OpenKODE: DirectX for mobile phones!

OpenKODE is like DirectX™ for mobile phones!
Except its an open standard, cross-platform, royalty-free and streamlined for handheld devices
OpenKODE is a set of C-native API's for handheld games and media applications. 2D, 3D, Video and audio media types are all seamlessly accelerated by OpenKODE. OpenKODE minimizes source changes when porting games and applications from phone to phone.
OpenKODE® is a royalty-free, cross-platform standard that combines a set of native APIs into a comprehensive media stack specification for accelerating rich media and graphics applications. OpenKODE aims to make advanced media capabilities consistently available across multiple devices for increased native source portability and reduced mobile platform fragmentation. OpenKODE 1.0 brings together the OpenGL ES and OpenVG Khronos media APIs to provide state-of-the-art acceleration for vector 2D and 3D graphics and provides the new OpenKODE Core API that abstracts operating system resources to minimize source changes when porting games and applications between Linux, Brew, Symbian, Windows Mobile, WIPI and RTOS-based platforms. Subsequent versions of OpenKODE will add the OpenSL ES and OpenMAX media APIs to provide accelerated video and audio that is fully integrated with graphics processing.
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Virtual reality and 3D Programming...

Imagine having a discussion with Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein on the nature of the universe, where their 3-D, life-sized representations looked you in the eye, examined your body language, considered voice nuances and phraseology of your questions, then answered you in a way that is so real you would swear the images were alive.
Technology from computer games, animation and artificial intelligence provide the elements to make this happen. The National Science Foundation has awarded a half-million dollar, three-year grant to UIC(University of Illinois at Chicago ) and UCF(University of Central Florida) researchers to bring those elements together and create the methodology for making such virtual figures commonplace.
EVL(Electronic Visualization Laboratory ) will build a state-of-the-art motion-capture studio to digitalize the image and movement of real people who will go on to live a virtual eternity in virtual reality. Knowledge will be archived into databases. Voices will be analyzed to create synthesized but natural-sounding "virtual" voices. Mannerisms will be studied and used in creating the 3-D virtual forms, known technically as avatars. These "Avatars" would respond to human conversations through actions and voice. A true implementation of 3D techniques.. Isn't it?
More information refer Article in Science Daily

OpenGL ES Full specification...

OpenGL ES working group announced the release of the OpenGL ES 1.1 full specification. This does not cross reference any specifications that of desktop OpenGL 1.5. But, the API itself is not changed and the working group would continue to maintain and publish the older "Difference specification", which was an annotated list of differences between it and desktop OpenGL 1.5. To understand the API, programmers new to OpenGL had to read the 300+ page OpenGL 1.5 specification, cross-referencing against the difference specification to see which features were supported. The new document is entirely self-contained and as it is only about half as long as the desktop specification, it is much easier for OpenGL beginners to read.
Both versions of the specification are available at the Khronos OpenGL ES Spec page

Windows-Mac porting made easy...

There’s no denying that most games are available for Windows PCs long before they come to the Mac platform, though a recent initiative could change this. TransGaming, a developer of software portability products for the electronic entertainment industry, has announced a collaboration with Nvidia, which makes graphics processor technologies, to bring “top tier video games” to Mactels using TransGaming’s Cider portability engine in conjunction with Nvidia’s CgFX graphics system. Cider is a portability engine allowing Windows games to run on Intel-based Macs without any modifications to the original source code. The software works by directly loading a Windows program into memory on an Intel-based Mac and linking it to an optimized version of the Win32 APIs. Games are wrapped up in the Cider engine to work on the Mac, using the OpenGL API to map Windows Direct3D calls. With Cider, porting becomes a thing of the past since the technology allows a Windows game to run on an Intel Mac without any significant development effort. Cider loads the game directly into memory and executes the code which means it is running directly in Apple's Mac OS X. The game simply relies on Cider's implementation of the Win32 and DirectX APIs instead of those found in Windows. With most modern games using shaders extensively, Cider converts all the DirectX shaders used by the game into the equivalent OpenGL shaders, which in turn rely on the quality of Apple's OpenGL drivers for their performance. In the end, the game play experience is equivalent to the Windows version and, most importantly, the Mac user is given a "Mac experience" and doesn't need to worry about installing any separate technology or Windows.

NVIDIA DirectX 10 Contents...

NVIDIA has released the world's first interactive Microsoft DirectX 10 application, known as the NVIDIA Cascades demo. The Cascades demo allows consumers with NVIDIA GeForce 8-series graphics cards and Windows Vista to experience stunning Direct X 10 graphics features on their computers for the first time.

You can find the Cascades demo at:
http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_cascades_home.html

In addition, many of the most anticipated titles of 2007 will be DirectX 10, including Crysis, Hellgate: London, Age of Conan, and Unreal Tournament 2007.

Geometry Shaders

What are Geometry shaders?
A geometry shader can generate new primitives from existing primitives like pixels, lines and triangles.

Geometry shader is executed after Vertex shader and its input is the whole primitive or primitive with adjacency information. For example, when operating on triangles, three vertices are geometry shader's input. Geometry shader can then emit zero or more primives, which are rasterized and their fragments ultimately passed to Pixel shader.

Typical uses of a geometry shader include point sprite generation, geometry tessellation, shadow volume extrusion, single pass rendering to a cube map.




• Input
- Standard primitives- point, line, triangle...
- New primitive types include neighboring vertices
- Line with adjacencyPrimitive Assembly



- Triangle with adjacency





• Output
- Unique output type (independent from input type)- Points, line strips or triangle strips
- Can output zero or more primitives- Generated primitive stream is in the same order as inputted
6Clipping & Rasterization

Windows Vista Fully Supports OpenGL

Hardware-accelerated OpenGL is fully supported on Windows Vista with the Windows Aero compositing desktop user experience - just as with Direct3D.

OpenGL hardware acceleration is handled in exactly the same way in Windows XP and Windows Vista - through an Installable Client Driver (ICD) provided by graphics card manufacturers. Without an OpenGL ICD installed, Windows XP and Windows Vista both revert to rendering OpenGL in software on the CPU rather than using GPU acceleration.

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