WorldCAD Access

CUDA Babysteps Into CAD

A new display driver from nVidia's Quadro graphics boards allows AutoCAD's hidden-line visual style to access the CUDA GPU, resulting in a 5x faster display. Conceptual and realistic visual styles are also said to be faster, but no numbers were given by the press release.

The company's cheapest Quadra board is just $99. The updated drivers are available free from the nVidia Web site.

Source.

In the months/years to come, I expect we can see more of AutoCAD's functions handled by the Quadro board and its CUDA processor.

New Oce Monochrome Printer Does Not Print in Green

Headline of press release received last week:

New Simple, Green, Durable Océ PlotWave 300 All-In-One System Saves Money and Space 

It's a monochrome printer that does not print with the green color, nor is the printer hardware painted green -- despite the wording of the headline. As I've said to my wife, it's a good thing our car is painted green, so we can tell people "We drive a green car."

No More 3D Display from Phillips

Phillips has shut down its division that had been producing 3D displays that required no glasses to view. Its sole 56" model didn't sell well "into the living room," though found some sales among businesses.

We still believe in 3D without glasses but the payback is too long.

Source.

3D CAD API for iPhones

ARS Technica is reporting on Apple's development of 2D and 3D graphics for the iPhone:

The WebKit team added CSS Transforms to nightly builds of WebKit back in October 2007, transforms that included scaling, rotation, skewing, and translation in 2D space. As the specification matured, 3D and animation capabilities were added. Eventually, the 3D transforms were broken out into a specification of their own. 

The hardware-accelerated CAD-friendly routines are enabled on the Mobile Safari Web browser running on the iPhone and iPod Touch only.

Details here.

4 Fingers Soon; 3D Touchscreens Later

Rumors are abounding of Apple introducing hardware/OS that'll sense the motions of up to four fingers on a single touchscreen. Four times the fingers, four times the finger grease.

In other technology news, Mitsubishi Electric is showing a prototype touchscreen that senses the distance to your finger -- effectively adding the z coordinate. 

By calculating the time variation of capacity in the z-axis direction, the acceleration of the finger approaching the panel can be detected.

Z detection is two-fold: speed and distance. The screen detects the speed of the finger's approach; distance is detected in 256-steps over a maximum distance of 20mm (just under one inch) -- about 325dpi.

Source.

Foam Table to Replace Glass

Multi-touch tables covered by glass are so last year. This year, it's foam covered tables. 

Impress shines a laser on a sheet of foam; the laser draws the images, while the foam allows 3D touching: x, y, and now depth. For example:

Draw a new object with different radius and pitch depending on the intensity of pressure.

Or...

Model a 3D object by lower or higher intensity of pressure at any desired position. 

You can see pictures and videos here.

New 3D Gestureized Display Tech

Fraunhofer Institute, the people who brought you MP3 files, plan to show off a gesture-activated 3D display next month.

No 3D glasses. No data gloves. Instead, a ceiling mounted-scanner uses two cameras to determine your hand movements. The usefulness?

In addition to its obvious appeal to video gamers, iPoint 3D can also be useful in a living room or office, or even in a hospital operating room, or as part of an interactive information system.

Heh. The image shows a 3D CAD drawing, which I think is a SolidWorks demo file.

Source.

Acad 2010 on Netbooks

I can now report that the version of AutoCAD I got running on my LG X110 netbook was a beta of AutoCAD 2010. With the Release Candidate now available, (RC = version being sent to the CD pressing companies for distribution to customers in late March), I uninstalled Beta 3 to put on the RC.

Of course, I ran into the same problem as before: the install/uninstall dialog boxes are too big for netbook screens, which are typically limited to a maximum vertical resolution of 600 lines. As you can see in the figure below, there is plenty of white space Autodesk can remove to make the Next button visible on the screen.

(Workaround is to attach an external monitor with a  higher resolution; even an aging 1024x768 one will do.)

Windows 2000

Does AutoCAD work with Windows 2000? No. I tried it, but the installer won't even run. So, it's just XP, Vista, and 7 now. 

Multi-touch Goes 3D

Immersion is showing a video of touching five sides of a cube controller to manipulate images in 3D. You can view videos of it in action on this Google-translated page.

Less is the New More

Brad Stone and Ashlee Vance of the New York Times report on the cost of technology plummeting in "$200 Laptops Break a Business Model." It reminded me of a cookbook the Mennonites put out 25 years ago, called "More-with-Less Cookbook."

I've noted before that technology is overblown; Office 2007 is unnecessary, except for Microsoft's revenues. Multi-core CPUs do nothing for Web browsing. Cell phones can't do anything more.

Now less-is-more is becoming mainstream in technology, as seen by the overwhelming popularity of netbooks. Less-is-more probably began with Google's spartan home page for its search engine, and then became common in other software, like SketchUp (bought by Google) and Picassa (bought by Google).

(Apple reversed the concept. "Less with more" is where you pay more to get less, such as the $150 difference between Apple's under-featured MP3 player and the over-featured one from SanDisk that my daughter bought.)

The idea of pay-less-for-less is frightening for technology executives, who are ingrained with "more = charge more." Hence irrational statements from executives at Sony, Apple, and Dell expressing doubts about netbooks, and then releasing products with fewer features and higher prices than those from the ASUS, Acer, and Wind.