Android Performance Case Study

If you are interested in Android development, I highly recommend checking out Romain Guy’s post (Romain is an Android dev at Google) on profiling and optimizing an application.

 

All applications should ideally take at most 16 ms to execute one frame, achieving a smooth  framerate of 60 frames per second. Romain goes over some crucial new tools like systrace and TraceView which work with Android Jellybean (4.1 and 4.2)

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If you are getting an Android device, make sure it’s a Nexus

I had a Samsung Galaxy Captivate for 2 years before I upgraded to a HTC One X. While both phones are pretty good, the lack of software updates is extremely frustrating.

 

Samsung took forever to release Gingerbread (version 2.3) for the Captivate. By the time they released it people were already running Ice cream sandwich (4.0) ROMS on it. I got frustrated and switched to an ICS ROM, though playing around with ROMS can be another headache.

 

As for the One X, it is a gorgeous phone with a wonderful screen, but HTC promised a Jelly Bean (4.1) update by the end of 2012, and here we are in 2013. It is simply frustrating for users who want to be on the bleeding-edge (yes you can root your phone and install a new ROM, but I was unable to since AT&T has heavily locked down their phones). 

 

In the meantime Google released the Nexus 4 in 2012, which came with 4.2 (will the One X ever get 4.2? Probably not). Even the 2-year old Nexus S got updated to 4.1 quickly (though it won’t be getting 4.2). 

 

I place the blame on the carriers, since HTC has released the JB update for worldwide phones. AT&T and other carriers like to load the phones with a lot of crappy apps which you can’t get rid of. I just want a pure and straightforward Android experience. It also doesn’t help that manufacturers like HTC and Samsung like to modify Android themselves to make it more distinct, but in my opinion it only slows down the Android experience and doesn’t add a lot. 

 

As for tablets, the same rule applies. Get a Nexus 7 or a Nexus 10.

 

There is a reason why Apple preferred to have total control over the iPhone software experience – and which is why you should get a Nexus device, free from the constraints of manufacturers and clueless carriers.

Writing a Software Rasterizer

There is an interesting post on AltDevBlogADay showing how one can write a software rasterizer:

http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/04/14/software-rasterizer-part-1/

 

Anyone interested in graphics should have some understanding as to how the graphics pipeline works and how the rasterizer works. Knowledge of math (especially linear algebra) helps greatly.

BezierView using WebGL

My lab (SurfLab) manages a program called BezierView which is used for rendering different kinds of Bezier surfaces (triangular, tensor-product, rational, etc.). BezierView has not been updated for a few years, so me and a few other colleagues decided to update the program using WebGL instead.

Now instead of downloading BezierView to your own computer and running a .exe file, you can just run it online through a webpage. You can find the still-being-updated version here. For now you can view tensor-product, triangular and rational patches along with polyhedra. It is being currently updated to include a better interface and to have support for all types.

There are some shortcomings to writing BezierView in WebGL – the most obvious one is that Javascript is much slower compared to C/C++. And the online version cannot handle huge files which the offline version can. And since WebGL is based on OpenGL ES 2.0, we cannot take advantage of the tessellator engine in modern graphics cards to evaluate parametric patches on the GPU (which results in a significant speedup). So all the evaluation is done on the CPU and the resultant vertices sent to the GPU. I guess we’ll have to wait for OpenGL ES 4.0 (or WebCL to be finalized – a Javascript implementation of OpenCL).

BezierView was developed using the excellent Three.js library. I highly recommend using it if you are developing a WebGL application.

The source code is available on GitHub.

You can find BezierView here.

Virtual Reality Projects

Back in Spring of 2009 (almost 3 years ago!), I took a very interesting Virtual Reality course offered by Dr. Benjamin Lok in my department. The course basically involves creating Virtual Reality projects. I ended up creating 4 which took a lot of work but which in the end were worth the effort. Here are the four projects I worked on (click on the links for more detailed info/video):

 

1. Using ARToolkit to demonstrate how touch-screens work:  

   We had to come up with a way to use ARToolkit (Augmented Reality). I thought of attaching some AR markers to a Nintendo DS and demonstrating how 3 different kinds of touch-screens work (resistive, capacitive and infrared). Written in C

2. Virtual Reality experience: Rescuing someone from a fire:

   Now we started getting into the heavy stuff. We had to create a Virtual Reality 3D experience using a Head-Mounted Display, object tracking and small space. At the suggestion of my teammate, colleague and friend we ended up using the Ogre 3D Engine for the project. We also used Google SketchUp models and wrote the program in C++.

3. VR experience: Target practice on a military base:

   This was my favorite project. We (me and my colleague Aritra Nath) created “virtual” shooting, where we attached a marker to a Nintendo Wiimote (which was in a gun shell, and you pressed the trigger to shoot). We had an actual barrier in the real-world which was nearly pixel-accurate in the virtual world (well, not quite). Used Ogreand Sketchup again.

4. New VR Interface for doing 3D landscaping around a house:

   The 4th project involved creating a VR experience where the user could “create” new content. My team ended up creating a way to do 3D landscaping only using fingers and a wiimote. Used the same tools as before.

I consider myself lucky that I was able to take such a course. Though it was kind of grueling at times (especially since all the teams had to share the virtual reality hardware), it was also fun and rewarding at the end.

