Darkwind Media Blog

Since the release of the Luster beta last week, we’ve received plenty of great feedback ranging from bugs to feature requests. A significant portion of the feedback has been for our game demo, Blocks. It seems that Blocks has been a big hit with our beta users, and that has convinced us to finish development on a final version of Blocks for retail. Since we will be concentrating on a full version, we’re releasing one more version of the demo for final feedback. Here is a summary of the changes that have gone into the final version of the demo:

- Added a mute button to toggle music & sound effects on and off.
- Added a Quit button on the main menu.
- Added 3 more hard levels: “Sea Sickness”, “Om Nom Nom”, and “Reddit is Fun”.
- Nerfed “Body Massage Machine” to make it easier for players to complete. Sorry about that!
- Removed the text “Hit R to restart”. The functionality is still there, so knock yourselves out.
- Fixed fullscreen issues. Some users were experiencing problems going into and out of fullscreen mode. This should be fixed now.
- Improved the quality of text rendering in some parts of the game.
- Hitting ESC from any part of the game will now bring up the menu.
- Hitting the “Enter” or “N” keys after completing a level will now bring you to the next level.
- Fixed a few other bugs related to the flash panels.

Before you go, check out a couple of gameplay videos I’ve made. This first video is of me completing the level “All The Way Down” without touching any walls. Smoooooooooth baby!

This second video is of me completing the last level, “Body Massage Machine”. A lot of people have stated this level was too difficult, and while I agree, this is proof that it’s entirely possible. Big props to Leo (and anyone else) for completing the original version of the level!

You can download the newest version of the Blocks demo here, or view the summary page of the demo here.

Thanks go out to individuals who have participated in the beta so far and given us feedback. Without you, none of this would be possible.

We are live! We have updated our site and made available the Luster Open beta for download. Once you have Luster installed check out our demos. Let us know what you think. Don’t forget about our demo of Blocks. Blocks is a game we’ve been working on using Luster that is a fun, challenging game that’ll swallow up hours of your day.

This beta has been three years in the making. We’ve been working on Luster for that long. There’s plenty more to do, and we definitely want to hear suggestions from everyone. Let us know what you think.

We’ve been working with our client on this medical imaging system for over a year now. Our part (the 3D part, of course) is one element in a larger application. The entire system is developing very nicely. Here is the latest version of our 3D renderer for CT and MRI scans. What you see above is the most basic rendering: direct volume rendering with no coloring applied. Below is the same scan rendered from above. Keep in mind that the scan is rendered at interactive framerates, so the user can change all display settings and navigate around and in the scan in real time.

We’ve added in another rendering mode which can be useful for some scans: iso-surface rendering. This mode creates a more “solid” image of the data and allows us to do a few different kinds of effects compared to the direct volume rendering mode.

Notice the high-quality lighting. There are numerous lighting and coloring settings available for isosurface mode. Many of the same data manipulation controls are available in this mode as well. Here’s the same scan but we’ve now focused on on the pelvis and hip bones. You can see that the scan has a lot of data in it and that once we start exploring the inside of the body it gets quite jumbled. Don’t worry, a radiologist knows what they are looking at. Also notice a few lighting artifacts (bands and stairs) because even though this data has some better resolution than previous scans, it is still relatively low. For this entire abdomen there are only about 160 slices.

As we approach our Beta release of Luster, one of the major hurdles we need to get over is finishing some of our projects we want to show off. We have so many half-started or half-finished things we could use to show the power and versatility of Luster, but we don’t want to be showing unfinished work. One project we definitely want to have ready for launch day is Blocks: the physics-based puzzle game we’ve been plucking away at for the last few months.

Finishing a game is a difficult task. There are a number of very different areas which need to be completed and polished and tested before release. We need original music, smooth gameplay, finalized textures, and we need to try to fit it all into the smallest package possible. Blocks is a relatively small game and even it requires a lot of attention to bring up to production level. We’ll be working hard on the sounds, the levels, and the GUI for the game right up until launch day. Luckily for us, the gameplay has been solid and fun and we’re fairly certain none of the core mechanics need further tweaking.

Hopefully the game proves as much fun to everyone else as it is to us. If it goes well, we’ll come back and work on it more adding features and creating a lot more levels for the even better Blocks 2. So, when the Luster beta launches remember to jump over to http://www.luster3d.com and give Blocks a try.

There’s a tidal wave of data that’s about to wash over us. I’m in a unique position right now where I’m able to see this wave forming and understand where it is coming from and how to deal with it. Medical data is rapidly growing, and the rate of growth is increasing. My vantage point right now is in one of the very fast growing areas. I also think it is a very critical area as well.

I’m referring to the data collected during medical scans. There are many different kinds: PET, CT, MRI, Ultrasound, etc. I’m dealing mainly with CT and MRI and the data sizes from these scans is exploding. This is a result of high-quality scanning and collection techniques. This should be viewed as a good thing. These machines cost a lot of money, but they can be used over and over. Higher quality scans produce better images to analyze, which in turn are easier to use as tools for diagnostics, recovery tracking, clinical trials, surgery planning, and probably a lot more.

What kind of sizes am I talking about? With the newest machines we are talking about Gigabytes of data per scan. Often in one sitting multiple scans will be carried out. For instance, many times, a scan is taken before and twice while your body is filtering a contrast chemical. That means modern machines can produce several Gigabytes of data per patient, per visit. How do we store this? How do we process it?

I don’t know about storage issues. I’m hope Radiology practices are solving this issue. I certainly hope they don’t just throw away your scan when you leave their office. My focus is on the processing. Currently Radiologists look at these scans as a series of 2D slices. With modern machines able to produce thousands of slices per scan this method is going to be very outdated very quickly. Instead we can use modern consumer graphics hardware (the video card in a normal computer) to reconstruct this scan in full 3D. This lets the Radiologist view the entire scan at once and interact with it in real time.

