Actually the gp was right, and you are completely wrong. You may have seen a different display like the one you describe (I think Tokyo U has one sort of like that), but this isn't it. The Perspecta display is pretty much the only display out there today that truly generates 3D, as opposed to the discrete number of 2D views that you get from lenticular or barrier display tech. It's certainly the only true 3D display you can buy today. The holovideo stuff from MIT might count as true 3D but that's nowhere near commercialization as far as I know.
Ok I'm adding this to the discussion kinda late so probably no one will read it, but here goes anyway.
Everybody's arguing left and right about whether or not it's right or fair to use such a thing, but nobody seems to have made what seems to be a very important point to me: frankly, GreaseMonkey just doesn't work very well. Furthermore, I don't think this it will ever evolve into a truly reliable tool, because A) the web is too dynamic and B) scripts don't actually _understand_ the content they are modifying.
At some level the script needs to understand the semantics of the web page, and that's just a hard problem. Basically what the scripts can do currently is simple pattern matching, like "find the container named foo, and insert something before it", but that sort of thing breaks as soon as the web page author decides to change the container name.
Two examples of real-life failure of grease-monkey scripts:
I tried the slashdot nested comment script, and when it works it works pretty well, but for some reason it doesn't work on every slashdot comment page. Whatever pattern it's using doesn't quite cover all the bases.
I tried the gmail delete button thing. The button appeared, but it wouldn't actually delete any mail, and furthermore at one point it seems to have caused gmail to go into an infinite refresh loop that resulted in me getting locked out of account for a while due to "suspicious activity".
Even assuming that Joe Regexpert has really awesome skillz in writing pattern matching code, Joe only sees the version of web pages that get served up to _him_. Any site that uses cookies can potentially serve up very different pages to different users. Many web sites (like slashdot) allow users to configure the appearance of the page. So in order to exhaustively debug his script, Joe Regexpert is going to need to try out all those different combinations of options on the web site. It's possible that for some combination of options, the web site may just serve up a completely different page. Maybe it's a popular configuration, so they've hand-coded a lightweight static version of the page, for instance. Anyway, it's just impossible for Joe to see every version of the page, and so he can't possibly write a script works 100% of the time.
It's just an impossible task in general. And it will be fairly trivial for web designers to make greasemonkey useless by just changing things around, renaming containers, and obfuscating the page with javascript code. It wouldn't be hard to write an automatic obfuscater to generate a different obfuscated page for every user. Then greasemonkey just becomes useless.
I don't deny that it may be useful in some situations, but overall I think if it is adopted widely it will not only annoy web site designers, but also be pretty dangerous for users. a la the gmail lockout above -- a bug in a user script can still cause some pretty serious damage. Deleting all your web mail willy nilly or changing information that is critical to you. It wouldn't be hard to sneak some insidious stuff into one of these scripts.
I have a toshiba laptop and I got an email notifying me about this. The thing that annoyed me was that they aparently chose to hire a 3rd party to send out the emails to all their customers. So I got this email claiming to be from Toshiba, but the email headers weren't from a toshiba domain (rather from "toshiba.toshsvcs.com"), and even the link I was supposed to click on in the email didn't match the domain it was supposedly taking me to. The link was like: www.toshibadirect.com/CEP. It says it's going to take me to toshibadirect.com, but upon closer inspection is actually taking me to toshsvcs.com.
I did whois on this toshsvcs.com domain and it just points to some dude in Arizona. So I'm thinking, wow, this is one of the best phishing scams I've seen... or is it?
Well apparently it's not, but it sure could have been. It kind of ticks me off that they're doing it this way. How am I supposed to explain to my grandma how to recognize a phishing scam when companies like Toshiba are hiring people to send out legitimate emails that are virtually indistinguishable from scams? In fact, this would still be a great one for the phishers to jump on. Just copy that toshiba recall email, and replace the already suspicious links with new ones that don't redirect to toshiba's website, or which do after asking you to enter your computer's password.
What's the world coming to? Oh, well at least we're getting rid of that oaf in the White House. Oh crap, you mean we're not???
