Garmin nuvifone, an iPhone with GPS and geotagging capabilities?

Garmin's recently (and abruptly) announced handset obviously marks the firm's first solo foray into the cellphone arena, and according to Cliff Pemble, the firm's president and COO, it's the "breakthrough product that cellphone and GPS users around the world have been longing for".

That being said, the unit will feature a 3.5-inch touchscreen with a trio of primary icons - Call, Search and View Map - along with an internet browser, HSDPA support and preloaded maps of North America and / or Eastern and Western Europe.

Furthermore, it houses "millions" of POIs, doles out turn-by-turn, voice-prompted directions and becomes Garmin's first device to include Google's local search capability.

As for pricing and availability? We're probably, according to rumours, looking at a Q3 2008 release, but we'll have to wait things out before finding out a price and who exactly will be carrying it. Certainly an interesting device that deviates from the norm, by being a direct iPhone competitor which includes GPS but also geotagging too (directly to something like Flickr via 3G or Wi-Fi) and should be eagerly anticipated!

Burnout Paradise, best urban modelling on a racing game yet?

Well I think it might well be! Having spent a few hours with this Criterion title on my XBox 360 I can safely say that apart from it being a thoroughly enjoyable racing game, the 3D urban model its based on takes some beating in quality terms. Burnout Paradise's fundamental change compared to older titles is that instead connecting from event to event automatically like in the past, players can explore the whole Burnout Paradise (the name of the virtual city!) world without waiting for new levels. While Burnout does come across as a sandbox, i.e. I spent much of my time exploring the streets and jumping off ramps, oblivious to any premeditated game goals, the openess offered also gives you the chance to freely explore a full-blown 3D virtual city of the highest order.

According to the creators of the game, while they didn't have a specific square area, but they estimated Paradise City to be about 15-to-17 older Burnout tracks merged together. Mountain passes and rural areas are mostly outside of town. However when back to the city, the urban landscape loos like a single dense spot, just like a real metropolis from a distance! Still, when downtown, you are surrounded by detailed buildings, completely obstructed from the previous vantage point. In short the game architecture looks great!

Criterion mentions they copied real buildings and facades from research trips around the world. One of the reference cities, Chicago, was clearly represented with the downtown river, bridges, and brick-and-iron designs. Anyway, you can feast on your eyes on the pics above and you'd also be well advised to check the game out yourselves for what is surely point-of-reference, absolute cutting-edge architectural real-time modelling in 2008!

VideoTrace: Rapid interactive scene modelling from video

VideoTrace is a system for interactively generating realistic 3D models of objects from video - models that might be inserted into a video game, a simulation environment, or another video sequence. The user interacts with VideoTrace by tracing the shape of the object to be modelled over one or more frames of the video. By interpreting the sketch drawn by the user in light of 3D information obtained from computer vision techniques, a small number of simple 2D interactions can be used to generate a realistic 3D model.

Each of the sketching operations in VideoTrace provides an intuitive and powerful means of modelling shape from video, and executes quickly enough to be used interactively. Immediate feedback allows the user to model rapidly those parts of the scene which are of interest and to the level of detail required. The combination of automated and manual reconstruction allows VideoTrace to model parts of the scene not visible, and to succeed in cases where purely automated approaches would fail.

Apart from the very cool vid above you can also check the following links, the first one the official project site and the other one a download of a last year's SIGGRAPH conference describing the work:

http://www.acvt.com.au/research/videotrace/

http://www.acvt.com.au/research/videotrace/Siggraph07-van_den_hengel.pdf

A new SIGGRAPH conference, SIGGRAPH Asia

Asia is rising. While Japan has been dominant economically for decades, China and India are growing at a phenomenal rate, and the four Asian tigers, Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan are still strongly on the prowl. Asian governments are pumping billions of dollars into digital media technology research and development, and Asian contributions in this field have increased tremendously.

SIGGRAPH conference figures show that while the number of papers from Asia has more than doubled in the new millennium, Asian attendance at the conference has fallen by about a third, due partly to cost and visa problems. These form the background to a meeting between Scott Owen and Alyn Rockwood, the President and Vice President of ACM SIGGRAPH, and a group of Asian delegates during SIGGRAPH 2006 in Boston. The meeting explored the possibility of having some form of the SIGGRAPH conference in Asia, which would also include Australia and New Zealand which lead to the first ACM SIGGRAPH Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in Asia opens in Singapore on 10th December 2008.

