A Technical Art Blog
I haven’t posted in a while, lots of changes going on, I left ILM after Avatar, and have moved back to Germany where my girlfriend is finishing medical school. I promise a good tech art post soon (my pick for tech art game of the year!) I look to be rejoining Crytek next year, working on Crysis 2.
FAIL.
Being digital artists, photo frames might look like attractive ways to showcase art and content, these devices are being pushed more and more. I got HPs ‘flagship’ model as a present, it retails for $300! I was so excited, but not for long. Unable to find any info online especially reviews, I thought I would post this here.
Lets first just get some things out of the way before I talk about the quality of what the device DOES do lets talk about what it does not, yet claims to do.
The following quotes are from the HP site itself:
The HP DreamScreen is a gateway to the Internet using your wireless network to access
weather info, Snapfish and your favorite web destinations.
This is just untrue. There is no integrated web browser. It has three web ‘apps’ on it: SnapFish, Pandora, Facebook. That’s it. It does not read RSS feeds, or do much of anything you probably want it to do, simple things like display news or recipes.
Stay current with social network sites like Facebook
‘Like’ facebook? There is only Facebook: nothing else.
Be organized with a built-in alarm clock & calendar.
This is laughable. Wondering how to sync the calendar with outlook or google or anything; maybe even just add appointments, I finally consulted their online documentation. Here, seriously, is the feature list for the calendar ‘app’:
View the current month, press right or left to view the next or previous month.
BWAH HA HA HA… *sigh*
Easy wireless access to your digital entertainment
It shows an icon for a video, but actually; it doesn’t stream video, it plays some videos, only at specific resolutions from specific codecs; off physical media.
Touch-enabled controls—Get fast, easy access to information and entertainment with simple touch controls embedded in the display
This is referring to some buttons around the bezel of the screen and is just so untrue they would have to change the marketing campaign in Europe or get sued. This does however remind me of the old In Living Color sketch where the handcapped superhero always says he is ‘not handicapped, but HANDY-CAPABLE!’.
Videos—Watch home movies and video clips in full screen – Its simple!
It’s as simple as taking your video, recompressing it to a supported video codec, resizing it to a specific resolution, and then physically transferring it ot the device –so simple grandma could do it! (with gordian knot, virtualdub, CCCP, and all those other video tools she has)
Resolution
The thing is a frickin’ 300 dollar photo frame, but it’s resolution is 800 x 480, this equates to 0.38 megapixels, at the time the frame came out, the average cheap point n shoot ranks 9 to 10 megapixels: this is well over twenty times the resolution of the screen!
Because of this, it can take 10 full seconds to load a photo and downsample it to 800 pixels from it’s original resolution. This makes browsing photos a pain, and loading photos from your camera cards nearly useless. Power users will use photoshop or xnView to batch all their content to 800 pixels.
There is aliasing galore, as 800 pixels is the resolution of many phones and handheld devices, not 13″ photo frames!
UPDATE: I have talked to HP and done some hunting, uncovering something that is just ridiculous: The DreamScreen 130 has a 1280×800 resolution. However, HPs software only works ar 800×480, the resolution of the cheapest screen, (the 100). To get around this, they upscale to 1280 pixels. This means they down sample your image to 800 pixels, then they upscale it with a software upscaler, so your pictures will ALWAYS LOOK LIKE JAGGY AND SOFT: NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO. This is a joke, HP should be ashamed of themselves.
Notice the terrible artifacts from the 1280 image, which was downscaled by the frame software, then upscaled to fit the panel.
Color Reproduction
It is a cheap TN panel, the gamma of your images widely fluctuates depending on the angle they are viewed. I would be ok if they had a low resolution but used a nice IPS, SIPS, or OLED panel, but this is just unremarkable. The black point is a dark shade of grey, in all seriousness, the panel quality seems on par with something like the panels they use in the dashboard of a Prius, or other industrial UI readouts.
Pretty terrible banding
Pretty bad black point
Pretty bad white point
Pretty mediocre contrast
Streaming / Network
Streaming requires lots of Microsoft Windows Media software and services running on a PC server in your house that is always on, they relied on this instead of doing the footwork themselves. If you were under the impression from their marketing that it could read files off samba shares or work with Macintosh, you would be wrong.
Software / User Interface
The software is pretty terrible. It is very clunky and unresponsive. Many times it does not recognize that physical media has been inserted and must be rebooted. The UI graphics themselves show terrible compression artifacts.
When you bring up the on screen keyboard to type in, say, the name of the device, it clearly shows buttons like [HTTP://], [www.], [.com], and others to make it easier to browse the web, however there is no web browser! There are other places in the print ads and UI itself that refer to features the device just does not have!
“Touch Screen”
The device claims to have a ‘touch sensitive screen’, and IT DOES! A small area around the bezel of the screen has botons that can be pressed/touched! This product is in NO WAY a touch screen device, and has no touch sensitivity, other than the buttons on the bezel, the marketing is a lie.