If you can't lower your caffeine consumption without causing problems, aren't you technically addicted?
No. I don't think so at all. I personally got these caffeine withdrawl headaches several times in college before I realized they were connected with reduced caffiene intake. (I just seemed to get these headaches the first day after I got home from school on vacation and started taking it easy. Of course it was because I wasn't drinking coffee and trying to stay up 24hrs like I did at school when I was on vacation.) But the point is, I never had a craving for coffee or caffeine. I didn't even realize it was lack of coffee that was causing the headache. So I think it is a stretch to call something like that an addiction. Maybe I'd call it a mild physical dependency, but not an addiction. There's no chemical psychological dependency.
But I suppose addiction researchers have probably gone and defined the word in as broad a way as possible so that they can call as many phenomenon as possible part of their purview. Like "internet addiction". Sheesh. Lack of self discipline is more like it.
What's so great about CrazyEddie's GUI? There's not even a screenshot link on the home page for me to be able to see if I care to learn more or not. Are there screenshots buried somewhere on the web site?
True. The file sizes almost certainly won't match. Good point.
Re:rendering software not a competive advatage?
on
SIGGraph and Open Source
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Sure, ILM, DD, Pixar, PDI, and the other big boys have all duplicated effort writing essentially the same code, so making everything open source wouldn't really give any one of them a big advantage. But what about Joe's 3D GarageWorks, Ltd.? He's trying to start up his own effects house and having a damn tough time getting all the cool software together. He's only been able to implement a basic photon mapper, and a crappy rigid body simulator. Sure would be nice for him if all the big boys would share their code with him.
So I just wonder if that could be a reason for the big studios not to want to go whole hog into open source. I.e. it could open up the sluice gates to a whole new flood of competition.
Well, actually, I suspect the real reason they won't go crazy open sourcing everything in a hurry is just that most of their code so tied into huge knots. After you peel off a few relatively modular pieces like image libraries, you're left with a huge intertwined mess. You can't really open source your "physics engine" because it depends on A,B, and C, which depend on D,E,F,G,and H, which depend on...etc. Whereas with the OpenEXR example, it's just an image lib, and image libs are pretty easy to encapsulate. You've got read() methods that give you an array of numbers, and write() methods that take an array of numbers, and that's about it for the API. A character animation system, on the other hand, well that's got to tie into all kinds of subsystems - meshes, deformers, bones, physics, rendering, etc. It gets pretty messy, unless you set out from the beginning to make components that could be used outside of where they were developed. And that takes longer to do, so what are the chances any of these movie studios would have bothered?
Well I think the idea is that someone running a mirror could replace that nice linux installer executable with a short executable containing a root exploit followed by however many junk bytes are required to make the md5 come out right. Previously it was thought too hard to figure out an apropriate sequence of junk bytes to achieve the same md5 (in any reasonable amount of time), but now apparently someone has succeeded in doing it.
So the amazing thing is not that md5 can have collisions. That's obvious. The big deal is that someone actually computed a sequence that hashes with md5 to a particular given hash value.
I can't find anything on his web page about it, but Greg Abowd, a professor at Georgia Tech has been working on continuous capture. He has some pda/cell phone software that his group has been working on which allows for continuous capture of audio. He also knows a lot about the laws regarding such recording. Not all states/provinces allow it, but many do.
I think his goals are more along the lines of automating segmentation and indexing of the audio for easy searching of your entire last day/week/year/decade of conversations with people.
Anyway, you might be interested in the kinds of things he's doing. But actually picking out random snippets of mp3 audio should be a trivial coding task. I'm sure there have already been a dozen libraries/scripting tools/command-line solutions proposed already in previous posts.
Good question. Probably the easiest thing would be to convert all assets over to CIEXYZ space. XYZ is a three primary system just like RGB, but the the X,Y,and Z primaries are outside of the range visible to humans. Because of this they can span the entire gamut of human-visible colors. The transform between RGB and XYZ space can be accomplished with just a 3x3 matrix multiply, and after that, all the math of your raytracer, or whatever, would basically still be correct, except maybe things like dispersion hacks. The downside is that many bits in a straightforward XYZ encoding are wasted on colors that are out of the visible spectrum, and bits generally aren't allocated where they make the most difference to perception. Unfortunately, more perceptually uniform encodings require more math than a simple 3x3 color matrix to convert in and out of.