My opinion on all this? It is a great idea to extend what is the best computer graphics conference to a new research and industrial market as long as the quality remains intact. Now how about remembering Europe and perhaps setting up something similar over here as well (although I am sure this argument has already been discussed many many times before!)?

http://www.siggraph.org/asia2008/

Prototype, capturing a 1:1 New York 3D model for gaming purposes

A very much anticipated new game title which has focused a lot of its publicity on the urban modelling work conducted for it is Prototype by Radical Entertainment. The creators of the title have attempted an 1:1 recreation of New York City with developers taking 22,000 photos to get it right, capturing the city exactly as it was in 2007.

Of course capturing a city requires a photographic survey of an enormous scale, but once the 22,000 photos are in place it can create a unique archive of the city at the point of creation. If this is combined with open game play (which to me personally looks very Assassin Creed-like, only in a modern era!), we end up with a potentially extremely impressive digital version of New York.

The game is scheduled for release on PC, PS3 and XBox 360 in 2008 with the date yet to be confirmed (latter part of the year most likely). Check the link below for movie trailer of the game including an interview detailing some of the processes involved with its creation.

http://www.g4tv.com/pile_player.aspx?video_key=19858

Article accepted for publication at X Symposium For Virtual And Augmented Reality

I've just received confirmation that a full paper I authored has been accepted for publication at the 10th SVR (Symposium on Virtual and Augmented Reality) conference, a major conference in VR and AR sponsored by SBC (The Brazilian Computing Society). The conference takes place at Joao Pessoa, Brazil between May the 13th and May the 16th.

The title of the publication I am presenting is "Developing a Framework for the Automatic Generation and Visualisation Of 3D Urban Areas on Mobile Devices". For more information check the link below, I will of course post a full report on the workshop when I return from it, so check this space for an upcoming post on this!

For more information about the conference check http://www.di.ufpb.br/svr2008

Electronic Arts mobile gaming titles with improved 3D graphics

Electronic Arts' mobile games will soon offer a 3D performance equivalent to traditional portable gaming consoles. Broadcom and Electronic Arts recently signed an agreement to enable popular EA Mobile game titles on mobile phones powered by Broadcom solutions. These game titles will be optimized for the latest generation VideoCore III mobile multimedia processor from Broadcom, which supports HD content and graphics performance equivalent to today's dedicated handheld game consoles.

"Low power 3D hardware graphics acceleration will allow developers to create games for convergent mobile devices that can compete with or surpass games for dedicated handheld gaming devices. True high-resolution 3D graphics will entice consumers to download and play more mobile games," says gaming analyst Billy Pidgeon at IDC.

Broadcom's VideoCore III solution features 2D and 3D graphics accelerators and improved audio technology. The low-power graphics pipeline is optimized for hardware acceleration of the OpenGL ES 2.0 3D graphics standard and supports graphics-rich 3D games with rendering performance up to 32 million triangles per second.

Broadcom promises over 6 hours of gaming from a standard cell phone battery, and multimedia users will find over fifty supported standards, formats, codecs and resolutions. Mobile games can also be played on televisions up to HD resolution via an included HDMI output, which should provide a more versatile gaming experience than a tiny screen can provide.

So, when can we get our hands on all these goodies? The first mobile phones powered by the VideoCore III solution will likely appear sometime around 2009 and while there's plenty of time till then this all sounds very promising for mobile gaming and mobile graphics in general...

3D World Magazine March issue: architectural tutorials

I've featured this magazine in this blog before but this month's issue of UK 3D World mag (March 2008) really is a must purchase for all interested in urban modelling since (as you can tell from the cover!) it is chock full of architectural 3D tutorials. This most notably includes one on inserting 3D models into a video clip using Boujou Bullet and also techniques for mastering compositing in a New York street scene.

More information on the magazine at http://www.3dworldmag.com/.