Open Source?
On the CD that ships with it, they have a ton of readme files showing they used a lot of GPL’d code, however the source installer did not work on my windows 7, x64.
Pros:
Cons:
It’s exciting that you can see some of our work already! Check out the teaser trailer, be sure to click [watch in high quality]
Really? Wow, I mean this isn’t as surprising as when they bought Alias 3 years ago (182 Million), but still. And 35 million? That’s the price of a single movie or three year videogame production these days. I thought the ‘desk bought Maya to kill it, but it’s still around… Wonder how long XSI will be around now.
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?id=12022457&siteID=123112
Maybe they will merge all three teams into one highly experienced, ‘all-star’ development team to make a new 3d app to end all 3d apps.
Aren’t there laws about these kinds of monopolies? Looks like the Lightwave and C43D guys are your only alternative..
One less booth at SIGGRAPH..
Thanks to my brother, Mike, for translating this from the original japanese [here]
When asked about which features of XSI helped the most on this project, Hideki Sasaki (Facial Animation Set Up Lead) came back with the rather surprising answer, “There were many but in regards to facial animation, cluster constraints really saved us.” In our facial rig setups, every point-cluster of your target shape is tied to bones using cluster constraints. Cluster constraints also were extremely useful in the following situations:
Since in MGS4 we were really trying to lighten the processing, on the PS3 we employed a method where tangent colors change only with the rotation of bones. In other words, if simply constrained to coordinates, in animation it will behave correctly, but the tangent color will not change. Basically, you run into a dilemma where shading goes from its default state to a one where it will no longer change. However, by using cluster constraints to constrain both normal and tangent lines the correct rotation values will be input, and that’s how we accomplished the shading.
(this sounds really interesting, i guess they are talking about smoothing angle tangents? In many engines like the CryEngine, the smoothing angle is based on the character’s default pose at export and never changes. This makes it sound like that exported cluster data to ‘drive’ the smoothing angle in realtime)
Furthermore, nearly all fluctuating objects attached to the character’s clothing, in cutscenes and gameplay, are done by the PS3’s simulation engine. That being said, there are some cases in cutscenes with intense action where it’s difficult to simulate. In those cases we use animation simulated in XSI’s Syflex. The basic workflow in those situations is as follows:
1. To express fluctuations in the clothing, make a simulation in Syflex
2. Convert the cached simulation results into shape targets
3. Constrain bones to the points on your shape controlled object with cluster constraints
4. Bone envelope the final model to be used on the PS3 (Basically the same idea as a facial rig)
(Baking arbitrary data to bones ftw!)
The advantage of using this type of control is, even if you temporarily get a little caving in or some kind of flaw in the simulation result, you are able to apply corrections with “Secondary Shape Mode” at stage 2 of the workflow.
It’s possible to edit the shape’s geometry using vertex shift; you can also use smooth and push to fix little imperfections if needed. It goes without saying that the results of these intuitive adjustments will be reflected in the envelope control’s PS3 data as well.
Sasaki explains, “You can set cluster constraints for all components, vertex, polygon and edge. I believe XSI is the only one that comes standard with support for constraining both normals and tangents. Without the help of these cluster constraint functions we could have never accomplished techniques like cross-simulation transfer to bones, or our ideas concerning facial rig set up.”
(they export/sync cluster rig element data to engine)
I saw this over at slashdot:
“The US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit has affirmed (PDF) a ruling that a plain, unadorned wireframe model of a Toyota vehicle is not a creative expression protected under copyright law. The court analogized the wire-frame models to photographs: the owner of an object does not have a copyright in all images of the object, but a photographer may have a limited copyright over a particular image based on artistic choices such as costumery, lighting, posing, etc. Thus, the modelers could only copyright any ‘incremental contribution’ they made to Toyota’s vehicles; in the case of plain models, there was nothing new to protect. This could be a two-edged sword — companies that produce goods may not be able to stop modelers from imaging those products, but modelers may not be able to prevent others from copying their work.”
This will have some interesting ramifications. And I don’t just mean for the Limbo of the Lost guys. (j/k)
One of my heroes passed away today. I never knew the guy but it made me very sad and hollow to hear he had passed. He was responsible for many of the creatures in films that made me eventually want to be a Technical Director.
I am carving out a little space for my thoughts and musings related to the field I am in. Nothing here will be related to the work I am doing at Crytek, so if you are here for industry secrets; you’ve come to the wrong place. I will however talk about industry trends, art, games, graphics, characters, rigging, sex, math, etc.
I work in an industry where everyone wants everything to look amazing, play amazing, sound amazing, etc… To be on the cutting edge in an industry like this, you are often breaking new ground, so in a way: ’stumbling toward awesomeness’.
Powered by WordPress