - but still hardly enough to do very good aircraft separation, etc. i mean, sure, it's nice and everything, it's 3d, no glasses, etc. but it's not super high res, though 100 million sure sounds like a lot. plus i'll bet that whirring noise thing gets to you like a dentist drill after a while.
given the way this thing works, shouldn't the title be:
Science: 3D Visualization Moves In Circles
;P
Actually, you're somewhat right. I remember a time not so long ago (OK, ten years ago...) where a video arcade in my city had a game that used the same concept: use 3D so that the different players (4 back then) would each see a different thing. They used live-action footage, shot from multiple angles, and a (for the time) strong computer to combine the information, and display it within a 3D half-sphere. The only problems with it was the game was $5.00 a shot, the controls were muddier than my bathroom, a full game (if you were good) lasted a few minutes max, and the plot sucked major ass.
The biggest problem with this isn't making it work, since it has before, it's making software that doesn't suck! Can anyone imagine using Windows3D, and getting the blue screen of death from all angles? I suppose Micro$oft would be happy because all of our software would instantly become (more?) useless.
CODITO, ERGO SUM: I Code, therefore I am.
Since there is only one set (left and right) images on the flat screen, only one viewpoint can be chosen.
I know that at least at Phillips Research Eindhoven they are working on flatscreen displays, which do not have the disadvantages you mention. They can be viewed by multiple people simultanously without a problem, and without goggles.
The technique is actually quite simple: take a high-res flatscreen, and stick a prisma sheet over it, so that depending on the angle you look at the screen, you will see another pixel.
At the lab they did have a prototype (1600x1200 as I recall) with 9 distinct views on it (thus reducing the apparrent resolution to 533x400). Really cool to see 3D on a flat(!)screen, without goggles.
Those 9 views were actually all horizonally distinct, otherwise the effect wouldn't be really well visible. So it doesn't work when you keep your head rotated, or move your head up&down.
(no link, sorry, they are not public about it. I saw it almost a year ago now, guess they must have improved since then)
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The difference is one is simulated 3d, the other is really 3d.
You can't change perspective on the flatscreen.. not like a hologram. What you see is what you see, until the software changes it.
You can't peek around something or shift your point of view by just moving.
This globe thing, you can look at, walk around, see things as if they were a solid image. Just like a hologram (but with a 360 degree fov of course)
I saw something smaller but essentially much the same when I was in RUSSIA for heavens sake ;) it just showed a spinning globe with some text orbiting around it but it still looked very neat.
so when do i get to visit the holodeck?!
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"You're either with the US or against the US"
A somewhat older rig for 3D visualization can be bought at Uncle Ira's Moser Electronics site, under the "Exotic Hardware" section.
I've read the posts to this thread and wanted to try and clear up a couple of things.
1. This is NOT a two-dimensional display. It creates images that are as "real" as any other object, although made of light (think "Death Star attack briefing" here).
2. This means, that you can perceive the dimensionality (is that a word?) of the displayed objects even if you are blind in one eye, are color-blind, have only one leg, don't like cats, etc.
3. No glasses or other viewing "helpers" are needed. Watch the screen, Luke...
4. This object works much like a traditional big-screen projecttion television...only the screen is rotating around the centerpoint of the globe at a considerable speed. The speed is fast enough that your eyes can't really see the screen, but can see the projected images.
5. This is NOT a new concept. The new thing about it is that it is the LARGEST commercially one available to date (large as far as resolution). I've personally seen versions of this display that are about 3 feet (~1 meter) around that use a matrix of LEDs on a rotating board. Same effect, really....older technology....not as good as this one. Here's one of the google returns for this design. Another design that has had a good amount of research is to create images using lasers shot onto a spinning helix or screw shape.
6. So far, resolution is the biggest hurdle. Next is refresh rate (it is, quite obviously tied to the rotation speed and to the speed and falloff of the light emmiting device (LED, Laser, phosphor, etc).
6. It really is amazing to see it in person. Don't knock it. It will be in more wide-spread use in the near future and will be a huge leap forward for certain tasks. Most people will never see one (except maybe in a science museum) and will never need to use one, though.
7. Using a wireless network, now you too can forward a holographic message from Obi-wan to the Senate! heh.
Personally, I'm against the US. But (unfortunately?) I'm a non-violent person. I suppose they could still get me for giving aid and comfort to the enemy, or being a fellow-traveler...
If this technology uses analogue to digital converters, it's already dead because of course any life saving surgery can't be performed because the visualization of the organ in question is most certainly copyrighted.
Progress is man's ability to complicate simplicity!
novalogic the game maker already patented the use of 'voxels' persay. actualy they have multiple patents on it last i heard. wonder if they'll sue. they actualy were designing games for the military based off of delta force
Everyone keeps saying that its resolution is about 464*464*464. It's not. Check the specs. It's 768*768 by 198 sections. The section facing you will have a resolution of 768*768, which isn't that bad. The four bit colour is a bit crap though. I look forward to watching where this tech goes. Looks cool.
Yeah, but when can I get it as a Winamp Plugin?