A car model will fill about 4GB of RAM while rendering. Does your phone have 4 GB of nice highspeed RAM? Nope? Ok you'll be swapping to slow memory. It takes a modern quad core with 8GB of RAM about let's say 5 hours to render a 1200x1200 rendering. Mobile screens are a quarter that so 5/16 = ~20 minutes. Now let's say a mobile phone now a days is about 1/100th the speed of our quad core 8GB modern system. Even generously giving it only a 1/100th speed hit which is probably 10x-100x off , you're looking at about a day and a half to render on your iPhone. Honestly I would expect a week. Truly honestly I would expect it to overflow its cache and crash immediately, I don't think it would even be possible to load into memory. But hey a week! That's... interactive...
Even if one has close to a million dependent options one could still save money by rendering it's not like you have to manually enter the different configurations.
No but you do have to render off every variation. And take something like a body kit. What if they want a spoiler. Those are generally painted the same as the car color. Now you have to render off the spoiler 10 times from 60 different angles. What if they want different side view mirrors, again another 60+ angles. Now what if they want the side mirrors but a different interior. The side mirrors will now have a different sillouete and will have to be composited seperately over the interior, but when the car turns around you'll have to switch alpha channels... ugh... And then what if you choose different seats? Well you might as well slice the car in half now for each frame since the interior png is going to have to be a mid ground element between the front of the car and the back of the car. And it'll have to be rendered seperately as a result. So now you have to render out 10 color variations on a side view mirror for both front and back seperately and keep its alpha channel correctly infront/behind of the car door. And so help me god if they want that car door to open that's going to just multiply the pain and suffering. And then later someone else is going to have to code up a flash page to handle all the switches between front/back animations dependent on view.... and on and on and on...
You then are faced with one of two options: Limit the views, visually changeable options or you spend an extra $40k rendering a million combinations in order to demonstrate a trillion possible total combinations when you could have just purchased a $20k computer and been done and offered your customer: more views, more options than would have been conceivable through pre-rendering. I suppose there's another option and that's to go client-side crappy 3D.
They don't reflect paint but they do reflect the environment. If you only want to show off your car in a white world... but what if you want to give your customers options for the background?
There's just not that many variations on a vehicle which have any impact on more than a couple of parts. But, if you think that it is unachievable to prerender these, please go look at Scion's current website, build a car, and write back. (Note: I haven't been there in years, myself, but I'm confident enough in my theory that I'm willing to let you to prove yourself wrong.)
... Let's see Oh I need to install a plugin to build my car... fine.. I wonder what it's for--Oh hey look at that! It's a little crappy real-time 3D renderer! Hahaha. There you go. Your very first example... uses a client side renderer.
It works but the reflections and lighting is all baked onto the car. Which is to say it looks worse than pretty much any video game made in the last 10 years... but it does employ multi-sample AA.
This site does remind me of a few things though: if you want a 360 of the car then you have to render out all of the options from at least 36 viewpoints. Now what if you want to see the car from above/below. Now you have to render out hundreds more viewpoints.
I know slashdot is keen on saying "The Cloud" is a buzzword and meaningless bullshit. But that's because Slashdot is evidently completely clueless to what cloud computing really means. What it means in this case is you pay for the processing you need. You don't buy a $15k server. You pay Amazon or Google or some other cloud processor for render time. If you need 3 seconds of rendering then they charge you 3c for the trouble.
Speaking from experience... it's currently a HUGE PITA.
Sure if you have just a side view and a front view it's easy. Render out each wheel seperately. But then what if you want a 360 view of the car now? Ooops. No dice. And what if you want the car color to be reflected in the side view mirrors? All the possible combinations? Well if you give the user complete freedom that means there is an infinite number of renderings you have to do. What if you want to see the car at night? Now you have to double all of your renderings and Flash code. What if you want to see the car on a street corner... another complete set of renderings. Street corner at night? Another set of renderings. What if you want to see the car from the drivers's seat. Another set of renderings. What if you want to see it from the passenger seat? another complete set of renderings. What if you want to see it with a door open.... you guessed it, another set of renderings, what if you want to see two doors open well now you have a whole rats nest of dependencies you have to render.
