Slashdot Mirror
Revolution in Graphics?
wilton writes "A technology genius has Silicon Valley drooling - by doing things the natural way, writes Douglas Rushkoff in today's Gaurdian.
This project has been going on for a couple of years now, they have demo's for Windows and Be.
The ideas is to not use rendering and polygons to create scenes. Instead build it up from a molecular level, with apparently amazing results. "
First it in no way simulates molecules as both the article and the header imply...it merely uses iterated equations.
Secondnly, and more annoyingly it is still entierly digital...stupid reporters
Marriage is the "pseudo-ethics" that cloaks the messy truth of sexuality in the raiment of propriety -- it's "Don't Ask,
try the original nervana site,
you can even get the software there, for Windows, Mac and Be. The screenshots
don't look bad, but I have my doubts as to what this
all is all about, but hey, I'm a simple biologist.
It looks to me like a hoax, or at least like
someone trying to get into news - you don't find
a source code or any details. Could some good soul,
fit in comp sciences, explain to me what so interesting about this project?
There's a demo of this at
http://www.nervana.com/psi/
(Winoze, Be and Mac)
It looks quite good, but very basic. Hard to tell really if it's going to be revolutionary or not.
Exactly how is this new, and what is it about this that qualifies this man as a "genious"?
I've seen better looking graphics in 5 year old euro-demos running on a 386 DOS box.
This is the coolest 74K ever. It's the smoothest VRML browser I've ever seen and an animated scene all in a 74K app! Granted it's not Q2 yet but it's damned impressive. Download it.
no I'm not afiliated with this guy/company I'm just real impressed.
I've downloaded the demo: all it seems to be is some garish landscape generator u can run thru: the sky/cloud moving thing ain't that cool. I've seen better water in the visualisations for my Mp3 player (Sonique for those interested) . Until i see a demo of this "molecular" technology that is on par or better with the 3d game engines of today, i'll remain a skeptic. Still, it might only be the begining of something great. Must keep an open mind.
Be kind. There are too many mean people out there already.
"In today's Gaurdian?" Guardian, surely! ;)
Though this may be intentional - the Guardian used to be notorious for its typographical errors (it's often referred to as "The Grauniad")
To get back on topic, their knowledge of tech matters is less than stellar (though not as bad as, say, the Sunday Times) so they may have just fallen for some marketing hype. I can scarcely imagine any Nintendo execs being stunned at that little demo, impressive though it is for 74k. (Though I've seen better on 4K Amiga intros)
It's just a landscape engine, nothing more. 3D-games contain a lot more stuff than just hills and lakes. It's still digital (doh). Low CPU requiremnts? Please, the demo (400x240 I believe) drains 90% of my CPU-resources - and it still looks like *hit. My CPU is not Z80 (which the article claims to be sufficient), but a K6-2 running at 400MHz. I rememer seeing cooler landscapes in demos, and with lot lover CPU requirements.
I'm not saying that this technology isn't worth anything (how could I, I first heard of it 15 mins ago). It still looks like it needs a lot of develoment, though.
For what it did, it didn't drop my system performance much at all. As a future holy grail for the precise and realistic 3d engine, however, I'm rather skeptical. The horrible mouse interface (pretty random as far as what dragging in any given direction does) in the demo makes it very hard to tell, but this method of iterative equations seems to have a problem- no consistently accurate solid 3d shapes. Sizes and relative shapes seem to stretch around far too much with a change of perspective. And I imagine that really beautiful, fractal and super-complex at any distance of viewing images that this tech could create wouldn't stay consistent as you move around. Apparent textures would swin all over the place. Maybe this is just a limitation of the demo, or my flawed analysis of the tech. But the reason polygon engines (or voxel engines!) are so popular is that they have consistent world geometry that works intuitively from any angle of viewing, making it well suited for virtual reality in which you can interact- even at the high speeds of quake-style games. This engine might turn out to be better suited for acid trip-heads than Quake4...
Apparently the people who wrote this article aren't up with modern times, or something. If you check out some of the 40kB demos for the Amiga you'd see more impressive stuff, and those don't require a 100MHz machine (stated requirements for the Win32 demo on the nervana.com site). As far as using mathematical equations to approximate the real world "better" than polygons, this has been used before. An example would be the procedural textures used in Lightwave 3D, which uses a bunch of algorithms to simulate different real world textures, using only a fraction of the memory of their bitmapped counterparts.
Of course, I could be completely wrong about these demos, but IMHO this is hardly revolutionary, or even the slightest bit impressive. I would expect that if this were truly something more than hype, there would be more substantial information at their website, or at least a demo which is actually impressive.
What would be nice to see is 3D accelerators with support for some procedural textures on the card, and then having those features actually used in the game. You can achieve some very impressive effects with such things, although I suppose most people see it as easier to just add more memory to the card nowadays. I remember reading one card that was due to be released a few months ago was supposed to have such features (Permedia 3?), but I'm not sure.
That was a really bad article and I don't find the Nervana site that informative either, but my guess is that he wants to (or already has) put support for iterated function systems on the graphics card.
Use of IFS in computer graphics can hardly be regardes as news, but I guess putting it in hardware, making it possible to draw directly in video RAM, would make the technology usable also for games. This way you don't need that many polygons to draw an intricate structure.
Lars
Lars
--
Reality or nothing.
