R2-D2 voice finds new sound for 'Wall-E'

(AP) -- Sci-fi animation moviemaking in aisle four!

Ben Burtt says he's inspired by the most ordinary activities and items.

1 of 2

Ben Burtt, the two-time Oscar-winning sound engineer who designed the voices of R2-D2, E.T. and now the main character in "Wall-E," says his out-of-this-world audio often comes from the most mundane, Earth-bound activities -- like a trip to the grocery store.

When he needed the sound of shopping carts banging together for a scene in Pixar's robot love story, Burtt took his 10-year-old daughter to a Safeway, where they put their recorder in a cart and pretended to shop (banging into things in the parking lot for good measure).

But when it comes to making robots emotionally resonant, Burtt bases his ideas on the voice of humans. Very small humans.

"The bulk of the vocals, the expressive vocals, are really sounds that are more like a toddler makes ... kind of the universal language of intonation," Burtt said in an interview aired on AP Radio. " 'Oh,' 'Hm?,' 'Huh!,' you know? This sort of thing."

Sometimes, though, finding just the right sound is the product of a happy accident, said Burtt, who's won sound effects editing Oscars for 1989's "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" and 1982's "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial."

"Wall-E," a Walt Disney Pictures release, opened last weekend.

Source : http://www.cnn.com

The Utah Teapot

The Utah teapot a model by Martin Newell (1975).

The Utah Teapot  or Newell teapot is a 3D model which has become a standard reference object (and something of an in-joke) in the computer graphics community. It is a mathematical model of an ordinary teapot of comparatively simple shape, which appears solid, cylindrical and partially convex.

The teapot model was created in 1975 by early computer graphics researcher Martin Newell, a member of the pioneering graphics program at the University of Utah.

History

Newell needed a moderately simple mathematical model of a familiar object for his work. Sandra Newell (his wife) suggested modelling their tea service since they were sitting down to tea at the time. He got some graph paper and a pencil, and sketched the entire tea service by eye. Then, he went back to the lab and edited bézier control points on a Tektronix storage tube, again by hand.

The actual Melitta teapot that Martin Newell digitized.

The teapot shape contains a number of elements that made it ideal for the graphics experiments of the time — it is round, containssaddle points, has a genus greater than zero because of the hole in the handle, can project a shadow on itself, and looks reasonable when displayed without a complex surface texture.

Newell made the mathematical data that describes the teapot's geometry (a set of three-dimensional coordinates) publicly available, and soon other researchers began to use the same data for their computer graphics experiments. These researchers needed something with roughly the same characteristics that Newell had, and using the teapot data meant they did not have to laboriously enter geometric data for some other object. Although technical progress has meant that the act of rendering the teapot is no longer the challenge it was in 1975, the teapot continued to be used as a reference object for increasingly advanced graphics techniques.

Over the following decades, editions of computer graphics journals (such as the ACM SIGGRAPH's quarterly) regularly featured versions of the teapot: faceted or smooth-shaded, wireframe, bumpy, translucent, refractive, even leopard-skin and furry teapots were created.

The original teapot model was never intended to be seen from below and had no surface to represent the base of the teapot; later versions of the data set have fixed this.

The real teapot is noticeably taller than the computer model because Newell's frame buffer used non-square pixels. Rather than distorting the image, Newell's colleague Jim Blinn reportedly scaled the geometry to cancel out the stretching, and when the model was shared with users of other systems, the scaling stuck. Height scale factor was 1.3.

The original, physical teapot was purchased from ZCMI (a department store in Salt Lake City, Utah) in 1974. It was donated to the Boston Computer Museum in 1984 where it was on display until 1990. It now resides in the ephemera collection at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California where it is catalogued as "Teapot used for Computer Graphics rendering" and bears the catalogue number X00398.1984.

Versions of the teapot model, or sample scenes containing it, are distributed with or freely available for nearly every current rendering and modelling program and even many graphic API, including AutoCAD, Houdini, Lightwave 3D, modo, POV-Ray, 3D Studio Max, and the API's OpenGL and Direct3D. Some RenderMan-compliant renderers support the teapot as a built-in geometry by calling RiGeometry("teapot", RI_NULL). Along with the expected cubes and spheres, the GLUT library even provides the function glutSolidTeapot() as a graphics primitive, as does its Direct3D counterpart D3DX (D3DXCreateTeapot()). Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard also include the teapot as part of Quartz Composer, Leopard's teapot supports bump mapping.BeOS included a small demo of a rotating 3D teapot, intended to show off the platform's multimedia facilities.

Teapot scenes are commonly used for renderer self-tests and benchmarks. In particular, the Teapot in a stadium benchmark and problem concern the difficulty of rendering a scene with drastically different geometrical density and scale of data in various parts of the scene.

Appearances

With the advent first of computer generated short films, and then of full length feature films, it has become something of an in-joke to hide a Utah teapot somewhere in one of the film's scenes. For example, in the movie Toy Story the Utah teapot appears in a short tea-party scene. The Utah teapot sometimes appears in the "Pipes" screensaver shipped with Microsoft Windows. The teapot also appears in The Simpsons episode Treehouse of Horror VI.

One famous ray-traced image (by Jim Arvo and Dave Kirk, from their 1987 SigGraph paper "Fast Ray Tracing by Ray Classification") shows six stone columns five of which are surmounted by the platonic solids (tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron) - and the sixth column has a teapot. The image is titled "The Six Platonic Solids" - which has led some people to call the teapot a "Teapotahedron". This image appeared on the covers of several books and journals. Jim Blinn (in one of his "Project Mathematics!" videos) proves an interesting version of the Pythagorean theorem: Construct a (2D) teapot on each side of a right triangle and the area of the teapot on the hypotenuse is equal to sum of the areas of the teapots on the other two sides.