Sure. If you're perfectly happy with slightly editable product brochures then the current system is fine. But if you want to add more interactivity to the user then you'll blow through the cost of 8 Tegras in a matter of days paying someone like me to make a bazillion renderings and then someone else to write the flash code to make it all interactive.
By comparison setting of a few animation and visibility switches is trivial.
A principle, vice principle/academic councilor, librarian, janitor, I think two accountants and a secretary. Not sure where I would have cut 80% of that.
And I know my mom would LOVE for there be more money spent on administration at her schools since she spends so much time filling out paperwork wasting tons of tax payers' dollars to ensure precious tax payers' dollars aren't being wasted.
If you're a music teacher hired by a school to teach students to play the instruments but you write a melody on the side on your own time the school doesn't own copyright to the song. It's a resource which you can bring to school (sheet music) and use as an educational tool.
Lesson plans aren't the work being hired. You aren't hired to create a lesson plan, you're hired to teach children.
Similarly if you hire me to create a house and I also manufacture a hammer off the clock you don't own my hammer. If I'm an author and I'm hired to lecture on my research the school doesn't magically inherit rights to my research because I gave a lecture. We once did work for hire and the company asked for all of our computers at the end. We just laughed all the way out the door. If you bring a monitor to work and use it instead of the small crappy corporate monitor--the company doesn't own your monitor just like it doesn't own your tie or your shirt or your shoes. You bring them to work to facilitate working. They aren't work property.
Schools pay teachers to show up and educate students.
-Allow the client to see their project from any viewport. -Walk throughs. -Scripted back-end for web apps. There's already a program running on RealityServer 2.0 which lets you build a room of your house and then place furniture and see a rendering of what your house would look like. Then let's you buy it. Imagine Ikea's catalogue letting you not just shop but actually visualize your house and then just order and have it ready for pickup when you arrive on a cart. Just swipe your CC.
This obviously isn't meant to replace your viewport. That's what Nvidia's Iray is for. This is for finished work in place of renderings, you upload scenes ready for interaction. Instead of rendering a 3 minute fly through to try and cover any and every possible angle the client *might* want to look at you just create some prime camera locations as bookmarks and let them wander and look around at their leisure.
Interesting piece of trivia. The original Energizer Bunny commercials were parodying Duracell Bunny commercials. But Duracell let the TM lapse and now can't run commercials with a pink rabbit in the US.
Not all games. Many genres would work great such as an RTS or many RPGs like WOW or Baldur's gate or any other game where the interface could be run locally on the portable's hardware and then let the server handle the rendering.
I imagine even a local 3D copy which is hidden from the user but handles all of the 3D Mechanics of detecting unit selection etc. Since it's not being shaded and it only needs collision meshes it would run fine on a cell phone. Then let the server render the well shaded and lit views.
The point is that the blackberry doesn't do any processing. It just streams the end result. Which is certainly doable considering the ZuneHD can playback 720p HD footage and it's not much bigger than a blackberry.
Not true. I'm an extremely happy ZunePass Customer. For $15 I get 10 free songs to keep an unlimited rentals. It's like Netflix for music if Netflix let you keep one DVD per month.
You don't HAVE TO PAY to put code on your own box. You just have to pay if you want that code to interact with Microsoft's servers.
If you don't want to play on XBox live you can do whatever the hell you want to your Xbox. Just don't try and connect to Microsoft's servers. It's very simple. It's not really nefarious.
In total, the gift will include 47 airports that together handle over 500 million passengers each year, or about 35% of the total number of annual passengers in the U.S. In October, Google and Virgin America announced that, during this same period, all passengers on Virgin America will have free in-flight Wi-Fi. Five of the airports participating in the program are also Virgin America destinations: Boston, Seattle, Las Vegas, San Diego and Virgin America's newest destination launching November 18, Fort Lauderdale.
