Spotlight
Issue: Volume 41 Issue 2: (Edition 2 2018)

Spotlight

Ikinema Part of Nvidia Holodeck

Ikinema Part of Nvidia Holodeck

Ikinema's full-body solving technology is being used with Nvidia Holodeck, a photorealistic, collaborative virtual-reality environment that incorporates the feeling of real-world presence through sight, sound, and haptics.

Ikinema's VR technology delivers a heightened sense of realism and full immersion for participants inside the Holodeck environment and helps dissolve geographical limitations by allowing individuals to group together, interact, and converse with each other inside their chosen virtual environment. A person's 3D virtual persona can naturally and instinctively move in and around high-render, life-size objects. When used for product creation, the ability to make live prototype iterations and quick decision-making delivers an efficient production life cycle at design level, before items go to the manufacture stage.

RunTime lets studios procedurally animate characters of any shape or size during gameplay or from live-captured data, resulting in characters that respond to the game world around them with more lifelike and natural movements. Avatars respond with higher fidelity by use of inverse kinematics across the entire body, allowing humanoid and fantasy creatures to react intuitively and naturally when scaling obstacles and traversing dynamically evolving terrain.

Vicon Launches ShOgun 1.2

Vicon Launches ShOgun 1.2

Vicon has released Shōgun 1.2, the latest update to its motion--capture software, with 11 new features and improvements, including SDI video support, custom prop and skeleton solving, and an improved Shōgun Post workflow that will help users deliver a high level of skeletal data in hours.

With Shōgun 1.2, mocap teams can add and record up to two HD SDI video camera devices for easy overlays of 3D footage.

There are a number of other new features, including the ability to create custom skeletons from meshes within Shōgun Post. Newly created custom rigs, complete with mesh and textures, can be loaded into Shōgun Live and applied to the capture pipeline, allowing game and film rigs to be driven directly using Vicon's full-body solver. Shōgun Live now supports prop creation with mesh and gives users the ability to modify the position and orientation, which ensures that elements, like virtual cameras, line up exactly.

Nvidia Makes News Splash

Nvidia Makes News Splash

Nvidia recently unveiled a series of advances to boost performance on deep learning workloads by 10x compared with the generation introduced just six months ago. Advancements include a 2x memory boost to Nvidia Tesla V100 and a new GPU interconnect fabric called Nvidia NVSwitch, which enables up to 16 Tesla V100 GPUs to simultaneously communicate at a record speed of 2.TB/sec.

The company also launched Nvidia DGX-2, the first single server capable of delivering 2 petaflops of computational power. DGX-2 has the deep learning processing power of 300 servers occupying 15 racks of data center space, while being 60x smaller and 18x more power efficient.

The company also introduced a new version of its TensorRT inference optimizer, with support for new capabilities in data centers, automotive applications, and embedded devices.

Blackmagic Design RevealsDaVinci Resolve 15

Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve 15, a massive update that fully integrates visual effects and motion graphics, is touted as the first solution to combine professional off-line and online editing, color correction, audio postproduction, multi-user collaboration, and now visual effects together in one software tool.

DaVinci Resolve 15 adds an entirely new Fusion page with over 250 tools for compositing, paint, particles, animated titles, and more. In addition, it includes a major update to Fairlight audio, along with over 100 new features and improvements.

The free version of DaVinci Resolve 15 can be used for professional work. DaVinci Resolve 15 Studio, which adds multi-user collaboration, 3D, VR, dozens of additional filters and effects, unlimited network rendering, and other advanced features, is available for $299.

WorldViz Releases Vizible, Announces VizBox

WorldViz Releases Vizible, Announces VizBox

WorldViz's VR business collaboration solution, Vizible, which released to existing WorldViz customers in January 2018, is now available for all businesses to purchase. In addition, the company has announced VizBox, a portable, all-in-one VR solution businesses can use to join Vizible collaboration sessions.