The Newell Teapot is also used on the Serious Sam game to show the 3D modeling properties of the Serious engine.

Source: http://www.wikipedia.org

Overview of Computer Graphics

The term Computer graphics has multiple meaning:

• Field of science, which studies the manipulation of visual and geometric information using computational techniques. Computer graphics as an academic discipline focuses on themathematical and computational foundations of image generation and processing rather than purely aesthetic issues.
• The economic branch which deals with the creating and modification of an image on a screen.
• The images created or manipulated in two or three dimensions (2D or 3D respectively), see 2D computer graphics and 3D computer graphics.

Computer graphics is often differentiated from the field of visualization, although the two fields have many similarities.

Applications of Computer graphics are:

• Digital art
• Special effects
• Visual effects
• Video games

Connected studies of Computer graphics are:

• Computer vision
• Image processing
• Computational Geometry
• Computational Topology

Source: http://www.wikipedia.org

Laptop works better for movies than games

(CNET) -- The differences between the HP Pavilion dv9700t and the dv9500t we reviewed last year are subtle.

Externally the two laptops are identical, but the dv9700t includes a current Penryn processor, an upgraded graphics card, and a higher display resolution.

Also, the dv9500t's HD DVD drive has (out of necessity) been replaced by a Blu-ray drive in the dv9700t.

The landscape of laptops has also changed since we last examined the 17-inch Pavilion model.

CES 2008 saw the introduction of Gateway's FX series of low-cost desktop replacements, which give the Pavilion dv9700t a run for its money, performance wise -- especially the $1,999 gaming-oriented P-172X FX.

However, the Pavilion dv9700t's primary advantage over the Gateway lies in its Blu-ray drive, HDMI connectivity, and massive hard drive capacity, all of which make it the superior machine for HD video.

In the end it comes down to your primary reason for buying an entertainment-oriented desktop replacement: if for gaming, choose the Gateway P-172X FX; if for watching high-definition movies, choose the HP Pavilion dv9700t.

The Pavilion dv9700t has impressive heft when you lift it out of its box; weighing 7.9 pounds without its power adapter, this is not a laptop you'll carry every day.

Nevertheless, it is lighter than many other entertainment-oriented desktop replacements, such as the 9.3-pound Gateway P-6831FX and the 11.1-pound Dell XPS M1730.

The dv9700t's case features the familiar Pavilion design, with rounded corners and a glossy imprint finish -- with a subtle circular pattern -- that create an overall sleek look.

We're fans of the Pavilion dv9700t's glossy display, which features a crisp 1,680x1,050-pixel native resolution.

The screen produced rich colors and sharp details, and there's plenty of screen real estate for traditional computer work as well.

Like all Pavilion laptops, the dv9700t includes a row of light-touch buttons above the keyboard that launch the media player and provide volume and playback controls. Altec Lansing stereo speakers, located above those controls, deliver decent sound, though we prefer the depth and clarity of the sound produced by the speakers (and subwoofer) on the Toshiba Qosmio G45.

Our Pavilion dv9700t review unit incorporates HP's optional VGA-resolution Webcam with two built-in microphones for Web conferencing. (Opting out of the Webcam package saves you $25.)

Like almost all desktop replacements, the Pavilion dv9500t's keyboard is full-size and includes a 10-key numeric keypad.

The somewhat compact touch pad includes a scroll zone, and we love the power button at the top of the touch pad, which is handy when you want to use an external mouse. To the right of the touch pad, a fingerprint reader (which is bundled with that $25 Webcam option) lets you log on to Windows and Web sites with the swipe of a finger. The final design feature of note is the handy Wi-Fi power switch located on the laptop's front edge.

The dv9700t has a typical array of ports and connections for a desktop replacement, plus a Blu-ray drive and HDMI output so you can watch high-definition movies on a TV. Unfortunately the HDMI jack comes in lieu of one USB port, leaving just three USB ports for you to attach peripherals. We do like the laptop's dual headphone jacks, which make it easy to share movies and music with friends.

Our HP Pavilion dv9700t review unit's 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo T9300 processor -- just one step down from the top of Intel's Core 2 Duo line -- carried it to the head of the pack on most of CNET Labs performance benchmarks.

The primary exception is our Photoshop test, where the Pavilion dv9700t fell behind the Gateway P-172X FX, which has 4GB of RAM to the Pavilion's 3GB.

The difference between the two systems was more dramatic on our Unreal Tournament test, where the gaming-oriented Gateway displayed nearly three times as many frames per second as the Pavilion dv9700t. The Pavilion dv9700t's frame rates, while acceptable, seem best suited for watching HD movies and playing casual games.

We hardly expect such a massive system to perform well on our battery tests. However, the Pavilion dv9700t lasted an impressive 2 hours, 36 minutes on our taxing DVD drain test. That battery life would be admirable on a smaller laptop and is downright impressive for a desktop replacement with such a large screen.

HP backs the Pavilion dv9700t with an industry-standard one-year warranty; term extensions are available for up to four years.

Toll-free telephone support is available 24-7 during your warranty period, and the HP support Web site includes real-time chat with a tech representative. If you want to troubleshoot problems yourself, you can search through the site's thorough FAQ database. 

COPYRIGHT © 1995-2008 CNET NETWORKS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.