It will be interesting to see how things progress.
Re:RGBCMY is more marketing factoid than it isreal
on
RGB to become RGBCMY
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· Score: 1
What you (and the page you referred to) call the C.I.E. colorspace is actually the CIEXYZ colorspace. CIE has defined many different colorspaces, so there's not one "CIE" colorspace. There are CIEXYZ, CIELAB, and CIELUV colorspaces for instance, to name a few. And technically the images shown on that page you linked to are x-y chromaticities, which are computed from the X,Y,Z coordinates as
x = X/(X+Y+Z)
y = Y/(X+Y+Z) which just gives you a handy way to look at colors in an easier to grasp 2D format. In reality gamuts are 3D volumes, but 2D pictures of those 3D volumes are difficult to make sense of.
Finally, the CIEXYZ colorspace is not any better than RGB at helping determine the perceptual distance between two colors. For that you need to use CIELAB or CIELUV.
Yes, I think it's safe to say that we'll see this tech used much sooner in computer apps than we do in TV broadcasts. After all, how long did it take to go from high def computer monitors to an actual high-def television standard and real broadcasts?
But there are some applications for this type of eye-catching vivid display tech already which can be paired up with custom hardware/software solutions to serve existing markets in the near term: * Advertising kiosks * Public information displays * Movie production (where they want to see on their screens better what the final laser print to film will look like)
After that I can definitely seeing HDR catching on among gamers, though maybe not WG. It's something that would be easy for game developers to support, since already a lot of calcs are done in floating point on the recent crop of graphics cards. It's just that currently the large luminance values are chopped off, or turned into glowing "bloom" effects in the final pass. Games with HDR would be cool.
Movies will probably be the next to get HDR, probably in the form of modified DivX codecs or something that support the extra dynamic range. Greg Ward presented a Sketch at SIGGRAPH this year about encoding HDR info into JPEG files in a backwards compatible way, and a similar thing could be done for HDR DivX movies, presumably. Getting it into mainstream standards will take longer, as will getting it into the production pipeline.
For the wide color gamut monitors, I think graphic designers will probably be interested, though I don't know enough about printing to know if wider gamut monitors would be better at proofing print colors. There's still a pretty big difference between reflective papers and inks, and emissive monitors when comparing colors.
Home theater buffs may even pay for WG / HDR displays just for the gee-whiz factor even before there's any real content for it.
But I really think that now that we've pretty much gone to the point where pixels are too small to see anymore, it is pretty inevitable that the future lies in high dynamic range and wider color gamuts.
The diagram of which you speak, the chromaticity diagram, is shown on the web page of the company the article is about: http://www.genoacolor.com/overview.html
It's actually pretty bad marketing on their part to show their expanded gamut on the chromaticity diagram. Distances in that space have little correlation with perceptual differences, so it makes it look like they've only marginally expanded the gamut. It would look better if they showed the L*u*v or L*a*b colorspace gamuts, which are more perceptually uniform.
The Irodori people who had a booth in E-Tech at SIGGRAPH had a diagram in L*u*v space, and it makes the relative amount of expansion of the gamut much more clear.
The kindergarden theory of paint mixing is a vast oversimplification of the actual process that takes place. Most paints can both absorb and scatter light. Several purely scattering pigments mixed together should act as you say, by more or less averaging the colors involved. Bright paints like titanium white or cadmium yellow are examples of paints with very high scattering. On the other hand the darker paints like lamp black and prussian blue, have more more absorption than scattering, and consequently they act more subtractive.