Qualcomm's prototype reference mobile devices

From the world of high-powered mobile devices/UMPCs two prototypes from Qualcomm that look particularly appetizing. The company is showing off a pair of reference designs showcasing its new Snapdragon chipset, a heap of silicon said to offer one of the best power to performance ratios in the mobile world. First up, the Fairbanks, Qualcomm's idea of what a next-gen dedicated GPS unit might look like, equipped with a 3 megapixel still / video camera, TV tuner, and microSD expansion on some sort of custom Windows CE base.

Next up, the Anchorage (pictured above) does the typical slide-out QWERTY smartphone concept in pure style with one critical difference - this one is humming along at a staggering 1GHz. It's got pretty much every kind of radio one could want or need and apparently has enough horsepower to hoist a full operating system. While these two will not see the retail market for some time, they do showcase in the best way where next-gen smartphones or even UMPCs are heading in the next year/year and a half...

Making of: The Old Fox

Another very interesting urban modelling making of, this time however of an individual building, can be found at the excellent 3D Total website, by Sandro Ghezzani. According to Sandro his influences on this particular piece of work was American, English and Norwegian architecture revivals: neo-gothic and neo-classic.

Being impressed by these styles, he began to do some research using the Internet as well as using some reference pictures from books. After that he came up with some sketches which would be the starting ground for the modelling. So the Old Fox cottage was born...

What is particularly interesting with this is that this tutorial/making of focuses on a single-building project thus highlighting a lot of the smaller, finer details sometimes lost in similar project overviews that cover whole scenes... Well worth a look if you decide to model a building of any era or style in a manual way!

The tutorial can be found at:

http://www.3dtotal.com/team/Tutorials_2/makingof_theoldfox/oldfox_01.asp.

Wii remote coupled with Virtual Earth?

As of September 2007, Nintendo has sold over 13 million Wii game consoles. This significantly exceeds the number of Tablet PCs in use today according to even the most generous estimates of Tablet PC sales making the Wii remote one of the most common computer input devices in the world. It also happens to be one of the most sophisticated containing a 1024x768 infrared camera with built-in hardware blob tracking of up to 4 points at 100Hz. This significantly outperforms any PC webcam available today. It also contains a +/-3g 8-bit 3-axis accelerometer also operating at 100Hz and an expandsion port for even more capability.

Bearing all this mind, it is of no surprise that the Wii remote is an area ripe for research other than gaming. One of the most interesting mini projects I've seen so far is the following which couples the innovative device with Virtual Earth.

Virtual Earth is the 3D interface to Microsoft's Live Maps service. Normally this control is loaded via the web browser and allows interaction with a keyboard, mouse, and Xbox 360 controller. In the video above, the Virtual Earth control is taken out of the web browser, used in a WinForms application and controlled with a Nintendo Wii Remote (Wiimote). The results are in my opinion fascinating.

For a technical breakdown of the project check the following link http://blogs.msdn.com/coding4fun/archive/2007/10/18/5506286.aspx.

High quality 3D foliage libraries available

Graphics studio and publisher Marlin Studios has released two new libraries of low polygon photorealistic tree models: TreeFarm Deciduous Trees on DVD and TreeFarm Palm Trees on CD-Rom. Available in max, obj and lwo formats, the textured models can be used in most any 3D software application. The tree models are particularly useful to animators involved in visualisation, game development, virtual reality, film and video, and any mainstream animation project.

The roots, trunk and limbs of each tree have been meticulously modeled and textured with multiple maps. The twigs and leaves are planar objects mapped with alpha textures and bump maps, with additional maps for diffusion, specularity and sub-surface scattering (translucency). The result is up to nine texture maps per tree. The multiple mapping results in photorealistic effects previously only available in high polygon count trees that are 30 times the size and 10 times the price per tree. Plenty of landscaping and full, natural trees are available.

“Since 3D trees were first created, there has always been a tradeoff between high and low poly trees,“ said company president and art director Tom Marlin. “You either got low quality with a high quantity of trees, or high quality only with a just a few trees. Now the paradigm shifts with TreeFarm models, offering photorealism with low poly trees”. TreeFarm Deciduous Trees offers 1450 pretextured tree models, consisting of 58 tree objects, with five distinct leaf types and five colors per leaf. With seven optional bark textures and a bonus leaf texture, the total number of combinations could exceed 10,000 different looking trees. A comprehensive browser-based index, including animations and thumbnails, is available with each library.