If you still think its good you should check out this, a 50 something K voxel engine in java (warning Explorer 4 only).
"The future is already here,
it's just not evenly distributed yet"
"The future is already here,
it's just not evenly distributed yet"
- William Gibson
Although the article didn't mention it, it seems like he is simply using known fractal rendering techniques for the landscape and water. It's not hard to come up with the rules for the quality he has achieved in the demo program and screenshots. What caught my attention in the article was the comment about doing creatures with his simple rules. I didn't even see any vegetation even though research on fractal plants has been going on for over a decade in the computer graphics community. Unfortunately, it sounds like this is another case of an uninformed journalist overhyping simple technology.
> This is the coolest 74K ever.
I suggest you check out some of the 4k intros on
ftp.scene.org. They've got 3d AND sound too. In 4096 bytes.
/begin{rant}
Constructive Solid Geometry (as used in POV etc.) is also an alternative to polygon-based rendering.
For those that don't know about it, with CSG the scene is built up from primitive blocks (e.g. cones, spheres, cubes, rods, etc). More complex objects are made by using boolean operations (AND, OR and DIFF) on the primitives. For example, a ring can be made by subtracting (DIFF) a rod from the centre of a sphere. Solid textures can be applied to the resulting objects, and raytracing can be used to produce shadows, reflections, transparency, etc.
Unfortunately, CSG and raytracing seem to have been overlooked by the graphics card manufacturers. The new effects proposed by 3dfx (motion blur, soft shadows, etc.) can be achieved very simply using stochastic raytracing. Raytracing has a reputation for being very processing-intensive, but I am convinced that it could be done efficiently in hardware, and the quality of the graphics would be far greater than polygon rendering.
In relation to the article - the Psi technique looks interesting, but seems to have very limited scope for application. IMHO, graphics card manufacturers should look at raytracing and CSG instead.
/end{rant}
I have this Deja Vu, all the pictures look like those 'fractal' graphics from 80's games like Rescue on Fractalus on old Ataris or Captain Blood on Atari ST/Amigas. Looks like they re-invented them and filled them with some colors. But displaying some landscapes with simple formulars is MUCH simpler than displaying complex graphics. If they show a tree based on ther 'formulars' and in high framerate they would impress me. But not with landscapes...
The game is about green themes like eco-friendliness, but the 3d algorithm is quite standard, and does not use "natural mathematics". Just looks like an old miggy 40k intro to me.
He spent severall yars developing this?
I can do a btter demo in 20 min in QBAsic and i still dont know how to program.
How can annyboddy be impressed by this?
Alot of you seem confused about why this is a cool thing. The point isnt that the graphics look amazing right now.. it's that they're generated in a fundamentally different, possibly better way.
Of course polygons look prettier.. look at the current difference between painted pictures and polygon graphics. With a painting the artist is simply putting the colors on a flat surface in such a way that it simulates reality. Relatively easy to do since you just need to put colors there in a suggestive way (i cant do it myself for beans, but you get the point).
Now a graphics program, you create a 3d object out of polygons, then place texture images over them. This is more difficult because you have to create the actual 3d object.. like sculpting.. you cant just suggest 3d with shadow, you have to Make 3d and let the light create the shadow naturally. The textures arent really roughness or shininess, just images that Look rough or shiny and make any light sources react the way they probably would.. this saves memory by making the shape Look more complex than it really is. A smooth cylinder might look just like a tree trunk because it has a rough-appearing texture. But it's not really a tree. If you get too close you get flattening of the texture.. especially in realtime engines for games because it cant raytrace fast enough with modern computers, so uses simple rendering. It can look really, really good.. but can also look REALLY bad.
Now, i may have misunderstood the article and webpage for this technology, but what i got out of it is that this uses something like a fractal generation system, using a formulae and number of iterations, to generate real objects. Not just a mesh of points some of which have polygons drawn between them, but something closer to a physical reality. Like a fractal, it would look fine up close or far away, and like a fractal because it's based on iterating a simple algorithm over and over it would just be a matter of doing math rather than crunching z-buffer coordinates into 2d images like we do in polygon rendering engines.
What's really important here is the oppertunity for data transfer. All those cyberpunk novels make use of the ubiquitous virtual worlds where people and environments are rendered seemlessly, usually using small computers, in realtime, with wireless modem links. So far this has been no more than a dream because no personal computer could hope to handle that kind of load, No computer can raytrace in realtime with a complex scene, and there'd be no way to send that much data with anything like current modems. This technology doesnt make this all come true in a flash, but it does improve the chances immensely. You can simply transfer location data and a formula rather than mesh coordinates and transforms.. much, much less data. You dont need to do the kind of heavy number crunching for raytracing because of the way the objects are generated, and you dont have to worry about things like textures because you can just make the actual object bumpy, smooth, jagged, whatever.
Now the biggest complaint is obviously that it doesnt compare to modern polygon graphics. There's a simple reason for this.. it's not a highly funded, industrially motivated, relatively old technology. It's fairly new and being developed by a few guys. You cant expect miracles overnight.. but what he's got looks pretty good considering how new it is. You all talk about how wonderful demos look with current tech.. sure they do.. that's what theyre for. This demo is to demonstrate that his technology Does work. If you had a time machine that could send a penny 5 minutes into the future, would you complain because it didnt look cool?