There's a more accurate theory that explains the mixing of pigmented materials, known as Kubelka-Munk theory. Hasse presents a good intro to it in this paper
Well, true they have to expand the gamut of existing RGB data artifically, but this is different from what you can do in photoshop. In this case the display can actually show more real colors than a conventional RGB display. Put the two monitors side-by-side, and you will be able to see colors on a RGBCMY monitor that simply cannot be reprodced on any normal RGB monitor. Have you ever taken a digital picture of a beautifully intense blue stain glass window, or some brightly colored flowers, and been disappointed when you got it home to see how bland the colors were on your monitor. The gamut captured by the camera is part of the problem, but even if it captured the colors perfectly, current monitors still couldn't display the results. These new wide gamut monitors should be able to do much better.
Having to "make up" the additional color data is just a temporary measure until content creation software and image acquisition hardware catches up to the gamuts possible with these new monitors.
And then I saw a few displays on the exhibition floor from NEC with a "WG" specifier for "Wide Gamut". NEC's WG monitor is still RGB but with purer R, G, and B phosphors to obtain a gammut wider than Adobe RGB.
And now there's this one. Way cool.
I can't wait till this becomes more widespread. The question becomes, what will the next color standard be for use in applications and APIs? It doesn't make sense to actually encode color as 6 values for display, since (most) humans only have three kinds of cones. It would make more sense to use something like CIEXYX for color interchange in that case. Especially if we're going to have this wierd mix of HDR and various wide gamut displays around for a while, each which has slightly different needs for color output. Best to just go with a neutral, well-defined intermediate colorspace.
Fun thing happened to me yesterday. I hit "preview" on a submission I was making to one story and it served me up a page for moderating a completely different story. And I have moderation turned off.
There's something definitely unusual about our cute little slashcode these days. Could he be experimenting with drugs?
Yikes! Wow I can't believe it took two and a half hours for someone to point out my stupidity.
Yes you're right: I meant that Blender uses RIGHT mouse button for selection, LEFT mouse button for placing the cursor. Sheesh. Amazing I got modded up to 3:Interesting with me effectively blabbering on and on about how annoying it was that Blender works exactly like every other Windows program.
Note to self: thumb and forefinger of Left hand make an L shape. Ok, now back to work on my autonomous robot navigation system.... wait a minute... oh crap! Left, robot! No! The other Left!!
Good thing the elections aren't for another few months, huh? I might have accidentally voted for the wrong side!
Yeh, I used EphPod with MacOpener on my Windows PC in the early days and it worked just fine. But now you can just reformat as a PC drive and use iTunes on the PC just as easily as you can with the new "made for windows" iPods. Works perfectly with the 1st gen iPods.
I believe this is the definitive book on the subject of the parent's post. A very interesting idea. I haven't read the book, but the author was interviewd on NPR a while back. If I ever start reading books again that's one I'd be interested in picking up.:-)
I'm still happily chugging away with my 5gb ipod! I'd love to get one of the sleek new ones, but as long as my music remains in MP3 format, my little 1st gen isn't obsolete. It still plays all the latest songs.
I don't think the interface is that bad, and they are working on making it better. And also documenting it better -- the new blender guide is a great thing. Besides, aren't you willing to put up with a little quirkiness for a free 3D modleing and animation program? Any 3D program is going to take some serious time to learn well, and the core modeling operations in Blender really are pretty efficent once you get used to them.
But the number one thing that annoys me with the blender UI, which will probably never be fixed, is that, flying in the face of 20 years of WIMP software conventions, they chose to use the LEFT mouse button for selecting things, and the RIGHT mouse button for positioning the cursor. I used it for several weeks and never did get the hang of that. Kept moving the cursor around when I meant to select something. I can't count how many times I carefully placed the cursor exactly where I wanted it only to turn around and carelessly right-click on some object to select it and -- DOH! I just moved the cursor. And there's no undo of cursor repositioning. Very annoying. So you just have to go back and redo your careful cursor placement manually.
