Visualization

Crystal Space is a free (LGPL) and portable 3D Game Development Kit written in C++. It supports: true six degrees of freedom, colored lighting, lightmapped and stencil based lighting, shader support, mipmapping, portals, mirrors, alpha transparency, reflective surfaces, 3D sprites (frame based or with skeletal animation, also using cal3d animation library), procedural textures, particle systems, halos, volumetric fog, scripting (using Python, Perl, Java, or potentially other languages), 16-bit and 32-bit display support, OpenGL, and software renderer, font support, hierarchical transformations, physics plugin based on ODE, ... See the extensive list of features for more details.

Researchers from UB's Virtual Reality Lab have developed a new tool for transmitting physical touch to the virtual world.

Their virtual clay sculpting system enables users to replicate in real time on a personal computer the physical act of sculpting a block of clay or other malleable material. The resulting 3-D electronic shape shown on the computer screen then can be fine-tuned for product design using standard computer-aided design/modeling software.

"This technology will give product designers, or even artists, a tool that will allow them to touch, shape and manipulate virtual objects just as they would with actual clay models or sculptures," says Thenkurussi Kesavadas, director of the Virtual Reality Lab and associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

In January 2001, CBS spiced up its coverage of the Super Bowl with a special effect that allowed the broadcaster to freeze a replay, arbitrarily change the viewpoint and continue the replay. Researchers around the world are looking to take this technology further by enabling viewpoint changes as the action, including live-action, unfolds, and by letting viewers controlled viewpoint.

The formidable technical challenge in presenting real-time, free-viewpoint three-dimensional video is the enormous amount of information contained in the stream of video information.

Researchers from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich have devised a way to process three-dimensional video in real-time that reduces the amount of data to the manageable level of 3 megabits per second.

(DANNY HILLIS:) I have always envied Alexander the Great, because he had Aristotle as a personal tutor. In those days, Aristotle knew pretty much everything there was to know. Even better, Aristotle understood the mind of Alexander. He understood which topics interested Alexander, what Alexander knew and did not know, and what kinds of explanations Alexander preferred. Aristotle had been a student of Plato, and he was himself a great teacher. We know from his writings that he was full of examples, explanations, arguments, and stories. Through Aristotle, Alexander had the knowledge of the world at his command.

Of course no one today knows all that is known, in the sense that Aristotle did. Now there is far too much knowledge for that to be possible. The scientific revolution, and the technological revolution that followed it, led to a self-reinforcing explosion of knowledge. The explosion continues. Today not even the most highly trained scientist, the most scholarly historian, or the most competent engineer can hope to have more than a general overview of what is known. Only specialists understand most of the new discoveries in science, and even the specialists have trouble keeping up.

This problem isn't new. In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote an essay for Atlantic Monthly about out the problem of too much knowledge. He wrote,

An interface for creating both directed and non directed graphs from Python. Currently all attributes implemented in the Dot language are supported (up to Graphviz 1.10). Output can be inlined in Postscript into interactive scientific environments like TeXmacs, or ouput in any of the format's supported by the Graphvix tools dot, neato, twopi.

Pydot home page

Shaping the Next One Hundred Years: New Methods for Quantitative, Long-Term Policy Analysis
By Robert J. Lempert, Steven W. Popper, Steven C. Bankes
Copyright 2003