TreeFarm Palm Trees offers 90 pretextured tree models, consisting of 18 different palm tree objects and five colors per palm frond. The average palm tree model contains 1600 polygons and palm frond maps are also 1024×1024 pixels. Mixing and matching palm fronds and barks result in hundreds of different looks for the palm trees. TreeFarm Deciduous Trees sells for a special introductory price of $299 USD plus s/h, while TreeFarm Palm Trees sells at the introductory price of $239.

http://www.marlinstudios.com/products/treefarm/treefarm.html

Papervision, the new VRML?

Being fed up with the limitations Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML), an essential part of my current research work, is posing, especially when it comes to delivering quality real-time graphics, it is interesting to see where 3D web plug-ins can go in the future. While VRML to this day seems to be the main proposition (and has been for a number of years now), the new kid on the block, offering a lot more potential than its older counterpart, is Papervision.

The engine entered public beta in July 2007 with a number of tutorials and demos emerging online at an ever increasing pace with the key to Papervision according to many being its open source nature and its integration with Flash, a plugin that to be honest is no longer a plugin but an essential component of many websites. What I personally find even more interesting in Papervision is the added graphical features it has compared to the aged VRML, the support of bump mapping being one prime example.

While it is anyone's guess whether Papervision will replace VRML as the standard 3D web plug-in of choice, it remains a very exciting proposition indeed. For more information check the official site here.

Making Of: Dead City

It is sometimes very easy to forget how effective manual urban modelling can be, especially when championing/researching (delete the appropriate one!) automated or semi-automated methods. However, mini-projects like the one described in this post serve as a great reminder as to how precise manual modelling can be, especially when tackling smaller urban areas.

In form of an excellent, making-of-structured, tutorial, Andrej Majewski takes us through the development of an urban scene titled Dead City, an area resembling a ghost town, taken entirely from photographic material and then translated in 3D using Photoshop, Softimage XSI and the VRay renderer.

Andrej covers all the important aspects of the workflow followed including texturing, lighting, modelling and creating assorted details such as vegetation and street structures. It should be noted here that the attention to detail throughout is impeccable, something that can be easily seen in the results, which brings me to the question whether an automated urban modelling system could ever be developed that can replicate a process like this (including the dedication shown to it) fully...

In any case, the tutorial can be found here and is well worth checking out, especially if you've ever attempted to model a real-world urban area in a photorealistic counterpart.

Article in IEEE Virtual Reality 2008 Workshop on Virtual Cityscapes

I've just received confirmation that I will be presenting a position statement paper I authored at the IEEE Virtual Reality 2008 Workshop on Virtual Cityscapes, a workshop taking place during the very prestigious annual IEEE Virtual Reality conference. This will be taking place on March the 8th and 9th at the Silver Legacy Resort Casino at Reno Nevada, USA.

The title of the publication I am presenting is "Towards Rapid Generation And Visualisation Of Large 3D Urban Landscapes for Mobile Device Navigation" and is quite fitting with the overall theme of the workshop which focuses mostly on key research issues in modeling large-scale immersive urban environments. For more information check the link below, I will of course post a full report on the workshop when I return from it, so check this space for an upcoming post on this!

http://gamma.cs.unc.edu/VR08_Cityscapes/

Computer graphics & Virtual Reality related journals

Picking up from the previous posts on conferences that focus on the computer graphics and virtual reality field, here's a list of scientific journals that address the same area. While the list is by no means comprehensive, (and any suggestions for additions are more than welcome!) it is a collection of a number of publications that will interest people, like myself, intending to submit their research results to something other than conferences...

