Ender's game redux [computer games]

In this article the author explains the context of his brother's e-mail, who is a US Army surgeon in Iraq. The e-mail concisely summarizes the convergence of entertainment technology and military training. He also describes the influence of game technology in his training.     

The computer graphics wars heat up

The author describes the present status of computer graphics hardware. While console games flourished, PC game sales have plummeted. The plans of Nvidia and ATI, the 3D graphics world's two dominant players are described.     

The GPU enters computing's mainstream

The Siggraph/Eurographics Graphics Hardware 2003 workshop, held in San Diego, will likely be remembered as a turning point in modern computing. In one of those rare moments when a new paradigm visibly begins changing general-purpose computing's course, what has traditionally been a graphics-centric workshop shifted its attention to the nongraphics applications of the graphics processing unit. GPUs, made by Nvidia (www.nvidia.com) and ATI (www.ati.com), function as components in graphics subsystems that power everything from Microsoft's Xbox to high-end visualization systems from Hewlett-Packard and SGI. The GPUs act as coprocessors to CPUs such as Intel's Pentium, using a fast bus such as Intel's Advanced Graphics Port. AGP8x has a peak bandwidth of 2.1 gigabytes per second - speed it needs to avoid inflicting bus starvation on data-hungry GPU coprocessors.     

The digital world's midlife crisis

We are in the midst of convergence between high definition television and game consoles and between handheld game machines and mobile phones. This market shift creates both big losers and big winners. IBM occupies the most favorable position with chip designs for all three next-generation consoles. But all the contenders find themselves facing an uncertain future. The players in this market are contending with what Clayton calls the "innovators dilemma". Each of the firm is immersed in an internal midlife crisis to redefine its identity so that it can triumph in the external struggle against its rival in the game market.     

MBone provides audio and video across the Internet

Researchers have produced the Multicast Backbone (MBone), which provides audio and video connectivity from outer space to under water-and virtually everyplace in between. MBone is a virtual network that has been in existence since early 1992. It originated from an effort to multicast audio and video from meetings of the Internet Engineering Task Force. Today. hundreds of researchers use MBone to develop protocols and applications for group communication. Multicast provides one-to-many and many-to-many network delivery services for applications such as videoconferencing and audio where several hosts need to communicate simultaneously. This article describes the network concepts underlying MBone, the importance of bandwidth considerations, various application tools, MBone events, interesting MBone uses, and provides guidance on how to connect your Internet site to the MBone     

Revitalizing museums with digital technology

Computing continues to transform every aspect of culture, including the original forms of location-based entertainment: public libraries and museums. Despite their continuing popularity, museums have generally lagged behind libraries in technology use. For example, a 2002 study conducted by the Institute for Museum and Library Services shows that only 62 percent of museums have a Web site, versus 75 percent of public libraries. Large museums are the exception to this trend and have undertaken several initiatives that foreshadow how museums may evolve in the 21st century. The paper discusses some museum technology applications.     

Future delivery of health care: Cybercare

Health-care system reforms can change the structure of the current U.S. health-care system, from centralized large hospitals to a distributed, networked healthcare system. In our model, medical care is delivered locally in neighborhoods and individual homes, using computer technologies like telemedicine, to link patients and primary care providers to tertiary medical providers. This decentralization could reduce costs enough to provide all citizens with medical insurance coverage; it would benefit patients and providers; and as a dual-use system, it would better protect the country's resources and citizens in an event of biological terror or natural disasters.     

Small is beautiful [entertainment computing]

Chip companies face the huge challenge of balancing low power consumption with the computing performance needed to transform polygons and push pixels. Applying this power to a device that can last days on a single charge lets users play Quake on a Quarter VGA (QVGA) screen at 35 frames per second. Mobile phone manufacturers also want highly integrated chips to minimize costs and circuit board real estate. Hence, they must also combine audio and imaging functions with signal processing for wireless networking.     

Exploiting reality with multicast groups

This article describes our investigation into developing large distributed simulations. The architecture we describe logically partitions virtual environments by associating spatial, temporal, and functional classes with network multicast groups. We exploit the actual characteristics of the real-world large scale environments being simulated by focusing or restricting an entity's processing and network resources to its area of interest via a local area-of-interest manager. For example, a simulated infantryman in a virtual environment doesn't need to know the condition of a simulated truck 20 virtual kilometres away