But what if it's as simple as running a Camera Shader which just jacks up the contrast and increases the UI contrast. As a developer I wouldn't mind doing that. That's a reasonable cost and expenditure to assist more customers. Similarly I would look into creating menus which have a compatibility mode so that all text is white on black. Again reasonably cost effective change.
Most engines already support post processing for 'film effects' etc. This could just be another film effect.
Some of us received more than 12 years of religious education more rigorous than many college degrees on the subject and have PhD theologians for parents and friends.
Don't bother confusing us with smoke screens and non-sequiturs. The bible fully endorses the practice of slavery and makes little to no attempt to dismantle the institution.
A God which can inspire circumcision surely could also find means of persuading his followers to abandon slavery.
It was clearly never a priority since we have no record of Jesus explicitly telling his followers not to enslave others.
Which is my point. We shouldn't really be getting our panties in a twist over Jon Carmack losing a contest that Jon Carmack lost.
If he really cared about it then he could have spent another month perfecting it. Doing it early smells of "Best of luck but I'm busy with other things." Which is fine, but it just means that if he doesn't care, then I most certainly won't.:D
And yet they didn't see fit to spend an extra few months on their guidance system to be sure they came in first. Why did they fly in September if they could have worked another month?
The slope of the data isn't related to challenge over time. It's amount of information over time.
So the amount of data to learn is steep because it requires a great deal of learning simultaneously.
It's assumed that people learn information at a steady pace. So steep learning curve implies that it's difficult because the amount of material to be learned is steeper than the rate at which the average individual can learn it.
Slashdot Mirror
A car model will fill about 4GB of RAM while rendering. Does your phone have 4 GB of nice highspeed RAM? Nope? Ok you'll be swapping to slow memory. It takes a modern quad core with 8GB of RAM about let's say 5 hours to render a 1200x1200 rendering. Mobile screens are a quarter that so 5/16 = ~20 minutes. Now let's say a mobile phone now a days is about 1/100th the speed of our quad core 8GB modern system. Even generously giving it only a 1/100th speed hit which is probably 10x-100x off , you're looking at about a day and a half to render on your iPhone. Honestly I would expect a week. Truly honestly I would expect it to overflow its cache and crash immediately, I don't think it would even be possible to load into memory. But hey a week! That's... interactive...
Even if one has close to a million dependent options one could still save money by rendering it's not like you have to manually enter the different configurations.
No but you do have to render off every variation. And take something like a body kit. What if they want a spoiler. Those are generally painted the same as the car color. Now you have to render off the spoiler 10 times from 60 different angles. What if they want different side view mirrors, again another 60+ angles. Now what if they want the side mirrors but a different interior. The side mirrors will now have a different sillouete and will have to be composited seperately over the interior, but when the car turns around you'll have to switch alpha channels... ugh... And then what if you choose different seats? Well you might as well slice the car in half now for each frame since the interior png is going to have to be a mid ground element between the front of the car and the back of the car. And it'll have to be rendered seperately as a result. So now you have to render out 10 color variations on a side view mirror for both front and back seperately and keep its alpha channel correctly infront/behind of the car door. And so help me god if they want that car door to open that's going to just multiply the pain and suffering. And then later someone else is going to have to code up a flash page to handle all the switches between front/back animations dependent on view.... and on and on and on...
You then are faced with one of two options: Limit the views, visually changeable options or you spend an extra $40k rendering a million combinations in order to demonstrate a trillion possible total combinations when you could have just purchased a $20k computer and been done and offered your customer: more views, more options than would have been conceivable through pre-rendering. I suppose there's another option and that's to go client-side crappy 3D.
They don't reflect paint but they do reflect the environment. If you only want to show off your car in a white world... but what if you want to give your customers options for the background?
There's just not that many variations on a vehicle which have any impact on more than a couple of parts. But, if you think that it is unachievable to prerender these, please go look at Scion's current website, build a car, and write back. (Note: I haven't been there in years, myself, but I'm confident enough in my theory that I'm willing to let you to prove yourself wrong.)
