The Hindu Business Line : IT’s not all fun-n-games!

Hot & cold: An enthusiast (left) tries out games machine Zolac fuelled by `hot' new chip from nVidia, and engineers from EVGA (right) cool an overclocked PC with liquid nitrogen, at the nVision Visual Computing expo at San Jose,, California last week. - Anand Parthasarathy

Anand Parthasarathy

Recently in San Jose, California

Cutting edge 3-D visual technology created for games machines are being used for serious real world challenges in medicine, industrial design and e-commerce.

Sometimes, the spin-off can seem more important than the original application than spun it off.

The first major global gathering of the visual computing industry held in the ‘capital’ of the original Silicon Valley was vivid proof of this.

Hosted by nVIDIA, leader in graphical computing technology, it had the look and feel (and overpowering sound!) of the world’s young-and-restless gaming freaks on their annual day out.

Indeed, an ongoing activity across all three days was an attempt to create a Guinness World record for the longest continuous LAN party (a spontaneous gathering of gamers on a local area network).

And the record was finally created, with 203 gamers playing each other non-stop for 36 hours.

Most of the gaming PCs they used were fuelled by nVIDIA’s GeForce graphics chips and boards - the latest version, the GTX 260, breaking the teraflops ceiling to create what was in effect, a desktop parallel supercomputer.

Such computing muscle was required to fuel the ultra realism that gamers demand today and to take them smoothly into the third dimension.

Tegra chip

The Lilliputian end of graphical computing will soon be boosted by the Tegra chip, a finger-nail sized wonder that is being touted as the world’s most advanced single-chip computer.

But beyond fun-n-games, this visual computing muscle has begun to excite some more serious users.

“Arthroscopic surgeons have taken what was basically the 3-D stereo vision capability of games consoles and harnessed them to improve the accuracy of (keyhole) surgery” the nVIDIA CEO, Mr Jen-Hsun Huang, told Businessline.

In his keynote at the nVision conference, Mr Huang introduced the Folding@home project, a global partnership in which thousands of lay users provide the computing power of their graphics computers to study the phenomenon of ‘protein folding’ ( assembling themselves)and associated human diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

The task needs a lot of graphical computation and nVIDIA has created client software that allows users of its graphical hardware to donate their computer time to the project.

Dassault presence

Another key presence at the event was the France-based Dassault Systems which provides 3-D tools to improve the process of engineering product design. It had created a free tool, called 3dvia ( www.3dvia.com ) which allows any user to create 3-D objects easily and add them seamlessly to the product drawings.

It has been harnessed by all the leading car manufacturers to set up Web pages where potential buyers of high-end cars can literally walk through an un-built vehicle, create custom features they would like to have, select details such as upholstery or dashboard design and then place an order.

Online fashion

The ability to create instant 3-D images from 2-D pictures is being used on the Web by garment sellers:

They allow you to create your correctly sized 3- D ‘avatar’ and drape it with the clothing to see how you look before buying. The flagship offering in this niche comes from Israel-based Optitex ( www.optitex.com ). In San Jose last week, they called it ‘the future of online fashion’.

Meanwhile games freaks had already gone beyond what most serious computer users would dare: An nVIDIA reseller, EVGA, was showing how one could ‘overclock’ - run a PC faster than the rated top clock speed - by cooling the cards with liquid nitrogen, that is at minus 196 degrees celsius.

That looked like something with a potential application in the real (non-gaming) world - provided you had a dozen flasks of cooool nitrogen handy!