After Apple which bought 3.6% of Imagination Technologies few months ago, it is the turn of Intel to buy 16.02% of the company shares. As a direct reaction Apple increases they share holding to 9.5%.

Such buy could appear like a thread for the company and his client but it definitely make same to me considering the growing market of embedded devices.

nVidia raised it card with Tegra, a complete platform integrating and GeForce chipset and an ARM processor. On its side, Intel released ATOM, energy efficient CPU, which has an unexpected success market wise.

However, Intel hasn’t any descent graphics hardware or software but Imagination Technologies with its PowerVR SGX does.

The PowerVR SGX and previously the PowerVR MBX are integrated in a lot of small devices like phones en MIPS and I would not be surprised to see it reaching Netbook where the competition with the Tegra platform could be taught.

Imagination Technologies clearly leads the market but nVidia become a serious competitor.

During the Apple WorldWide Developers Conference (WWDC), the new iPhone 3GS have been announced.

From the user point of view, not much new. It is faster but the iPhone 3G seams quite fast to me.

From the programmer point of view, it's a big change! The PowerVR MBX have been replaced by the PowerVR SGX which implies the support of OpenGL ES 2.0 instead of OpenGL ES 1.1.

OpenGL ES 2.0 brings a fully programmable approach, a big step, and a lot more fun to program!

I'm currently having a lot of fun learning how to use 3DS max! This is my first interesting results in modeling.

The texturing needs to be really improved to make the mesh more real time 3D software complient but I still don't know how to do this. For the hair it's quite the same issue, I hope to find sonething nice foe the rendering. On the good side, I made great progress on the skeleton animation side! :)

This model will be perfect to feature the Küken engine!

Google and the London Saatchi Gallery organize a photography contest based on iGoogle themes. Each photographer need to submit 5 pictures that would be used to create iGoogle theme.

I submit my set of picture for with it my first photography contest. I created 5 pictures featuring my little Küken has main character display in a very positive wait, Küken presenting someking of world beauties with a tentative of added emotional values inspired by painter: Monet and Rothko.

I hope you like it that my experiment will be selected in the 26 best set shortlist. The five best set of pictures will be display at the Saatchi Gallery and the winning win £5000!

If I win, I'll buy a Canon 5D MKII! :D

GLM 0.8.3.0 have been released a week ago and provides the first GTC stable extensions.

However, GLM 0.8.4.0 development have been started for a while and should finally provides some SSE optimisations! It's been a while since I started to experiment with SSE first with intrinsics then with asm (so much fun!) and I finally came back to intrinsics when asm became deprecated by x86-64.

I have not idea the extra form the implementation is going to have, so far I have a vec4 and mat4 types and a lot of functions which extend intrinsic functions. I think, the first release while be limited to SSE (and SEE2?) but I expect to take advantage of SSE3 and upper versions thought VC9 intrinsics in the future.

When it's going to be released? I'm sure plenty of GLM 0.8.3 patch versions would be released before it happens.

Any idea on this topic? Thanks for sharing!

Boost 1.39.0 gets released and provides an amazing new library: Signals 2. It is basically a thread safe version of Signals library.

My heart stops a second ... o you actually realise the potential for a multithreaded 3D software? There are lot of chances that this is not going be efficient but for some cases it could be just the right solution.

For example, what's about a user interface of a 3D software that would run an independent thread for the UI and send messages about where an object is created, moved, edit, etc. to a main thread. Sound definetely good to me!

Gerhard Richter is German painter born in Dresden in 1932. His perception of portrait was very unconventional. "I don't think the painter need either see or know the sitter. A portrait must not express anything of the sitter's 'soul', essence or character". This is so far from the practice of photographer usually use posing, dressing, environment, etc. to reflect something depth or more personal from the sitter, Richter was resisting interpretation: "You realise that you can't represent reality at all - that what you make represents nothing but itself, and therefore is itself reality". He explored techniques to stop tentative of any perception.

The National Portrait Gallery in London display an exhibition of 48 Gerhard Richter portraits until May 31th 2009.

Inspired by Gerhard Richter ideas, I didn't some experiments based on casual situation, casual pictures.

IAMX is the project of Chris Corner also member of the band Sneaker Pimps, a british trip-hop band.

With IAMX, Chris Corner explores an energetic electronic based music to deal with darkness, eroticism and decadence.

The first album 'Kiss + Swallow (2004)' sound like free electro with a Chris Corner voice display on front which gives a Pop side to this album. The second album released in 2006 in Europe, "The Alternative", provides a more accessible music for most but maybe more balanced. Fortunately, the whole potential of IAMX is unleashed in Live which almost make the albums seem plain after while!

IAMX has started a tour in this US and in Europe where they played in London last yesterday, in Paris on Wednesday, in Berlin on Saturday and a lot more dates all over Europe soon! I show that should not be missed by any amateur of good electronic and trip-hop music!

Finally, the third album, 'Kingdom of Welcome Addiction', is going to be release on May 18th and a first song 'Think of England' is available on IAMX myspace page.

OpenGL Extensions Viewer (glView) is one of my favorite free development tool that I use really often. It gives information about the OpenGL features supported by your hardware but it also provides a large database with all graphics cards and the extensions they support.