Anyway, it's obviously no sure thing, but it does have a good deal of promise, and polygons cant last forever. Personally i think realtime rendered 3d games look like crap. Raytraced scenes can look very nice, but all too often suffer from virtual unreality (that plasticy look everything tends to take on.. obvious fractalism in complex objects etc).. This or something like it that builds up from basic principles into a complex object will eventually be needed.. just think about human interaction in a virtual environment, you cant very well create polygon meshes for every possability.. what if you broke a chair, how does it generate the broken ends and interior wood grain? If you bite into a cookie, how would you go about creating realistic crumbs in realtime?
Dreamweaver
"If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live" -- MLK, Jr.
never heard of the demoscene have you? there are even 4k's for linux now. this project is just plain shit and it should be removed from slashdot NOW. instead there should be a big link to ftp.scene.org (or perhaps www.error-404.com, which has some nice demos too)
Give me a break, that looks like a demo from 92, barely, resembles some fractal rendering using non-standard voxel engines or seomthing alike breakthrough ? just show me where constructing a world from easily raytraceable maathematical objects such as cones, spheres, etc is very nice, ofcourse to achieve great deal of detail you would need tons of these and ofcourse to render them would necessetate a raytracing engine like suggested before. I don't know what this guy has been working on and why the guys from Nintendo/Apple are 'falling from their seats', but I'd sure like to hear his explanation because his site contains nooothing but a poor demo, a picture of a monkey and a home-made-video that takes too long to load. I'm not saying the dude is lame or anything, I'm critisizing the person who brought this to the media with backup information, without a good presentation, without documents, sources, opinions, etc. blah :)
A lot of 4k intros have generated landscapes and objects too, and yes we have seen fractal based objects too. Why is zbuffering no 'math' by the way? This project just got too much attention because someone did not read more than the article.
A wonderful little program (5.5k) by Tim Clarke called MARS.EXE let you move with your mouse through shaded voxel-based martian terrain under a cloudy sky. It an at fantastic speed even on a 386.
Read the original usenet posting here.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I can understand how using psuedo-analogue or even real analogue can lead to more realistic images. Fractals to produce better looking trees etc, sparks being blurred by the analogue signal (umm interesting, improve reality by decreasing quality). I'm probably off mark, but isn't there an issue of constraining these to produce an exact rendition of say a racing track. We can generate a load of curves to create a random track but how would a _real_ track be accurately constrained. An accurate representation of say Silverstone can be done in simple co-ordinates but I'm personally unsure as to what rules would need to be in-place to generate this with this approach.
probably comes under the "nice idea that I don't understand heading".
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I think that this is a hoax (there is nothing at the website related to all the bull in the article) to promote a lame CDROM game._ __________
__________________________________________
exactly :)
. . . . . . .
may u!sh 2 sm!le at dz!z bad nn.!m!tat!ion
The problem I see with CSG is features like racetracks and landscapes. They don't really suit a CSG representation. Another thing to remember is all the other doohikeys that have to deal with your geometry representatione (e.g physics and AI).
The move to polygons has seen the death of many kewl little tricks that existed when people could just plot pixels. More stuff may dissapear id on-card geometry acceleration takes off. CSG would admittedly be interesting for this sort of thing, but a card whose hardware acceleration was based on CSG would make many operations that are simple today a bit of a bitch.
"He decided to use the Nintendo GameBoy as a standard for how much computing power a machine should have (in other words, very, very little)"
So why does their demo require Minimum of 100Mhz.
It's not hard to see how underwhelming this project is.
The reporter who wrote the Article about this appears to have swallowed someones marketing hype hook-line-and-sinker. He hasn't even done the usual journalist work of go to an analyst and get some sound bites (text bites?).
The best case scenario for Nervana is that they have been mis-represented by someone, maybe the writer of the article.
They might have a good model for terrain representation but that hardly constitutes a revolution in graphics. You still have to do everything else.
Using this as a base for graphics would be like the old days on the amiga when someone comes up with a neat video trick and tries to make a game based around it. Inevitably the result is a contrived usually crap (mostly never to be released) game.
This stuff could possibly work as an opengl extention, but only if it can be implemented in hardware.
-- That which does not kill us has made its last mistake.
http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/ is much more impressive.
---
Don't bother reading the article. It contains no real information and it's obvious the reporter is dancing around the subject.
I don't know exactly what is being refereed to here, but many alternatives to polygon rendering have been around for ages. Simulation of the light reflection/refraction at the molecular level has been an ongoing area of research in the graphics community. The problem is as you get closer to real-life, exponentially more processing power is required. We can only hope for better and better approximation methods. Further, the fundamental laws of physics governing lights at the quantum level are not fully understood.
I'm highly skeptical that a 22 year is doing any work in this area. This work had very little application in the real-time graphics community, why should Nintendo be interested?
Perhaps they are referring to voxel rendering, which can be done in realtime and a more likely project for a 22 year old to undertake (who hasn't?) A large problem with voxels is the amount of memory required, so either the shapes must be generated on the fly procedurally or it must be compressed using curves/wavelets or a combination of both. The article mentions "parabolas and ellipses," so this might be what is being talked about? Voxels are in no way a representation of something "on a molecular level."
I'm impressed the reporter managed to write such a long article without saying anything.