Oh, and the lack of global undo is another major annoyance, but that'll probably be fixed someday. Undo has been added for certain sub-modes already. But I think the main Blender developers are too attached to the whole RMB for cursor positioning/LMB for selection thing to ever change that.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the gp was right, and you are completely wrong. You may have seen a different display like the one you describe (I think Tokyo U has one sort of like that), but this isn't it. The Perspecta display is pretty much the only display out there today that truly generates 3D, as opposed to the discrete number of 2D views that you get from lenticular or barrier display tech. It's certainly the only true 3D display you can buy today. The holovideo stuff from MIT might count as true 3D but that's nowhere near commercialization as far as I know.
Ok I'm adding this to the discussion kinda late so probably no one will read it, but here goes anyway.
Everybody's arguing left and right about whether or not it's right or fair to use such a thing, but nobody seems to have made what seems to be a very important point to me: frankly, GreaseMonkey just doesn't work very well. Furthermore, I don't think this it will ever evolve into a truly reliable tool, because A) the web is too dynamic and B) scripts don't actually _understand_ the content they are modifying.
At some level the script needs to understand the semantics of the web page, and that's just a hard problem. Basically what the scripts can do currently is simple pattern matching, like "find the container named foo, and insert something before it", but that sort of thing breaks as soon as the web page author decides to change the container name.
Two examples of real-life failure of grease-monkey scripts:
I tried the slashdot nested comment script, and when it works it works pretty well, but for some reason it doesn't work on every slashdot comment page. Whatever pattern it's using doesn't quite cover all the bases.
I tried the gmail delete button thing. The button appeared, but it wouldn't actually delete any mail, and furthermore at one point it seems to have caused gmail to go into an infinite refresh loop that resulted in me getting locked out of account for a while due to "suspicious activity".
Even assuming that Joe Regexpert has really awesome skillz in writing pattern matching code, Joe only sees the version of web pages that get served up to _him_. Any site that uses cookies can potentially serve up very different pages to different users. Many web sites (like slashdot) allow users to configure the appearance of the page. So in order to exhaustively debug his script, Joe Regexpert is going to need to try out all those different combinations of options on the web site. It's possible that for some combination of options, the web site may just serve up a completely different page. Maybe it's a popular configuration, so they've hand-coded a lightweight static version of the page, for instance. Anyway, it's just impossible for Joe to see every version of the page, and so he can't possibly write a script works 100% of the time.
It's just an impossible task in general. And it will be fairly trivial for web designers to make greasemonkey useless by just changing things around, renaming containers, and obfuscating the page with javascript code. It wouldn't be hard to write an automatic obfuscater to generate a different obfuscated page for every user. Then greasemonkey just becomes useless.
I don't deny that it may be useful in some situations, but overall I think if it is adopted widely it will not only annoy web site designers, but also be pretty dangerous for users. a la the gmail lockout above -- a bug in a user script can still cause some pretty serious damage. Deleting all your web mail willy nilly or changing information that is critical to you. It wouldn't be hard to sneak some insidious stuff into one of these scripts.
Maybe not a great actress, but she did pretty decent job writing and directing that movie with Bill Murray, "Lost in Translation".
I did whois on this toshsvcs.com domain and it just points to some dude in Arizona. So I'm thinking, wow, this is one of the best phishing scams I've seen... or is it?
Well apparently it's not, but it sure could have been. It kind of ticks me off that they're doing it this way. How am I supposed to explain to my grandma how to recognize a phishing scam when companies like Toshiba are hiring people to send out legitimate emails that are virtually indistinguishable from scams? In fact, this would still be a great one for the phishers to jump on. Just copy that toshiba recall email, and replace the already suspicious links with new ones that don't redirect to toshiba's website, or which do after asking you to enter your computer's password.
What's the world coming to? Oh, well at least we're getting rid of that oaf in the White House. Oh crap, you mean we're not???
If you can't lower your caffeine consumption without causing problems, aren't you technically addicted?
No. I don't think so at all. I personally got these caffeine withdrawl headaches several times in college before I realized they were connected with reduced caffiene intake. (I just seemed to get these headaches the first day after I got home from school on vacation and started taking it easy. Of course it was because I wasn't drinking coffee and trying to stay up 24hrs like I did at school when I was on vacation.) But the point is, I never had a craving for coffee or caffeine. I didn't even realize it was lack of coffee that was causing the headache. So I think it is a stretch to call something like that an addiction. Maybe I'd call it a mild physical dependency, but not an addiction. There's no chemical psychological dependency.
