Cutting Edge Software

[brisray]

If anyone wants to see what software is on the cutting edge then check out the Microsoft and Google sites at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/ and https://research.google/. I'm sure there are others but these companies are developing stuff that may become common in a few years.

The Microsoft site was where I found ICE (Image Composite Editor) that at the time was years ahead of anything Photoshop or GIMP could do. 

[Melooon]

A fun one I recommend looking into (If you have an NVIDIA GPU) is their 3d point cloud rendering software! It lets you take a sequence of random overlapping images of an object and will create a 3D scene from the images - its shockingly affective and shockingly fast - On my mid-range 3060 GPU it renders in about 40 seconds. Apparently just 2 years that same process would take over an hour for any computer - its been advancing leaps and bounds!

In the next few years it will be very possible to just take a few pictures of an object and drop it right into a game engine - we will be able to make entire 3D games set in our houses in an afternoon! (if a person wanted to do such a thing...)

I made a thread about here here: https://forum.melonland.net/index.php?topic=646.0

You might already know it - but 2-Minute Papers is a great youtube channel that summarises the latest academic papers (mostly related to graphics and processing) in a very quick casual style - https://www.youtube.com/@TwoMinutePapers

[brisray]

There really are some very clever people around. I'm in awe of what some can do, and not just with computers.

There's some sites I've been following for years. Boston Dynamics and their robots are just amazing, their responses are getting better than human almost monthly. As for the Voyager spacecraft. I've got watches with more computing power than those things. It will be a sad day when the hydrazine generators that power them finally run down.

One piece of software I'd like to see perfected is the one you mentioned, 3D image rendering. I've got loads of photos, most not very good, of HMS Gambia. On day the software will be good enough for me to enter all the photos I have and get a good 3D rendering of the ship.

Over 40 years ago, in 1981, I managed to save the money to get to BAHX-VDNKh in Moscow - https://brisray.com/holidays/russia1981/russia3.htm. 32 years after that, in 2013, Jens Mondry found the photos because the exhibition had been neglected and was falling apart and they were going to reproduce it digitally and wanted them. I don't think they got as far along with the project as they wanted - http://lostexhibitions.net/vdnkh.shtml - but the rendering software would have been so much help to them.