-- Virtual Windows Project
Definition:
NURBS, Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines, are mathematical representations of 3-D geometry that can accurately describe any shape from a simple 2-D line, circle, arc, or curve to the most complex 3-D organic free-form surface or solid. Because of their flexibility and accuracy, NURBS models can be used in any process from illustration and animation to manufacturing.
I know the use of NURBS are really easy and flexible as they are simply splines which can be ajusted by certain control points and different wieghting. They have easily replaced charachter modelling from polygons in the past 2 years.
I remeber speculation on hardware which could render/raytrace NURBS and other spline based modelling, directly w/o conversion to polys. However i've yet to see it materiealize.
Some of the Better NURBS modeller's avalible are:
Maya A linux port of this is supposedly floating around SGI and some of the larger software houses.
Rhino3D Shame its windows only, yet there's some reports of it successful in Wine.
Enjoy, Oblisk
------------------------------------
...then I think sounds pretty cool.
From the article:
"He just passed through Silicon Valley last week demonstrating his homemade graphics engine, and everyone from the designers at Nintendo to programmers at Apple has been left in shock."
They sound pretty impressed to me. If this is a real breakthrough - then NVIDIA, 3dfx etc. may be in big trouble...
The question is - if this is so great - when is it going to be available/usefull - later this year or in ten years?
It is clear that the really clever bit about this engine is the way it works : i.e. not how it looks. As far as I can tell, there is no information available about this on any of the related sites (I've poked around in the Windows .exe as well). If the data for generating the island landscape consisted of, say, 256 bytes of polynomial orders & coefficients it would be remarkable. But we don't know (yet) . . .
http://home.global.co.za/~skorsm an/dnload/dnload.htm
I really fell bad about being so phenomonally unimpressed with guy's life's work. Granted, I am not publishing graphics software myself, but I don't post my grade school artwork either.
I feel almost the same when my three year old daughter brings me a picture she drew. "oh, sweetheart, that's beautiful! I love you! Now go stick that to the refrigerator with the other ones."
Did anyone else find it suspicious that the most recent "interview" was from September of last year? About a remarkably stupid sounding game? And the "demo" was billed as a way to view the island of nervana, even though it only vaguely resembled an island? The guy is 22 and designed the game, the graphics engine, and wrote the music for the game?
The best I can hope for here is that the reporter was a friend of his trying to help him out, or maybe just really, really, hard up for a story.
Computers can only simulate determinism. ~Hermetic.
Doesn't sound particularly revolutionary....
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Of course it's a hoax, look at who wrote the article -- Douglas Rushkoff. Wasn't Rushkoff complaining the other day about the evils of technology? Well, today he's around back to his day job of an uninformed hack constantly spreading the latest hype. Rushkoff's always been clueless.
.."colouring which produces a surreal comic-book feeling to
the engine. This has been produced in part by the mathematics required to describe the landscape in real time,
meaning that the colouring remains relatively fundamental." So it HAS to look this crappy? Pretty sad. I have a name for it though, he could call it Retarded-PreSchooler-Vision... Pretty catchy isn't it?
I noticed that the software mentioned is available for Windoze, MacOS and BeOS, but not any free software OSes. Also, something tells me that this guy's not about to go free-software with his new stroke of "genius". Perhaps-- and this may be off the topic, but I feel it's important-- perhaps we could establish a corps of Slashdot geeks who monitor new postings and, whenever someone mentions a new non-free-software technology worth noting, seeks out to spawn off an effort to clone or surpass it.
Another thing that bothers me is that slashdot articles generally seem to draw no great distinction between free and non-free software. Sure, by all means, articles like this inform and entertain, but it would be nice (just my opinion) if they also said something like "It would be nice if this was free software" or "Anyone out there wanna join me in cloning this and making the clone free software" or the like...
Just my 2c...
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
works on ie 5 also
-----
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Apologies for replying to my own post (bad form), but I hit 'Submit' too soon!
Regarding the 3dnow source code. It was written for a K6-2 300Mhz machine that I no longer have.
I have only compiled it with gcc (requires a recent version of binutils for the 3dnow part)
under Linux. It doesn't currently do CSG either,
only a fixed scene containing spheres. Unfortunately the 3dnow part doesn't actually give any speed improvement at the moment! I suspect that the femms overhead is too big - suggestions welcomed. I'd be interested to see how this runs on an Athlon.
No signal to noise. And I've seen much better results for landscape generation: check out MetaCreations Bryce, based on the work of the grandfather of procedural texturing, Ken Musgrave. It's stunningly beautiful.
... comments, Rosenthal or Scherer? I'm sorry, I just don't feel at liberty to disclose anything. Those of you that know us and our work, trust us...
"But this could be promising!..."
True. I'll believe when I see promising artworks. This reporter obviously got carried away; I'm in computer games and I'm just not impressed.
"But Bryce isn't realtime!"
True enough as well. Bryce is a raytracer; it takes a long time to render. Oooooooooooh.....I wish I could talk to you about this
I do disagree with you on one point: No reason a 22 year old can't do this. Everyone in the basement is 19 or younger.
Could someone PLEASE remove this item?
The idiots are getting way too much attention again.
He decided to use the Nintendo GameBoy as a standard for how much computing power a machine should have...and developed a series of simple equations that can be used to generate waves, textures, and shapes.