Try it and adopt it!

A first release of Küken is finally available! This version should be considered as an Alpha version.

Küken is an OpenGL 3.0 + extensions renderer. It is build with a very programmable approach and aims GeForce 8 and beyond. It hasn't been tested on Radeon cards yet so nothing sure with sure platform. However all the extensions used by Küken are supported on Radeon cards which should make it portable quite quickly.

It supports offscreen rendering with multisampling, geometry instancing, render 2 buffer, queries and conditional rendering, uniform buffer (Through GL_EXT_bindable_uniform currently), etc...

It is a low level library where all features are exposed as objects of the rendering pipeline (rasterizer, blend, program, rendertarget, etc.). This design aims allowing effect files, sorting, efficient multithreading and portability to D3D10/11.

For higher level features the idea is to create others projects to keep packages tiny. Possible futur projects would be a FX system, a multithreaded tasks ans communications system, a geometry optimization library, a scene graph ... Not much done yet but the FX system should be first available, it will make easier my test process.

Küken exposes almost all programmable and not deprecated OpenGL 3.0 features but there is still a lot of tests to do check everything. The next step is OpenGL 3.1 and especially GL_ARB_uniform_buffer_object.

The project is managed using CMake, coded in C++ and use GLM and GLI but have been tested only on Visual C++ 8.0 yet.

Last week I recieved a new toy to enjoy some picture sessions: A Canon EF 70-300mm f4-5.6 IS USM lens. I'm so pleased with it!

Following my picture inpirations, I enjoy to much the perfectly smooth and soft blur is can produce. So much stronger to much deep that the one produce by my Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS Lens!

Second crazy amazing feature, the USM motor used for the autofocus. So accurate and so fast! However, one issue is the desperate need of lights of this lens which evolved some trouble to focalize in such condion. I have also notice some trouble to focalize when lighting is really to strong (like taking a picture of the sun).

This lens is stabilize with two different modes: The first mode is the classic full stabilization mode for none moving subject. The second mode is a vertical or horitonal stabilization which allow to move the camera when taking a picture of a moving subject for example. It's a really nice feature for wildlife or sport pictures.

I'm really happy with this lens with is also perfect for my macro picture with 300mm lens techniques. It needs to take pictures at 2 meters from the subject but the blur is so nice and the picture quite shape for such lens.

I fixed the RSS feed of G-Truc Creation so that it finally works on Google Reader.

A new update of GLM is available.

OpenGL Image (GLI) is a "new" C++ project I'm working on mostly based on old image code.

It allows to load images (DDS and TGA), save images (TGA), to apply few image operations (flip, mirror) and manipulate image data (duplicate, crop, copy part of images and generate mipmaps), etc.

This is still the beginning of the project, the API may change, bugs could occure and obviously features are still very limited.

For the future of this project, I would like to add feature like arthmetic operations, blending, trilinear filtering, blitting, rotations, various color operations, compression and so on. Also, I expect to provide some quite of OpenCL support ...

A lot of work is still needed, there is not even any documentation but it is already quite useful in a combined use with OpenGL for textures. This is kind of a preview so any feedback will be much appreciated!

GLI requires GLM and Boost to build. This first release has been tested only with Visual Studio 8.0.

I have just bought my Canon EOS 450D and Canon already announced this Canon EOS 500D ... how unfortunate. It's not suposed to replace the Canon EOS 450D but reach a little bit higher gamme to compete with the Nikon D90.

Well sound like theory but for sure it makes a better competitor to the Nikon D90 because like this camera for Nikon, it is the first camera to bring video recording for a Canon advanced amator camera ... A feature I would love to have to my camera!

It can record at 30 FPS in HD720 and 20 FPS in HD1080. Quite impressive even if this type of camera is not likely going to make you film an amazing movie! It could be a great fun of experimenting!

Like the Canon EOS 450D, it is very light for a camera of this quality thanks to the use of plastic body material. One big advantage over Nikon camera for my point of view even if it doesn't look as good. It is still sold with the good generic 18-55 IS lens within a kit. However, it gets the 15MP sensor of the 50D which allow the video mode and a better 640*480 screen. It also extended the ISO range to 3200 which can be expanded to ISO 12800.

Not actually much for this new camera ... expect this video mode! Well, I'm still happy with my lovely 450D :)

Such an unexpected event! OpenGL 3.1 and GLSL 1.4 got released at GDC 2009. I was actually expecting it for Siggraph 2009 as usual but the ARB releases OpenGL 3.1 really fast this time! The amount of work is however quite significant and I'm going to present some aspects of it.

An extract of issue 47 of GL_ARB_uniform_buffer_object specification about the block layout qualifiers. Issues 48 and 75 gives further informations about the std140 packing.

packed:
- Implementation may optimize the layout to remove inactive uniforms and otherwise restructure the layout for efficiency.
- Application must query the GL for the uniform block layout.
shared:
- Implementation may optimize the layout but must use the same layout across shaders so that the resulting layout can be shared by multiple shaders.
- Application must query the GL for the uniform block layout.
std140:
- Implementation must use the pre-determined layout, defined in this specification.
- Application need not query the implementation for layout information as it can be determined by reading the shader and the specification.