Vliv first support for 3D Connexion SpaceNavigator

I have implemented the necessary code to take advantage of my new Space Navigator USB device.
Right now, only panning is supported, but it is yet incredibly fun...
The Personal Edition of the device is quite affordable at $59.

Where are the cheap 3d printers ?

In 2007, there has been a rage about cheap 3d printers.

Two have been announced, with early 2008 availability. One is even taking advance order !

The first one is Desktop Factory, advertised at $4995

The second one is 3D System's VFlash, advertised at $9900

None of them is available, and I am starting to wonder if they really exist, as it's now been several months nothing very new has appeared on their Web sites.

Fun with plugins

In a previous post, I was talking about an image that contained all frames of a movie, with precalculated zoom levels.

I have now created a specific plugin, that reads AVI files, thanks to Win32's AVIFile API.

The image from the AVI is now completely virtual, and tiles are created on demand.
It is even possible to zoom out 3 levels, at a performance cost because each time you zoom out, 4 times the previous number of tiles have to be loaded.
On a sample movie (640x352), this does not look so bad and complete movie is browsable.

Here is a screendump:


As usual, source code or dll for this plugin is available on-demand.

A sample plugin for Markus-Lyapunov fractals

Happy New Year !

I have implemented a very simple plugin for displaying Markus-Lyapunov fractals in VLIV.
For more information, see Wikipedia entry.

They are very simple to implement, but are very CPU intensive, so I have limited the number of iterations to a very low number, and the formula is the simplest (AB) by default.

As usual the image can be zoomed at very high levels.
This plugin benefits very much from multi-core CPUs.

Here is a screendump:

Please send me a message if you are interested in this plugin.