... Let's see Oh I need to install a plugin to build my car... fine.. I wonder what it's for--Oh hey look at that! It's a little crappy real-time 3D renderer! Hahaha. There you go. Your very first example... uses a client side renderer.
It works but the reflections and lighting is all baked onto the car. Which is to say it looks worse than pretty much any video game made in the last 10 years... but it does employ multi-sample AA.
This site does remind me of a few things though: if you want a 360 of the car then you have to render out all of the options from at least 36 viewpoints. Now what if you want to see the car from above/below. Now you have to render out hundreds more viewpoints.
I know slashdot is keen on saying "The Cloud" is a buzzword and meaningless bullshit. But that's because Slashdot is evidently completely clueless to what cloud computing really means. What it means in this case is you pay for the processing you need. You don't buy a $15k server. You pay Amazon or Google or some other cloud processor for render time. If you need 3 seconds of rendering then they charge you 3c for the trouble.
Speaking from experience... it's currently a HUGE PITA.
Sure if you have just a side view and a front view it's easy. Render out each wheel seperately. But then what if you want a 360 view of the car now? Ooops. No dice. And what if you want the car color to be reflected in the side view mirrors? All the possible combinations? Well if you give the user complete freedom that means there is an infinite number of renderings you have to do. What if you want to see the car at night? Now you have to double all of your renderings and Flash code. What if you want to see the car on a street corner... another complete set of renderings. Street corner at night? Another set of renderings. What if you want to see the car from the drivers's seat. Another set of renderings. What if you want to see it from the passenger seat? another complete set of renderings. What if you want to see it with a door open.... you guessed it, another set of renderings, what if you want to see two doors open well now you have a whole rats nest of dependencies you have to render.
Sure. If you're perfectly happy with slightly editable product brochures then the current system is fine. But if you want to add more interactivity to the user then you'll blow through the cost of 8 Tegras in a matter of days paying someone like me to make a bazillion renderings and then someone else to write the flash code to make it all interactive.
By comparison setting of a few animation and visibility switches is trivial.
Well at my high school there was:
A principle, vice principle/academic councilor, librarian, janitor, I think two accountants and a secretary. Not sure where I would have cut 80% of that.
And I know my mom would LOVE for there be more money spent on administration at her schools since she spends so much time filling out paperwork wasting tons of tax payers' dollars to ensure precious tax payers' dollars aren't being wasted.
It's not work for hire.
If you're a music teacher hired by a school to teach students to play the instruments but you write a melody on the side on your own time the school doesn't own copyright to the song. It's a resource which you can bring to school (sheet music) and use as an educational tool.
Lesson plans aren't the work being hired. You aren't hired to create a lesson plan, you're hired to teach children.
Similarly if you hire me to create a house and I also manufacture a hammer off the clock you don't own my hammer. If I'm an author and I'm hired to lecture on my research the school doesn't magically inherit rights to my research because I gave a lecture. We once did work for hire and the company asked for all of our computers at the end. We just laughed all the way out the door. If you bring a monitor to work and use it instead of the small crappy corporate monitor--the company doesn't own your monitor just like it doesn't own your tie or your shirt or your shoes. You bring them to work to facilitate working. They aren't work property.
Schools pay teachers to show up and educate students.
In real time off the top of my head:
-Allow the client to see their project from any viewport.
-Walk throughs.
-Scripted back-end for web apps. There's already a program running on RealityServer 2.0 which lets you build a room of your house and then place furniture and see a rendering of what your house would look like. Then let's you buy it. Imagine Ikea's catalogue letting you not just shop but actually visualize your house and then just order and have it ready for pickup when you arrive on a cart. Just swipe your CC.
This obviously isn't meant to replace your viewport. That's what Nvidia's Iray is for. This is for finished work in place of renderings, you upload scenes ready for interaction. Instead of rendering a 3 minute fly through to try and cover any and every possible angle the client *might* want to look at you just create some prime camera locations as bookmarks and let them wander and look around at their leisure.
Wait... when has Microsoft sued people for downloading music or a movie?
