Vision - January/February 2009 - (Page 30) Poised to pull this bandwagon is the technology called graphics acceleration. The latest features seen on PCs, such as Vista’s Aero 3D window interface or the Apple iTunes’ Cover Flow album finder, are immediately recognizable uses of this technology. A good graphics accelerator which can be a stand-alone chip, built into a chipset or system-on-chip (SoC)—renders images on a screen better than the system’s general-purpose CPU can. This lets the CPU perform its other functions without having to get faster or bigger. Graphics acceleration already is ubiquitous on desktop and laptop PCs and game consoles. Take it away and many of the features we take for granted simply won’t work. But now the technology is spreading. The mobile market is the key new frontier for graphics acceleration and, in particular, 3D. Jon Peddie, who heads up market research firm Jon Peddie Research, said the technology is fast becoming standard on mobile phones. “By 2012, more than 40 percent of all mobile phones shipped—some 500 million plus—will incorporate graphics acceleration hardware,” said Peddie. And it’s not just phones that will benefit. Personal multimedia players (PMPs), portable navigation devices (PNDs), handheld computers, gaming devices, cameras, and anything else users interact with, will all need some form of graphics acceleration. Graphics acceleration is where the process of displaying images on the monitor is sped up, enabling visual effects otherwise impossible to achieve. Drawing graphics can be done in software or in hardware, but the hardware approach yields up to 15 to 20 times the performance of software alternatives, and with much lower active power consumption. These 3D scenes are represented by thousands of triangles called “polygons”, which are transformed into the pixels one sees at astonishing speed. A range of products incorporating graphics acceleration are now hitting the market, and they’re stimulating the content community into action. 3D user interfaces (UIs) and 3D navigation will be the next “killer apps” for graphics acceleration in the mobile and automotive arenas; for end-product manufacturers, high-quality graphics, often combined with touch- screen and other innovative new technologies, will differentiate their offerings at the point-of-sale and provide them with a distinct marketing advantage. Technologies such as Imagination Technologies’ POWERVR MBX, are already powering advanced UIs and gaming in products like Nokia’s N95, Sony Ericsson’s W960i and DoCoMo’s SH905i. Here are just a few of the things that graphics acceleration can do: 1. User Interfaces Since the UI is constantly in use, it’s the key shaper of the user’s product experience. Good use of graphics improves usability—it’s not just eye candy. The size of the screen is getting larger 2. Navigation and Driver Information Both the in-car and PND markets are creating growing demands for advanced 3D graphics to represent the world on screen more realistically, adding features such as 3D points of interest and dynamic floating icons over a high frame-rate, true 3D map. 3D makes maps easier to navigate and relate to the surroundings. With 3D providing increasingly advanced user interfaces for in-car multimedia electronics, the outcome will be reconfigurable clusters of instruments, navigation, driver information, and other user controls all shown on a high-quality, graphics accelerator-driven display that can be “reskinned” and reconfigured to reflect each user’s personal preferences. “By 2012, more than 40 percent of all mobile phones shipped—some 500 million plus—will incorporate graphics acceleration hardware.” —Jon Peddie 3. Gaming Accelerated graphics is standard on massmarket game systems, and new versions of the technology have highly efficient, lowbandwidth, low-power architectures that can now bring console-class gaming to the mobile world. Earlier versions of that technology have already been adopted by leading mobile device manufacturers and service providers, such as Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo (FOMA), and Samsung. The latest-generation accelerators can give mobile phones the same visual quality as a game console by using a system called shader-based graphics, where each image can be programmed to be more arresting and inventive, rather than being built up using basic rendering techniques that always look similar from application to application. 4. Flash Players Adobe Flash technology is used for a growing number of Internet-based applications. High-performance Flash players that deliver the full desktop Flash experience are crucial to successful growth of the mobile Internet market. Optimized solutions are now possible using 3D graphics www.ce.org representing 90 percent of the area of leading new devices. As a result, the screen is the key delivery point for product identity and branding, enabled by the graphics. By employing 3D perspective, the designers of UIs can maximize the use of the available screen space. Techniques such as placing objects in the background until they’re needed, overlapping objects partially “behind” other objects, or using transparency, carousels and high-quality scaling, let designers profoundly change the utility of a device interface. Now-familiar UI effects, like Apple’s Cover Flow, are the result of 3D graphical processing and are simple examples of how a dynamic, graphically-rich 3D UI can transform the user experience. 30 January/February 2009 Steve McAlister/Getty Images http://www.ce.org
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