But I suppose addiction researchers have probably gone and defined the word in as broad a way as possible so that they can call as many phenomenon as possible part of their purview. Like "internet addiction". Sheesh. Lack of self discipline is more like it.
What's so great about CrazyEddie's GUI? There's not even a screenshot link on the home page for me to be able to see if I care to learn more or not. Are there screenshots buried somewhere on the web site?
Not a chance! He can waste time with his friends when his chores are finished.
True. The file sizes almost certainly won't match. Good point.
Sure, ILM, DD, Pixar, PDI, and the other big boys have all duplicated effort writing essentially the same code, so making everything open source wouldn't really give any one of them a big advantage. But what about Joe's 3D GarageWorks, Ltd.? He's trying to start up his own effects house and having a damn tough time getting all the cool software together. He's only been able to implement a basic photon mapper, and a crappy rigid body simulator. Sure would be nice for him if all the big boys would share their code with him.
So I just wonder if that could be a reason for the big studios not to want to go whole hog into open source. I.e. it could open up the sluice gates to a whole new flood of competition.
Well, actually, I suspect the real reason they won't go crazy open sourcing everything in a hurry is just that most of their code so tied into huge knots. After you peel off a few relatively modular pieces like image libraries, you're left with a huge intertwined mess. You can't really open source your "physics engine" because it depends on A,B, and C, which depend on D,E,F,G,and H, which depend on...etc. Whereas with the OpenEXR example, it's just an image lib, and image libs are pretty easy to encapsulate. You've got read() methods that give you an array of numbers, and write() methods that take an array of numbers, and that's about it for the API. A character animation system, on the other hand, well that's got to tie into all kinds of subsystems - meshes, deformers, bones, physics, rendering, etc. It gets pretty messy, unless you set out from the beginning to make components that could be used outside of where they were developed. And that takes longer to do, so what are the chances any of these movie studios would have bothered?
Well I think the idea is that someone running a mirror could replace that nice linux installer executable with a short executable containing a root exploit followed by however many junk bytes are required to make the md5 come out right. Previously it was thought too hard to figure out an apropriate sequence of junk bytes to achieve the same md5 (in any reasonable amount of time), but now apparently someone has succeeded in doing it.
So the amazing thing is not that md5 can have collisions. That's obvious. The big deal is that someone actually computed a sequence that hashes with md5 to a particular given hash value.
I can't find anything on his web page about it, but Greg Abowd, a professor at Georgia Tech has been working on continuous capture. He has some pda/cell phone software that his group has been working on which allows for continuous capture of audio. He also knows a lot about the laws regarding such recording. Not all states/provinces allow it, but many do.
I think his goals are more along the lines of automating segmentation and indexing of the audio for easy searching of your entire last day/week/year/decade of conversations with people.
Anyway, you might be interested in the kinds of things he's doing. But actually picking out random snippets of mp3 audio should be a trivial coding task. I'm sure there have already been a dozen libraries/scripting tools/command-line solutions proposed already in previous posts.
Good question. Probably the easiest thing would be to convert all assets over to CIEXYZ space. XYZ is a three primary system just like RGB, but the the X,Y,and Z primaries are outside of the range visible to humans. Because of this they can span the entire gamut of human-visible colors. The transform between RGB and XYZ space can be accomplished with just a 3x3 matrix multiply, and after that, all the math of your raytracer, or whatever, would basically still be correct, except maybe things like dispersion hacks. The downside is that many bits in a straightforward XYZ encoding are wasted on colors that are out of the visible spectrum, and bits generally aren't allocated where they make the most difference to perception. Unfortunately, more perceptually uniform encodings require more math than a simple 3x3 color matrix to convert in and out of.
It will be interesting to see how things progress.
What you (and the page you referred to) call the C.I.E. colorspace is actually the CIEXYZ colorspace. CIE has defined many different colorspaces, so there's not one "CIE" colorspace. There are CIEXYZ, CIELAB, and CIELUV colorspaces for instance, to name a few.
