NVISION 2008: The EndUser Recap

NVISION 08, Nvidia's first "great big visual computing show" incorporated their massive GeForceLAN, PartnerForce conference, and a show floor packed full of exhibits in one event. This caffeine-fueled, 3-D accelerated, and even star studded 3 day event took place in San Jose, California early last week.

The show officially started with the opening keynote by NVIDIA's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. Those expecting recaps to the company's economic performance, and new product launches were met with well, a different format. This wasn't a Steve Jobs Apple keynote. Nvidia's CEO spent the majority of the time talking about the way the GPU's parallel process is beginning to change the way we tackle problems in science, industry, and of course gaming technology. Various guests joined Mr. Huang on stage, including Taehoon Kim, developer of the game "Nurien," Jeff Han from Perspective Pixel, and Tricia Helfer from "Battlestar Galactica"/"Burn Notice."

Arguably, one of the most impressive demos during the keynote was Jeff Han's demonstration of Perspective Pixel's intuitive interface-free multi-touch display. The huge multi-touch display relied on gestures to call up command menus and other common to advanced tasks. The demo included a photo viewer/editor, where he moved photos by touch around the workspace as if they were physical photos on a desktop. With a flick of a finger they would move around the virtual desk and zooming in and out of each photo was accomplished by the now familiar gesture of pinching two fingers together. There was also a Google Earth-like map that he tilted and flew over with similar gestures. Han was named one of "Time Magazine's 2008 100 Most Influential People in The World," no small feat as his innovation was in part what makes the iPhone so intuitive.

Tricia Helfer then joined Huang on stage to discuss how visual computing has impacted working as an actress in Hollywood today, and her hit series, Battlestar Galactica. They showed a few clips of the show where she had to interact with computer generated characters. She elaborated on the challenges of working with actors that weren't physically there. Another example she gave was the complex procedure of acting in scenes with "multiples" of herself, where visualizing events in one's mind, and hitting precise cues were key. She definitely lent a more lighthearted and entertaining feel to the keynote, yet provided a very intelligent look into the process of acting with visual computing technologies. She did mention some upcoming projects and hinted at the possibility of a BSG movie.

The rest of NVISION closely echoed the ideas mapped out in the keynote. The graphics industry has been about "faster" and "prettier" for far too long. NVIDIA seems confident in how they are tackling increases in graphics rendering speed and new API features in each generation of their GPUs. With CUDA (NVIDIA's C programming language), they see the GPU becoming more than what we traditionally think of it as. NVIDIA is also tackling the issues of power consumption, and heat in their GPUs. The general idea they are pursuing is to vastly improve "hybrid" technology. To be able to make a GPU consume incredibly low amounts of power when it is engaged in less demanding tasks or when it is idle. Though beyond that, NVIDIA's strategy for power and heat reduction in their GPUs is still unclear, however it is definitely on their radar of issues to solve.

Some cool new programs that were shown at the show were "Badaboom," a CUDA enabled media converter. While early previews have been lukewarm, at the moment it is being tweaked and re-tooled for even more performance and quality. Even with the beta though, evidence of dramatically faster media conversion is apparent with GPU parallel processing. Converting a video for your PC to a device like the iPhone takes a fraction of the time a traditional CPU would need. An impressive portion of this demo was that you could toggle GPU utilization on and off on the fly and see the performance benefit right before your eyes. The difference in transcoding speed was night and day. It definitely makes transferring videos to your iPod a much quicker task. While the program was available to many sites for preview purposes, it is not available to the public yet. The speed is there, but they are working on making the video quality surpass expectations for the public release version.

CoolIris (formerly PicLens) was another program that was on display. The program makes browsing images on the web a richer and more robust experience when using a site like Google image search. With it's tight integration with Firefox, CoolIris is a fun program that all GeForce owners can enjoy now for free. It utilizes GPU acceleration to render images quicker, smooth browsing, and zooming in and out. The program promises to offer more than just a visually stunning browsing experience for images, it intends to extend itself to videos, media sharing, and shopping (on Amazon no less!).

Microsoft's Live Labs also showed off their new "Photosynth" web application. It has been making rounds around the blogosphere in the recent weeks and people have already been trying it out. With this tool you can re create a 3-D space from a series of photos taken in a common space. It identifies key pixels in each photo and creates a 3-D cloud map. Then aligning the photos according to the map, you are able to navigate your photos as a 3-D environment. The demo was very impressive and again it is something you can try for yourself right now. However at the moment, it requires you to take a set of photos from scratch, you can't yet create a "synth" from an existing set of photos you may have taken say, last year. Some may say that a lot of the programs on display at NVISION were not new, but honestly, these programs are still very fresh. The fact that you can try them now yourself and utilize your GPU's performance with them is something NVIDIA wanted to really get across to everyone. The install base for NVIDIA PhysX, 3-D Stereoscopic technology, and CUDA accelerated programs is huge considering how many of us are already using GeForce 8 series or higher video cards.

Oh and of course the closing keynote featured Adam Savage & Jamie Hyneman, the Mythbusters, explaining the difference between CPU computing and GPU computing in a way only the Mysthbusters can:

--Ken H.