VizBox, a patented, all-in-one boxed solution, is light enough to ship to offices that may not have VR headsets available. The units come with everything needed to connect to a Vizible VR session. No specialized training is required.

Vizible is available on a subscription basis as a cloud-based (SaaS) solution. The starting subscription price is $250 per user per month. VizBoxes are available for Vizible users for $7,900 or can be rented upon request.

E-on's Vue and PlantFactory in R5

E-on's Vue and PlantFactory in R5

E-on Software has rolled out Release 5 (R5) of its Vue and PlantFactory 2016 software as a free software update.

R5 of Vue includes export and interoperability improvements, LOD export for objects or group of objects, user-defined number of LODs to be exported, the ability to export only one texture per LOD, and the ability to export objects as billboards. The UI also features a redesign.

PlantFactory 2016 R5 also comes with a host of new features, including new creative tools, a fully-featured flower node together with an additional metanode companion collection, a user-defined twist parameter propagation between parent and child segments, improved displacement computation between trunk/branch transitions, export and interoperability improvements, and a redesigned and simplified UI for exporting.

OptiTrack Releases Prime Color Camera

OptiTrack Releases Prime Color Camera

OptiTrack has announced Prime Color, a high-speed, high-resolution video camera that delivers freeze-frame images for high-speed video analysis as well as reference video applications for traditional motion-capture systems. It also offers the ability to integrate full-color video across a number of applications.

The Prime Color operates at the following resolutions and frame rates: 1080p up to 250 fps, 720p up to 380 fps, and 960x540 up to 500 fps.

OptiTrack will also be releasing the Prime Color FS, which adds a software-operated mechanical filter switcher to enable calibration alongside other OptiTrack cameras.

The first Prime Color FS cameras are available now for $1,999. Prime Color also is now available starting at $1,499.

PNY Unleashes Powerful Graphics Solution

PNY Unleashes Powerful Graphics Solution

PNY Technologies has launched the Nvidia Quadro GV100. PNY's most powerful computing platform for HPC, AI, VR, and graphic workloads on professional desktops to date, the Nvidia Quadro GV100 helps corporate workstations make the most of the latest applications.

The Nvidia Quadro GV100 utilizes Nvidia's Volta GPU architecture, providing greatly increased memory capacity, scalability, and performance. Volta's 32GB HBM2 memory subsystem delivers super-fast graphics memory, two times greater memory capacity, and 20 percent more memory bandwidth compared to the previous generation.

PNY Unleashes Powerful Graphics Solution

Isaac SDK to Accelerate Autonomous Machines

Nvidia recently announced the expansion of its Isaac platform to build robotics applications. The Isaac software development kit is a collection of libraries, drivers, APIs, and other tools. The SDK will save manufacturers, researchers, start-ups, and developers hundreds of hours by making it easy to add AI into next-generation robots for perception, navigation, and manipulation. It also provides a framework to manage communications and transfer data, within the robot architecture. And it makes it easy to add sensors, manage sensor data, and control actuators in real time.

Nvidia Pumps Up the Power

Nvidia Pumps Up the Power

Nvidia revealed the Quadro GV100 GPU with RTX technology, delivering for the first time real-time ray tracing to millions of artists and designers.

Media and entertainment professionals can see and interact with their creations with correct light and shadows, and do complex renders up to 10x faster than with a CPU alone. Product designers and architects can create interactive, photoreal visualizations of massive 3D models - all in real time.

The Quadro GV100 GPU, with 32GB of memory, scalable to 64GB with multiple Quadro GPUs using Nvidia NVLink interconnect technology, is the highest-performance platform available for these applications. Based on Nvidia's Volta GPU architecture, the GV100 packs 7.4 Tflops of double-precision, 14.8 Tflops of single-precision, and 118.5 Tflops of deep learning performance. And the Nvidia OptiX AI-denoiser built into RTX delivers almost 100x the performance of CPUs for real-time, noise-free rendering.

The Quadro GV100 GPU is available now.