And technically the images shown on that page you linked to are x-y chromaticities, which are computed from the X,Y,Z coordinates as
x = X/(X+Y+Z)
y = Y/(X+Y+Z)
which just gives you a handy way to look at colors in an easier to grasp 2D format. In reality gamuts are 3D volumes, but 2D pictures of those 3D volumes are difficult to make sense of.
Finally, the CIEXYZ colorspace is not any better than RGB at helping determine the perceptual distance between two colors. For that you need to use CIELAB or CIELUV.
Yes, I think it's safe to say that we'll see this tech used much sooner in computer apps than we do in TV broadcasts. After all, how long did it take to go from high def computer monitors to an actual high-def television standard and real broadcasts?
But there are some applications for this type of eye-catching vivid display tech already which can be paired up with custom hardware/software solutions to serve existing markets in the near term:
* Advertising kiosks
* Public information displays
* Movie production (where they want to see on their screens better what the final laser print to film will look like)
After that I can definitely seeing HDR catching on among gamers, though maybe not WG. It's something that would be easy for game developers to support, since already a lot of calcs are done in floating point on the recent crop of graphics cards. It's just that currently the large luminance values are chopped off, or turned into glowing "bloom" effects in the final pass. Games with HDR would be cool.
Movies will probably be the next to get HDR, probably in the form of modified DivX codecs or something that support the extra dynamic range. Greg Ward presented a Sketch at SIGGRAPH this year about encoding HDR info into JPEG files in a backwards compatible way, and a similar thing could be done for HDR DivX movies, presumably. Getting it into mainstream standards will take longer, as will getting it into the production pipeline.
For the wide color gamut monitors, I think graphic designers will probably be interested, though I don't know enough about printing to know if wider gamut monitors would be better at proofing print colors. There's still a pretty big difference between reflective papers and inks, and emissive monitors when comparing colors.
Home theater buffs may even pay for WG / HDR displays just for the gee-whiz factor even before there's any real content for it.
But I really think that now that we've pretty much gone to the point where pixels are too small to see anymore, it is pretty inevitable that the future lies in high dynamic range and wider color gamuts.
The diagram of which you speak, the chromaticity diagram, is shown on the web page of the company the article is about:
http://www.genoacolor.com/overview.html
It's actually pretty bad marketing on their part to show their expanded gamut on the chromaticity diagram. Distances in that space have little correlation with perceptual differences, so it makes it look like they've only marginally expanded the gamut. It would look better if they showed the L*u*v or L*a*b colorspace gamuts, which are more perceptually uniform.
The Irodori people who had a booth in E-Tech at SIGGRAPH had a diagram in L*u*v space, and it makes the relative amount of expansion of the gamut much more clear.
The kindergarden theory of paint mixing is a vast oversimplification of the actual process that takes place. Most paints can both absorb and scatter light. Several purely scattering pigments mixed together should act as you say, by more or less averaging the colors involved. Bright paints like titanium white or cadmium yellow are examples of paints with very high scattering. On the other hand the darker paints like lamp black and prussian blue, have more more absorption than scattering, and consequently they act more subtractive.
There's a more accurate theory that explains the mixing of pigmented materials, known as Kubelka-Munk theory. Hasse presents a good intro to it in this paper
Well, true they have to expand the gamut of existing RGB data artifically, but this is different from what you can do in photoshop. In this case the display can actually show more real colors than a conventional RGB display. Put the two monitors side-by-side, and you will be able to see colors on a RGBCMY monitor that simply cannot be reprodced on any normal RGB monitor. Have you ever taken a digital picture of a beautifully intense blue stain glass window, or some brightly colored flowers, and been disappointed when you got it home to see how bland the colors were on your monitor. The gamut captured by the camera is part of the problem, but even if it captured the colors perfectly, current monitors still couldn't display the results. These new wide gamut monitors should be able to do much better.