IEEE Computer Graphics And Applications (Publisher: IEEE)

IEEE Transactions On Visualization And Computer Graphics (Publisher: IEEE)

ACM Transactions On Graphics (Publisher: ACM)

The Visual Computer journal (Publisher: Springer)

Virtual Reality journal (Publisher: Springer)

Computing And Visualization In Science journal (Publisher: Springer)

Computer Graphics Forum journal (Publisher: Blackwell Publishing)

Journal Of Virtual Reality And Broadcasting (Publisher: Digital Peer Publishing)

Computer Animation And Virtual Worlds journal (Publisher: Wiley)

The International Journal Of Virtual Reality (Publisher: IPI Press)

Graphical Models journal (Publisher: Elsevier)

Computers And Graphics (Publisher: Elsevier)

Sony's Home: the answer to Second Life?

An interesting piece of news and a long-awaited product launch on this is expected from Sony, who hoping to replicate the success of social networks and Second Life in particular is working on a PS3 feature called Home. Playstation 3 gamers will be able to meet, chat and share content with friends inside a 3D universe. "It's about community, collaboration and customisation," said Sony's Phil Harrison at the recent Game Developers Conference, in San Francisco. Gamers can buy furniture and clothes, while publishers and retailers are also expected to offer 3D spaces. A teaser clip can be seen below.

Mr Harrison also debuted titles for PlayStation 3 at the San Francisco conference that would leverage the success of social networks such as MySpace and FaceBook. For example, an online version of karaoke title Singstar will let gamers share video clips of their vocal efforts and leave comments for other players. "The industry is on the threshold of a new era of creativity, collaboration, communication and commerce embedded into an experience to empower games," Mr Harrison said.

My personal opinion on this is that apart from the obvious benefits of having another virtual reality world portal out there, Sony is also trying to push the graphics capabilities of such an excursion to its very limits (unlike Second Life that seemed dated in that area almost from the day it was launched!), witness features such as real-time shadows etc. as shown on the YouTube link above...

Upcoming computer graphics-related conferences in 2008 Part 2

Following from November's post here's another few links of some interesting computer graphics conferences taking place in the first half of the next year. Note that most of them have their upcoming deadlines in the next few weeks/months!

SBIM 2008
Fifth Eurographics Workshop on Sketch-Based Interfaces and Modeling (Annecy, France)

EGITA

6th Eurographics Italian Conference (Salerno, Italy)

CAE 2008

International Symposium on Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization, and Imaging (Lisbon, Portugal)

EGSR

19th Eurographics Symposium On Rendering (Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina)

CONVR 2008

8th International Conference on Construction Application of Virtual Reality (Kuala Lampur, Malaysia)

SCCG 2008

24th Spring Conference on Computer Graphics (Bratislava, Slovakia)

GraphiCon 2008

18th International Conference on Computer Graphics, Computer Vision, Image and Video processing (Moscow, Russia)

EGUK 2008

26th Eurographics UK chapter conference (Manchester, UK)

EGVE 2008

14th Eurographics Symposium On Virtual Environments (Eindhoven, Netherlands)

3DTV 2008

International Conference On The True Vision, Capture, Transmission And Display Of 3D Video (Istanbul, Turkey)

Virtual Manchester

I have tried to feature other UK virtual city models in the past, here's another attempt, this time at rainy Manchester...

The model is created by ARUP, a global firm of designers, engineers, planners and business consultants providing a diverse range of professional services to clients around the world. They have a long reputation in city modelling through their in-house research teams and the Manchester model is testament to this.

While I would like to gripe a bit about the lack of textured meshes, there are several things great about the work shown in the movie above, most notably the transport planning section shown half way through the movie. The model covers 4562 buildings and 15 spatial zones so understandably on a large scale such as this one roof structures and textured facades are somewhat lacking. Even so this remains a fine effort on modelling a major UK city in 3D and well worth checking out.

How to build a 3D virtual city in 5 minutes tutorial

For what is the first post of 2008 (happy new year everyone by the way!) something I spotted on the excellent Digital Urban blog a few days ago. Have you ever wondered on how you could create a detailed, textured 3D virtual city model for an impressive demo visualisation in under 5 minutes? Well courtesy of YouTube and FreeTutorials, you can now have a go at that!

While the modelling package used in the video above is Bryce (which personally I have little experience of), I found it easy enough to adapt the technique to something like Discreet's 3D Studio Max. Indeed I would imagine the technique of using simple height maps to generate the basic mesh could be adapted to just about any other package.