The data overload is an enormous barrier to this type of application. A modern scan will not only overflow the video card’s memory, but before long it could begin to overflow the computer’s main system memory. Managing this flood of data and feeding it into the graphics pipeline in a sensible way is exactly what we are tackling right now. It’s a critical problem, because we want Radiologists to be as effective as possible with this new level of detail.

I will post again when we have a more complete prototype of our new 3D Medical Scan Visualization software.

This is an update to the GeoLocation Globe Application. I’ve made some updates to the RSS reading so that the updates come in more automatically. It now auto-subscribes to several Yahoo feeds and auto-updates every minute. This means you can just sit back and watch the news happen throughout the day, and how it changes across the globe.

RSS Feeds geo-located on the earth

You can browse the news stories by hovering over the little pins sticking out of the earth. The information will pop-up in a tooltip. This gives you the title of the story, its source, category, and a brief description/summary if it is available.

Browsing an news story's information

As you explore the earth, blue pins will start to pop in around you. These blue pins are discovered geo-located Flickr images. The application crawls through Flickr, finding those images that have been geo-tagged. It then populate the area around where your looking with those images. If you roll over those pins, a thumbnail of the image dynamically downloaded from Flickr will float beside your cursor.

Viewing the thumbnail of a geo-located Flickr image

Nighttime across the US overlayed with its new stories

By clicking the blue pins, the full-resolution image will be downloaded from Flickr and shown in a pop-up.

The high-res image of a geo-located Flickr image

You can dynamically filter the data by checking RSS feeds or Flickr on or off. In the future you will be able to filter both news and images by category or tag. In the image below the RSS feed has been turned off, leaving just the blue Flickr pins.

RSS feeds turned off, just viewing Flickr images

Pure globe with all geo-located data flitered off

One thing you may notice recently is that people are starting to focus more on geolocation. This is the ability to place things in geographic space. We have tons of data on the internet and more being added all the time. Tagging that data is really important if we want to be able to find it, explore it, or visualize it. One kind of tagging gaining popularity is to tag the data with location information.

With Luster we can take advantage of available web services and visualize the location of data in real-time.

We can take information from online services and databases and plot them onto the globe. Viewing information by its location is just one way of exploring it, but done correctly that can be a powerful way to visualize and see patterns in the data. What you see above are the news stories from Yahoo’s Top Stories RSS Feed. The application checks for changes every minute, so you have a real-time view of Yahoo’s top stories as they happen across the world.

And since RSS provides us with all sorts of useful information, we can let that information that is attached to each news item be viewable in the application. You can roll over each pin and see the story, its source, description, etc. When the user is interested in reading the story, a simple mouse click will navigate their browser to the story’s link.

Really, RSS feeds are the just the beginning. More data is being geo-tagged online all the time. Flickr has some 35,000 images with location tags and a powerful API that can access them. Twittr recently announced that they will be letting users opt-in to have their tweets geo-tagged. If a significant number of users start tagging their tweets with this information, we can use our application to plot where tweets happen across the world in real-time.

Yesterday, I decided that we needed a simple app demonstrating product visualization. The idea here is that within Luster we can put a 3D representation of a product, building, or part. Users can get a great feel for the design of the product by interactively moving around it. The full 3D environment Luster provides means it is easy to set this sort of application up.

For a more advanced demo, we can allow the user to interact with different parts, or perform actions on the system. For instance, for a car we could open the door and move the camera in to peer into the interior. We can let the user look under the hood and rev the engine (play a recorded sound of the actual engine). You can see in this video below an automated exploded view which we can do for any other products. We could also attach information to the product, or its parts that the user can easily access. A car might have information about optional extras, with links that lead out to the manufacturer’s website with even more information.

These sorts of application makes exploring a product more fun, and easier to navigate. Here’s some media from the demo.

We’ve been working with a client for some time now creating a new CT/MRI 3D visualizer. The main focus for the application is on image quality and user interaction. There are a few screenshots on the luster3d gallery, but here are newer screenshots from the latest version of the application. The quality is much higher now and we are beginning to focus more on product integration and user interface. You should note that the CT scan shown here is actually quite low-res. There are only 52 slices in the entire scan. Modern scanners can produce hundreds of slices per scan. You should be able to see why these scans are so useful. We can construct a sharp, accurate 3D image of a person’s body.

For those versed in medical visualization you can note that there is no special transfer function used here. The pixels are colored directly with the density value read from the scan, which means the 3D reconstruction matches the 2D slice view very closely.

In another update on the progress of the next version of Luster I thought we should mention the main reason for the time it is taking to complete: mac support. When I first started creating the Luster runtime I made a decision that I would not use any technologies or systems that could only run on a single platform. I didn’t want to close off Mac or Linux support when starting out because I knew the time would come when I would want those platforms supported. However, using cross-platform libraries and tools doesn’t automatically mean you can run something on multiple platforms.

So, after deciding that the time was right to support the Mac, we started the porting process. After a few months of learning how to develop for the Mac, the first Mac-enabled version of Luster is nearing completion. Most of Luster’s functionality is ported and I can run the majority of Luster applications in the standalone player. Look for a brand new release of Luster on both Windows and Mac in the coming weeks!

With the new version of Luster will come a whole new collection of demos. I’m most excited about Blocks, which I’ve posted about several times now. Progress on this simple game is almost complete. We’re carefully crafting the first few levels that we will release and I am working on the shadowing system that we will be using for it. So far the game has proven to be fun to make and to play. We will do some final playtesting and gameplay tweaking just before release.