NVIDIA GPU Gems 3 Call for Participation
H. writes "Following the success of GPU Gems and GPU Gems 2, NVIDIA has decided to produce a third GPU Gems volume to showcase the best new ideas and techniques for the latest programmable GPUs. If you would like to contribute to the GPU Gems series, please read the submission guidelines. The deadline for proposal submissions is Monday, December 11, 2006. If your proposal is accepted, you will receive additional time to complete the chapter." (Here are the participation guidelines.)
This may just be a personal pet peeve, but I hate when the author neglects to explain what the hell they are posting about. I'm tech-oriented (are we not all reading slashdot?), but I have no clue what a GPU gem is? I don't feel compelled to go to some outside link just to discover what you are even discussing here.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
I have this great idea where you put the color in one texture, and the (precomputed) brightness into another (possibly much lower resolution!) texture. With the right hardware, you can even color AND light the scene in a single pass!
Not to be facetious, I have long wanted to see more realistic gems (gemstones) and in fact did some modelling work on them a long time ago. Gemstones are fascinating and particularly with more lifelike video displays coming, realistic calculation of what happens to light in gemstones is perhaps a good area to look at.
One problem of course is that when you look at a diamond, or a baccarat chandelier for that matter, each eye sees a different path, though perhaps this could be rendered on those new multi-angle LCDs.
So my suggestion would be to look at code for realistically rendering types of crystal and gemstones, and to do it right so you can see the "fire" they say is in a diamond, identify levels of quality and so on.
A scratch on the surface (sorry) of fast high quality crystal rendering would be great for games, education (geology? art?), all kinds of things. And it is one place that a fast rendering unit that doesn't cut corners ought to stand out above the rest.