Having to "make up" the additional color data is just a temporary measure until content creation software and image acquisition hardware catches up to the gamuts possible with these new monitors.
I, for one, welcome our new RGBCMY masters.
Wow, this is really cool.
o dori.php?=conference
g h.php?pageID=conference
There's a whole bunch of these wide gamut and high dynamic range displays suddenly.
At SIGGRAPH this year, there was a 6-primary (RGBCMY) projection system called IRODORI on display in emerging technologies:
http://www.siggraph.org/s2004/conference/etech/ir
There was also a high dynamic range display (capable of a greater range of brightness) from Sunnybrook Technologies at E-Tech:
http://www.siggraph.org/s2004/conference/etech/hi
And then I saw a few displays on the exhibition floor from NEC with a "WG" specifier for "Wide Gamut". NEC's WG monitor is still RGB but with purer R, G, and B phosphors to obtain a gammut wider than Adobe RGB.
And now there's this one. Way cool.
I can't wait till this becomes more widespread. The question becomes, what will the next color standard be for use in applications and APIs? It doesn't make sense to actually encode color as 6 values for display, since (most) humans only have three kinds of cones. It would make more sense to use something like CIEXYX for color interchange in that case. Especially if we're going to have this wierd mix of HDR and various wide gamut displays around for a while, each which has slightly different needs for color output. Best to just go with a neutral, well-defined intermediate colorspace.
Fun thing happened to me yesterday. I hit "preview" on a submission I was making to one story and it served me up a page for moderating a completely different story. And I have moderation turned off.
There's something definitely unusual about our cute little slashcode these days. Could he be experimenting with drugs?
Yikes! Wow I can't believe it took two and a half hours for someone to point out my stupidity.
... wait a minute ... oh crap! Left, robot! No! The other Left!!
Yes you're right: I meant that Blender uses RIGHT mouse button for selection, LEFT mouse button for placing the cursor. Sheesh. Amazing I got modded up to 3:Interesting with me effectively blabbering on and on about how annoying it was that Blender works exactly like every other Windows program.
Note to self: thumb and forefinger of Left hand make an L shape.
Ok, now back to work on my autonomous robot navigation system.
Good thing the elections aren't for another few months, huh? I might have accidentally voted for the wrong side!
Yeh, I used EphPod with MacOpener on my Windows PC in the early days and it worked just fine. But now you can just reformat as a PC drive and use iTunes on the PC just as easily as you can with the new "made for windows" iPods. Works perfectly with the 1st gen iPods.
I believe this is the definitive book on the subject of the parent's post. A very interesting idea. I haven't read the book, but the author was interviewd on NPR a while back. If I ever start reading books again that's one I'd be interested in picking up. :-)
I'm still happily chugging away with my 5gb ipod! I'd love to get one of the sleek new ones, but as long as my music remains in MP3 format, my little 1st gen isn't obsolete. It still plays all the latest songs.
Sweet! I keep an eye on the blender dev mailing list but somehow I missed that one.
--bb
I don't think the interface is that bad, and they are working on making it better. And also documenting it better -- the new blender guide is a great thing. Besides, aren't you willing to put up with a little quirkiness for a free 3D modleing and animation program? Any 3D program is going to take some serious time to learn well, and the core modeling operations in Blender really are pretty efficent once you get used to them.
But the number one thing that annoys me with the blender UI, which will probably never be fixed, is that, flying in the face of 20 years of WIMP software conventions, they chose to use the LEFT mouse button for selecting things, and the RIGHT mouse button for positioning the cursor. I used it for several weeks and never did get the hang of that. Kept moving the cursor around when I meant to select something. I can't count how many times I carefully placed the cursor exactly where I wanted it only to turn around and carelessly right-click on some object to select it and -- DOH! I just moved the cursor. And there's no undo of cursor repositioning. Very annoying. So you just have to go back and redo your careful cursor placement manually.
Oh, and the lack of global undo is another major annoyance, but that'll probably be fixed someday. Undo has been added for certain sub-modes already. But I think the main Blender developers are too attached to the whole RMB for cursor positioning/LMB for selection thing to ever change that.