Does anyone here know why polys, especially triangles, are the basis of most modern graphics systems? No? I'll tell you: it's because they're *EASY TO DRAW*. The equations are as simple as you can get; almost everything becomes linear interpolation and therefore only needs a single addition per pixel line. Waves are likely to need some sort of transcendental function (such as sine or cosine) to function properly -- something that requires either a massive hardcoded table, or a LOT of CPU time. Not to mention the need to toss either fixed-point or floating-point numbers around. GameBoys are 8-bit, aren't they? That doesn't give you much precision.
Remember how you used to draw parabolas and ellipses in maths class?
Um. There are three possibilities for drawing these:
-> Use the equation directly. This involves a square root. Square roots are slow.
-> For the ellipse, you can generate it using sines and cosines with a parameterized equation. The resolution on the parameter will determine how choppy the outside looks; even a resolution of 1 degree took a while on my TI-85 back in high school
-> Iterate over the ENTIRE DISPLAY, applying the generic conic equation to each point; use this to find boundaries. Incredibly tricky, requires a square or two for each pixel, and is generally going to be a pain. (for the ellipses this is a little simpler, since you can bound it by the major and minor axes)
Each element of such a display will require much more computation that a polygon; you could save a few polys this way, but I don't see it being the sort of revolutionary jump they describe.
The article then goes on to state some fluff about plants and carbon atoms, claiming that quantum equations are 'simple' (I wish!) and suggesting that "Barbalet"'s stuff is built "from the ground up, just like nature does it." This isn't true, even if what they said is true, and has nothing to do with molecules and plants; he would be building his images up from shapes -- different shapes than are standard now, perhaps, but still just shapes. No image built "from the ground up, like nature does it," requiring the transmission of every molecule, is going to even be manageable by modern computers, let alone result in stuff that can be transmitted over modems and wires more easily than graphics images.
The more charitable explanation is that this is a highly confused journalist who has run into ellipsoid 3D graphics or something similar and thinks it's cool.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Raytracing has a reputation for being very processing-intensive, but I am convinced that it could be done efficiently in hardware, and the quality of the graphics would be far greater than polygon rendering.
Not just in hardware. Ray tracing was used in John Carmack's Wolfenstein - a classic example of how ray tracing can outperform traditional polygon rendering. In Wolfenstien the simplifying assumption is that just one ray needs to be traced per column of pixels in the viewport. It obviously works, for the special-case scenes that Wolfenstien used. The ideas were generalized somewhat in Doom, to allow for ceilings and floors. Raytracing was abandoned in Quake, in favor of traditional polygon rendering, coupled with a kick-ass culling algorithm. But don't think that raytracing is out of the picture yet - hehe, pardon the pun.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Each of the current Graphical techniques are adept at different things. If we used Psi, polygons and voxels together we could create some stunning environments etc.
Just a thought.
Anyone know a reason why it can't be done...?
"Tell me your problems......I could do with a laugh!"
I just noticed that there's a link to a homepage at the bottom and other people can run the demo. So it's not a hoax, but I stand by my other comments -- the journalist is confused :) Fractal graphics are, as many other people have said, interesting but not revolutionary. I personally doubt they work well in the general case; unless you can get a fractal that looks just like any given object (say, a car), you'll have to start building objects up from fractals, at which point you run into the same problem that we have with polys: if you look close enough the illusion of an object vanishes. The only difference is that instead of turning into flat polys close up, the objects will turn into fractals close up. (and no, reality is not made of fractals so this won't really work that much better) OTOH for things that this works well for (trees, waves, clouds) it might be interesting to have a fractal-rendering subsystem added to a 'traditional' graphics system -- only problem is, how do you do the Z-buffering? But I'm sure someone can work that out.. Or maybe he's talking about procedural textures -- again, neat but not particularly new..my university actually has a research group looking into the possibilities of these things to do 'non-photorealistic rendering'. Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
remember this commercial?... : *Terminator2 music plays* "This Winter... General Motors will turn plastic into metal....."
i was SO excited! just think, super-light motors! think about the structural applications!
damn thing was a f@ckin' CREDIT CARD....
01101100 01101001 01101110 01110101 01111000 01110010 01110101 01101100 01100101 01110011
....invent this? I guess they will two years from now.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
Taking a look at the screenshots on the guys webpage, just looks like a simple terrain renderer, no moving object, no complex objects, just rolling terrain. Neat, but not anywhere near "revolutionary"... I think maybe this guy is related to that other guy who said he could broadcast TV quality video over 14.4 connections using a new "compression method"...
From what was written, it sounds like the "new" technology is "use fractals for graphics".
Someone explain the breakthrough please.
The author of the original Mars terrain demo has made an explanation of the algorithm used here.
I'd like to see a version of this under Linux.
What a load of Buffalo Biscuits. That thing is an idiot test, plain and simple; if that "impressed" Nintendo than it's just another sign of their detachment from reality. I think I'll dig my Amiga 500 out of the attic. And run vastly superior demos on it's 7mhz processor. I'll say this for it then, it was a nice blast from the past.
The article was so non-technical,i really don't know what this guy did. But, haven't people been generating landscape images from iterative equations for a long time?
Seeing as how PC's and workstations are being obsoleted by the god-like PSX2, I wonder what Sony could do with this Wonderful, Superb New Technology....
