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Viewing 3D stereo photos in an Oculus Rift
Just for fun I tried out viewing 3D photos in an Oculus Rift. For that I took some pictures with a DSLR and a Loreo 3D lens. The first problem here is that the Rift has a very wide field of view (which is great for virtual worlds and immersion) but the 3D lens has [...]
FPS vs msec/frame
When talking about the performance of graphics applications or algorithms you hear frames per second (FPS for short) as the unit of measurement. This however is wrong most of the time and here’s why: Why we use FPS There are two ways to measure how fast an application can render the virtual world: by giving [...]
Augmented Reality on a Segway
In september I was in San Francisco for a couple of days to attend the MobileHCI conference and the MobiVis workshop, but not just for fun and looking at cool new stuff, I also presented a work about mobile augmented reality. My colleagues Michael Königs, Prof. Dr. Leif Kobbelt and myself tried out if you [...]
Is the GPU of the 13″ Retina MacBook Pro too weak?
When Apple can first out with ‘retina’ (high resolution) displays for there Macs the big 15″ notebooks were upgraded first, not the smaller 11″ – 13″ ones. At first you wonder why, as it is probably simpler to build smaller displays with high dpi. But on second thought you realise, that you need a good [...]
Thoughts about the Field of View (on HMDs)
In most VR applications such as 3D games, the field of view (FoV) is done wrong. It isn’t easy to do it right when sitting in front of a PC monitor but it will get simpler when/if head mounted displays (HMDs) become common for gamers – but maybe, it’s not right to do it right… [...]
MacOS X OpenGL driver status
MacOS X 10.8 Mountain Lion was released earlier today and with it the hope for updated OpenGL. Currently the OpenGL Capability Table isn’t updated for 10.8 (or even 10.7.4) yet but there haven’t been much improvements anyway: Current OpenGL support is still 3.2. GL_ARB_instanced_arrays, GL_ARB_occlusion_query2 and GL_ARB_timer_query are still the only supported extensions from OpenGL [...]
Texture Compression
We all know image compression from common formats like JPEG or PNG. For rendering the textures can be compressed as well, but here different formats are used than the ones we are familiar with. The reason here is that there are special requirements when it comes to texture compression: Small texture size Fast decompression Fast [...]
Remote OpenGL
Sometimes you want to connect to a remote linux machine via ssh and use the remote GPU for OpenGL (rendering). Maybe because of automated testing of rendering in a windowless OpenGL application, maybe because you just want to query the OpenGL capabilities with glewinfo. This might not work as intended: It might not work at [...]
Inspecting the shaders of Rage
Rage, the game by ID Software and shooter legend John Carmack, is fun to play. But it’s even more fun to play around with it. I already presented ways to inspect the mechanics of ID Tech 5′s Virtual Textures, or MegaTextures as they are also called. However, if you are really curious about how that [...]
Megatextures in Rage
The shooter Rage by ID Software implements a technique known as Megatextures or Virtual Textures that basically mimics a MMU to handle textures larger than the graphics cards memory. The implementation scales from consoles to hi-end PCs and allows to use the same assets on all platforms – a huge plus for the artists. They [...]