Interesting piece of trivia. The original Energizer Bunny commercials were parodying Duracell Bunny commercials. But Duracell let the TM lapse and now can't run commercials with a pink rabbit in the US.
Not all games. Many genres would work great such as an RTS or many RPGs like WOW or Baldur's gate or any other game where the interface could be run locally on the portable's hardware and then let the server handle the rendering.
I imagine even a local 3D copy which is hidden from the user but handles all of the 3D Mechanics of detecting unit selection etc. Since it's not being shaded and it only needs collision meshes it would run fine on a cell phone. Then let the server render the well shaded and lit views.
The point is that the blackberry doesn't do any processing. It just streams the end result. Which is certainly doable considering the ZuneHD can playback 720p HD footage and it's not much bigger than a blackberry.
Really you wouldn't describe Netflix HD as photorealistic? Even things... originally shot on film? With a camera?
Oh right. The free market.
I can choose from one of 5 companies who all do the same thing or one which doesn't provide coverage anywhere useful.
WhoooO! Free market.
There is also no way to rent most music
Not true. I'm an extremely happy ZunePass Customer. For $15 I get 10 free songs to keep an unlimited rentals. It's like Netflix for music if Netflix let you keep one DVD per month.
You don't HAVE TO PAY to put code on your own box. You just have to pay if you want that code to interact with Microsoft's servers.
If you don't want to play on XBox live you can do whatever the hell you want to your Xbox. Just don't try and connect to Microsoft's servers. It's very simple. It's not really nefarious.
From TFA:
In total, the gift will include 47 airports that together handle over 500 million passengers each year, or about 35% of the total number of annual passengers in the U.S. In October, Google and Virgin America announced that, during this same period, all passengers on Virgin America will have free in-flight Wi-Fi. Five of the airports participating in the program are also Virgin America destinations: Boston, Seattle, Las Vegas, San Diego and Virgin America's newest destination launching November 18, Fort Lauderdale.
But what if it's as simple as running a Camera Shader which just jacks up the contrast and increases the UI contrast. As a developer I wouldn't mind doing that. That's a reasonable cost and expenditure to assist more customers. Similarly I would look into creating menus which have a compatibility mode so that all text is white on black. Again reasonably cost effective change.
Most engines already support post processing for 'film effects' etc. This could just be another film effect.
When your company's revenue is more than the GDP of most nations I think you're a good position to discuss the world economy.
Some of us received more than 12 years of religious education more rigorous than many college degrees on the subject and have PhD theologians for parents and friends.
Don't bother confusing us with smoke screens and non-sequiturs. The bible fully endorses the practice of slavery and makes little to no attempt to dismantle the institution.
A God which can inspire circumcision surely could also find means of persuading his followers to abandon slavery.
It was clearly never a priority since we have no record of Jesus explicitly telling his followers not to enslave others.
Wait what?
12 Trillion / 300 million = ~$40k per person.
Since the top 10% income earners pay 70% of taxes let's split that up.
12*0.7 = 8.4 Trillion / 30 million = ~$280k per person.
The average and even above average american pays:
12*0.3 = 3.6 Trillion / 370 = ~$13.3k
That's not a terribly insurmountable amount. It doesn't mean we should spend without restraint but it's hardly as bad as you portray it.
Which is my point. We shouldn't really be getting our panties in a twist over Jon Carmack losing a contest that Jon Carmack lost.
If he really cared about it then he could have spent another month perfecting it. Doing it early smells of "Best of luck but I'm busy with other things." Which is fine, but it just means that if he doesn't care, then I most certainly won't. :D
And yet they didn't see fit to spend an extra few months on their guidance system to be sure they came in first. Why did they fly in September if they could have worked another month?
The slope of the data isn't related to challenge over time. It's amount of information over time.
So the amount of data to learn is steep because it requires a great deal of learning simultaneously.
It's assumed that people learn information at a steady pace. So steep learning curve implies that it's difficult because the amount of material to be learned is steeper than the rate at which the average individual can learn it.