Hysterically.
It looks like simple voxels to me -- a rendering trick that's been around for almost a decade. For those of you who are amazed at what can be done with 74k, take a look at this little program from 1994.
Anyone else remember doing this kind of stuff with Fractint in, like, 1992?
And what is with this analog crap? Extremely uninformed mediot, methinks...
It uses fractals to create absolutely mindblowing landscapes. The psi engine or whatever its called looks like its trying to accomplish the same thing but its nowhere in the 'genius' realm.
Be careful guys. There is such a thing as an analog integrated circuit chip! Alot of those iterated equations are really only finite difference equations which allow you to approximate solutions to differential equations. These same differential equations can be modeled directly with analog circuitry as well -- havent you ever seen the rossler attractor on an osscilloscope? Im not so sure how IFSs would be done, but there could very well be a way...
Also, Pixar's Renderman uses procedural shaders, where the appearance is calculated dynamically, instead of using pre-generated textures (though that is also an option).
Instead of scanning in a wooden surface and tiling that image, Renderman can use a shader which generates a wooden surface; for wood that looks different, adjust the shader's code or pass in different parameters.
The ambitions are: wake up, breathe, keep breathing.
I am not an expert at this but to me what this "new" tech does sounds alot like most other graphics methods.. Doesn't 3d polygons work by having lots of equations being done by the CPU to make a scene? And are not most of these equations quite simple? And why use the word simple? What is simple? For us seeing is simple but for a computer it isn't. Now that's a good example. Think of it this way we can see so easily and to do that we allocated the largest portion of our brains to any single task. If we just assume that visualising is similar to see then we must have similar processing power. I don't think there is any computer that can match the brain at overall processing power yet. What I mean is you can only go so far interms of clever methods. We can all see it in the CPU race between AMD and Intel. AMD may have the better chips but Intel has the brute Mhz ( until recently ) and Intel was winning. Personally I am not aganist this but it isn't very impressive. I wouldn't mind cheap "real world like" graphics but I am not going to jump up and down at this. I just can't believe that someone working by himself with little help can hope to do what other's working in large companies with big R&D can't. Just look at hotmail addresses how many "somehandle9999" do we need to get before people get the point that if you think of it 9999 other people would have think of it too?
I haven't looked at them yet but I also tracked down an older demo at Info-Mac that includes algorithm info for an earlier wireframe version. (Skip the useless 2Mb mov promo.)
The Mac demo of the new version downloads as 14k but unstuffs to 4Mb (!), and it includes an interactive terrain generator, which impresses me.
His writings explain that he started this as (what I call) a 'philosophy lab' where modelling 'mind' based on Bertrand Russell's ideas (!?????) was his main goal.
The Info-Mac demo is wireframe but includes a bunch of little monkey-dots whose eyes you can look thru, zipping around too fast and too tiny-ly for me to have fun with (yet).
I can't show you what's next. But I promise it's much more beautiful than this guy's lame stuff. And has some very excellent properties.
And it was all written by 18-19 year olds.
This is not a computer graphics revolution, but it is a shift in the way that 3d graphics will be written in the future. Polygon based graphics is a dead technology. While there is plenty of room to improve on it there is still a limitation. Download the demo on www.nervana.com and check out the size of the file, 74k. Imagine a bit more color, a better navigational engine and human avatars. You would basically have the equivilant of todays massively multiplayer role playing games (Asheron's Call, EverQuest) that could be streamed in a web browser. Some people on this board claim they have seen better graphics on an amiga, thats bull*hit. What amiga titles render atmosphere, light/day effects, ocean waves, curvature of the earth, and lighting effects? I can answer that myself actually, NONE. How many people here take a alpha version of an application and use it as a good example of what the final project will look like? This technology is in its infancy. And it deserves a much closer look than some people have given it. Scapin
Exactly what I was thinking. This has been around for a long time, as it was used in that one Bladerunnder game that flopped a couple years back. Anyone remember that?
General purpose fractal graphics compression actually works very well - Iterated Systems' FIF format gives great compression and very high quality, along with the nice fractal-based benefits of providing resolution independence, natural scaling and variable resolution/compression tradeoff. As you say, fractal landscape compression (esp. for things like mountains, clouds, etc) is a very old idea. AFAIK if he's come up with a way of representing 3-D objects that would be novel - not to mention being necessary for anything other than backgrounds - but he doesn't seem to be....
Sounds like fractal geometry to represent things. Not that exciting and requiring lots of power..
If there is any innovation in this article at all, it's moving this technology down to the level of a video game from the non-real-time applications where it's been used for decades.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I must say, I'm not terribly impressed. I've seen better... much better. Fractal graphics have been around for years... and I've seen much more realistic looking ones on my old Amiga. It's true that this demo is pretty small, but it's not that small considering the poor quality. Many demo competitions had a 4k division. The top placing demos were usually abou 2-3 minutes long, and very visually impressive.
As for saying that the polygon based stuff is always ugly... what about Final Fantasy 8? That runs on a mere Play Station, and it's one long celebration of eye candy!
I don't dipute that fractles can make some very pretty graphics (especially of various plants), but they just aren't as simple to proccess as polygons. I really don't see how you can come out ahead in terms of CPU use. Drawing a line requires only a compare and either one or two increments per pixel (using Bresenham's algorithm). There just isn't a way to mathematically generate fractals that cheaply. Maybe that's why after all of the fractal hype in the early 90's, game designers went to texture mapped polygons anyways.
