Victor Mateevitsi

LIVE Broadcast of Felix Baumgartner jumping from space!

More info here: http://www.redbullstratos.com/live/

My hopes that we were leaving inside Matrix, just vanished!

From the article:

"Where can you be taller than a six-story building, and smaller than a molecule?

Inside the Electronic Visualization Lab’s CAVE2.

For the CS 566 class (Parallel Processing) I implemented the find_max algorithm for use on clusters. The program creates a random array of n numbers, distributes the array across all the nodes of the cluster and then finds the max. The program also calculates the processing time, communication time and overall time to find the max. It outputs the results in either a human readable form, or in a tab separated output.

More information here

While working on a VTK project, I had to change the position of the camera so by looking at the API, I used the setPosition() function.

The problem that I faced that sometimes after changing the position I would get a blank black screen. Update() or Render() or Invalidate() did not work. The only way to “re-render” the window and show something was by interacting with the mouse: A click, or a pan would immediately redraw everything correctly with the vtkCamera in the position that I had set up using setPosition() !

This problem drove me crazy for days and I finally gave up without finding a solution, until yesterday!

So basically when you use the setPosition() of the vtkCamera class in VTK you change the position of the vtkCamera. The clipping range is not changed though, and if it happens that your new camera position is OUTSIDE the clipping range, then you see nothing!! By clicking on the window, you basically slightly change the position of the camera and VTK forces a recalculation of the clipping range based on the new camera position and thus you see the object again! So basically to fix the problem, you have to do is run the ResetCameraClippingRange() on the vtkRenderer object. So for example: theRenderer->GetActiveCamera()->setPosition(0.0, 0.0, 0.0); theRenderer->ResetCameraClippingRange();

I watched today the amazing TED talk of Hugh Herr about Biomechatronics.

Hugh Herr is Associate Professor at the MIT Media Arts and Sciences department and director of the Biomechatronics group at MIT.