I'm a gnu world man.
If *this* is what was causing hi-tech graphics folk to wet their pants, then we've seriously overestimated everyone in Silicon Valley. Go to the end of the article and click on the link to nervana.com, then download the demo... what a piece of nothing.
--- Dirtside
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
This stuff has been around for years. With the exception of speed however this particular implementation looks fairly nice. It doesn't have many artifacts on steep surfaces (thanks to the linear interpolation probably), although the distance resolution dropping artifacts are quite noticable.. Mac users may want to check out Matt's Fract for a more flexible, much faster and open source (tho not public domain) implementation of this algorithm.
Procedural textures. L-systems. Iterative fractals. Stochastic rendering. Ray-tracing. CSG. Blobs. Splines. NURBS. People like Kenton Musgrave have been working on this kind of stuff for years and years. Ever see a Pixar film? Most of that stuff is modelled with procedural algorithms, not polygons and texture maps. Render Man and BMRT both use procedural techniques. Not to mention programs like Bryce, 3ds Max, Lightwave, POV-Ray, Vue d' Esprit, Radiance, and others.
So... Silicon Valley isn't seeing aything they haven't seen before.
You'll notice after Bruce Sterling's responses John Carmack is going to be next week's interviewee. As I understand it, he's right up there in the world of actually making use of graphics technologies. :(
So, when the questions posting opens up on Monday, why doesn't someone ask a question about the validity/usefullness of this (and perhaps other methods)? I'd do it myself, but I'm going to be away from my computer
This is basically procedural texturing and procedural modeling, which is hardly a new field. Here's an excellent two volume set on the subject. There have been a handful of games that have made use of procedural texturing, including Trespasser and Descent 3.
Keep in mind these things...
1) This is more of a proof of concept. At least, this is the way I figure it.
2) The actual gain comes from the algorythms and formulas used behind the scenes. I think S.V. people were excited because they were imagining what they could do with this in the future.
3) We don't know what's going behind the scenes. That is what I want to see!!! My guess is that it would be something like the way you generate the Mandlebrot(sp?) set.
I think the this has a possible future. We only need to find out whats going on behind the scenes, and then it would need to be optimised to be more effecient on todays CPUs. If I am correct in how he does this, it will be extremely CPU intensive because of all the math in the repitions. I bet the formulas can be reworked to operate faster.
I want more information on the formulas and algorythms. Until then, I am not sure how much it will move the indestry forward. We shall see what happens.
I want the formulas and algorythms!
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
Iterated Systems- http://www.iterated.com
Lizardtech- http://www.lizardtech.com
The cool thing about this isn't so much the compression of an image (visually lossless compression to 40:1 or better), but the scaling of an image. You can scan an image at optimum setting (maybe 8x10, 1200dpi, etc) and compress it. But the cool part is later on when you want a poster size of this image, or a web thumbnail, you can scale the image up or down with great clarity from a single source. Extremely cool in this industry.
Jason
Just tried it out... Not to shabby! Of course, my poor lil' P133 didn't provide the best animation, but it was still pretty nice.
World Construction Set.
Sorry, but I haven't had enough time to port it to Linux or Be yet. Currently Amiga, Mac and Windows.
-- There is no truth. There is only Perception. To Percieve is to Exist.
Smack this link instead: http://www.nervana.com/docs/index.html
Mind the Gap
...for the writer anyway. I stopped reading when I came upon this:
> CDs - a digital recording technology - sometimes
> sound a little cold to the ear because,
> subconsciously anyway, we can hear the tiny
> spaces between the recorded samples of music.
His credibility is toast.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Holy manifested mental meanderings batman! There's nothing more to this than smoke and mirrors PERIOD.
Go read this:
http://www.nervana.com/docs/index.html
Laugh yourself silly, and don't worry yourself about the end of the world because some no name upstart is heralded as a genius in this most highly competetive arena of computer science.
It is clearly stated in the documentation of this project that it is nothing but fractals, in fact one of the characters of his "game" is called a "mandleroo" (from mandlebrot... go figure). You heard me straight. Go read it for yourself, then get some sleep.
Not only that, but the nervana project appears to be something more along the lines of Creatures (you know, the artificial life game?), rather than a revolutionary graphics engine. In fact, the idea is so half baked and incomprehensibly written that it's tough to make anything of it at all.
As an aside, the "falling out of their chairs" that the Apple and Nintendo execs were doing was from laughing so hard.
The demo looks like crap. The whole thing is about graphics, so if the demo looks like crap, it says something about the algorithm. For example, if I were to claim that my sorting algorithm is awesome, and yet it fails to beat quicksort, then the algorithm must suck. How does he plan on rendering buildings and characters? Maybe he has a good idea, but it probably sucks for practicality, much like realtime raytracing. At least realtime raytracing produces stunning images. -K
Does Nintendo even have a facility in the Valley? The headquarters of Nintendo of America is in Redmond, Washington, just down the road from you-know-who.
I downloaded the demo from the Nervana page, and it looks almost exactly like the old MARS.EXE demo for DOS (also can run in Windows).
e
I searched Yahoo and found a copy of the demo here:
http://www.wyburd.freeserve.co.uk/Files/mars.ex
It's an amazingly small 9K, and runs incredibly smooth on even a 386, but looks better then the Mousedemo that the article talks about.
Oh, and I saw this Mars demo back in the early 90's, so it's definately a pre-cursor.
but guess what... Iterative texture generation in hardware was patented decades ago.
I dunno, but it looks to me like someone decided to reinvent the wheel and package it as a "new device for travelling in a circular way". Basically, a hybrid Voxel/Polygon engine would do -exactly- what this engine does, with far more control. Instead of using a standard heightmap style renderer, we instead use "Land DNA" (which imho is total bull****), which separates the data from the result even more. So, not only is this just another overkill method of doing something which has already been done, it is also just something designed to be hyped. Why else would they call it 'land dna'?
I'd love to see them try and simulate cliffs with this thing. Rolling hills are really easy to do using mathematical equations, but jagged edges? that will be interesting.
However, I cannot be all negative: The reduced data size is good...
(By the way, isn't drawing points based on an equation every time you do a transformation more expensive than forming a set of polygons/vertices based on an equation, at which point you can then rotate, scale, shear, translate, etc. the vertices using a single homogeneous coordinate matrix?)
Hmm, what's this? A Gameboy:
From the puny technical details that one can find both in the article and the kid's web site, he is just using procedural modeling and possible parametric functions to render simple shapes. Big deal! Procedural modeling has been around for decades. Ditto for parametric functions (such as NURBS). And wow, he has also combined some elements of stereo rendering and level-of-detail/simplification to increase the complexity of the surfaces closest to the viewer. Wow! This has been for the past 3 decades.
All the digital vs. analog is pure crap. He is using a darn computer and math equations to create procedural objects. Where is the analog part?! Where are the molecules?!
Do you ever wonder about the truthfulness of the stories being reported in areas that you don't know squat? We constantly witness exuberant amounts of incompetence when it comes to journalist reporting computer science-related news. Imagine what they can do with some related to genetics, for example.
Argh!
The guy who has written Terragen DOES know his stuff!
Funny thing is, the damn thing is written in VB - put that in your pipe and smoke it!
Here's a link for the curious:
Planetside - the Home of Terragen
Here are some images as well:
Terragen Images
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
This is the main reason why Intel developed its Pentium III, and Motorola/IBM/Apple the G4. Using digital graphics requires the processing power of a supercomputer.
What angers me about this statement, is that this is a technology based article, and yet they call the Pentium III a supercomputer. The current definition of a supercomputer is a Gigaflop (1 billion floating-point operations per second [accual supercomputers do Teraflops now, but the government currently has Gigaflop as the standard to determine exportability, and it will most likely be altered to reflect real supercomputers]). The G4 is the only consumer processor that meets the supercomputer standard (sorry I do not know how many "flops" the Pentium III does, but it is not a Gigaflop).
I know this is offtopic, but I just had to complain about that article. The relevancy that it might have though, is that if they overlook such a basic (to most) known fact, how can we accredit the rest of the article as being full to truth. This technology seems remarkable how they make it out to be, and I bet it is better than anything we currently use, but they might have other exaggerations or overlooking of things such as the "supercomputer." Just something to think about when reading that article. Or maybe my pro-apple feelings are clouding my head... nah.
-Blair Heuer; "What does it mean?" - Larry Cucumber
It's kind of interesting that the guy who is slated to revolutionize the 3D graphics industry hasn't yet mastered the perspective transform and made a viewer which resembles a plate tectonics demo as you zoom out. Maybe the guy ran out of hallucinogens and tried to make a virtual substitute.
Indeed I have some amazing games and simulators running on my 64k RAM, 1MHz Apple ][. If I ever visit a computer hardware museum I hope they don't show just the machine, but show it running some of it's greatest software as well. Today's generation might underestimate what has been done on this stuff. Compare to the Playstation, a hardware used to its limits.
It is a sad fact that today's machines aren't used as effictively as that old iron. Can't say that my K6-300/192MB is a factor 300 improved. :-) That seems to come naturally when moving to a higher abstraction level.
You can do conics with only adds and substracts just like you can do bresenham circles with only adds and substracts. it's a lot trickier, but it can be done. Same for sine generation -- it's a simple application of a differential equation; you lose precision because of the finite and iterative nature of the computation, but it still looks like a sine. I've seen a 128-byte demo of a 3-D sinusoidal road! it's probably still online somewhere. regarding the article itself: he mentions the moog, but he really wanted to say "theremin". The moog was later, and is more associated with mystique than horror. Later polymoogs had a more techno sound, but they're not *real* moogs (grin)
Greetings from Berlin (entour) I didn't know the article was coming out - I have been swamped with email. There were a couple of innaccuracies in the article but in general I thought it was fair. It is not a technical piece but it was written in context. I have been travelling for the past three months solidly. I get back to Australia in a couple of weeks and I will start looking at my email. Please if you have any questions email me directly (tom@nervana.com). I am not media hungry (this is the first article that has been written about me in the past year) and it isn't a hoax (it is four years worth of work). I will have a FAQ emailed out the the mailing list in the next month so if you want more info subscribe! I am physically exhausted having travelled for so long so please don't worry if you don't get a response back instantly... And keep it positive!