Binary Search Tree in Python

It has been a while since I have written a data structure from scratch (had to write B-Trees for an Advanced Data Structures course 2 years ago), so I decided to refresh my memory by quickly writing up Binary Search Trees in Python. Making sure you are familiar with data structures always helps with interviews too.

You can access the file here. I have only tested this for integers, so might need a little bit of work for other data types. The following methods have been implemented:

• add(data)
• remove(data)

Traversals:

• preorder()
• inorder()
• postorder()
• bfTraversal() (Breadth-first traversal)

Helper methods:

• isLeaf(node) – checks if a node is a leaf
• lcAncestor(value1, value2) – finds the least common ancestor of two nodes with values value1 and value2
• printAllPaths() – prints all the possible paths from the root to the leaves

I won’t go over how a BST works, but hopefully the code is self-explanatory.

If there are any questions let me know – hope people find it useful.

Evaluating Bicubic Bézier Surfaces using (Py)OpenCL

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GitHub Repository here
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I’ve been meaning to get into OpenCL for a while, so I thought I would write a simple program which would evaluate Bicubic Bezier patches (surfaces) in parallel.
I also wanted to program in Python more, so I decided to use PyOpenCL. You can find more info about the OpenCL implementation in Python from the link.

I am not going to go over what a Bezier patch is and how it can be evaluated. There is a straightforward equation for evaluating one which I will be showing later on, but for more info about Bezier patches you can find other info online.

Let’s begin.

My Google Chrome extension – “Comment Save”

(UPDATE December 29th, 2012: Comment Save is now on version 0.6.x, and has support for filters (black and whitelist), timed deletion, Disqus/LiveFyre support, Google+, etc.)

Though I focus mostly on computer graphics, I also have an (amateurish) interest in web-design and web-programming.

Late last year a friend of mine brought to my attention a problem he encountered: he wrote a bunch of text in a textbox and when he clicked submit the server responded with an error. He had lost all he wrote which was frustrating. I thought it would be useful to have an extension which records everything you type in one of those boxes so you can recover it if you lose it.

Another friend suggested it would be nice if the extension kept a history of all your posts (if you are one of those people who comment across many sites a lot). And so I came up with “Comment Save” (which has roughly 500 users as I type this).I’ll let the description describe it:

As featured on Lifehacker!

http://lifehacker.com/5715657/comment-save-keeps-track-of-your-comments-on-the-web

Ever written a large post or comment on a website, click submit, only to see your comment get lost in the internet wilderness? Or your tab/window closed somehow before you could submit?

Or maybe you just like to keep track of all the posts you made on different websites.

Comment Save (CS) helps you keep track of what you have been writing as you type. Icon beside the address bar brings up a window showing you the last post you wrote alongwith a link to the page. Link in the window allows you to view your post history.

You can also filter websites where you don’t want any of your posts to be tracked.

Works on sites like:
– Youtube
– Facebook/Google+
– Gawker blogs (Gawker/Gizmodo/Jezebel/Lifehacker/etc.)
– Engadget/Techcrunch/etc. (Sites which use Disqus)
– WordPress/Tumblr
– Forums of all kinds
– Digg/Reddit
– CNN/New York Times/The Guardian/other news websites
– And lots more!

FEATURES:
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* Records your post as you type so you can recover it if you lose it.
* Keeps a history of all your posts along with a link to the page and the time.
* Allows you to add filters so you can disable tracking on certain websites.
* Simple checkbox in the popup window enables/disable tracking globally

The extension helped me learn Javascript more (and also helped me deal with HTML Web Databases). The source code for the extension is open-source and has been released under the GPL v2 license. The source code can be accessed on Google Code here. Feel free to look through it.

If you have any feature requests for the extension please let me know. Some features I have thought about adding include:

• Delete all comments after a set time. (User-specified time, for ex. 10 minutes, 1 day, 1 month, etc.) (UPDATE: Added in Version 0.5 on 9th August 2011)
• Search Comments: Within that include searching by website, within a specific timeframe, etc.
• Delete Comments by website

Any other suggestions would be welcome!

Deferred Shading in DirectX 10 (with Ambient Occlusion)

Deferred Shading is a rendering technique (in comparison to regular forward rendering) which has become popular over the last few years. Games like the upcoming Battlefield 3, Crysis 2 and numerous others use it, so I wanted to give it a try and implement a simple deferred renderer myself in DirectX 10.

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GitHub Repository and Visual Studio 2010 files:
GitHub Repository here
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Images for all the render targets/textures (Diffuse, Normals, Depth, Ambient Occlusion, Composite with Ambient Occlusion, Composite without AO):

Diffuse Texture

View-space Normals

Depth Texture

Ambient Occlusion

Composite with Ambient Occlusion

Composite without AO

What is Deferred Shading?

If you are reading this chances are you already know what deferred shading is and how it works, so I won’t go into too much detail. Wikipedia has a good overview and there are other places which can describe it better.

Basically deferred shading involves rendering your view-space normals, your depth-buffer, specular/diffuse, ambient occlusion, etc. values into different textures and then using them at a later pass to create a final composite image (by rendering a full-screen quad). There are several advantages and some disadvantages (increased memory bandwidth due to multiple render targets, inability to handle transparency, anti-aliasing, etc.)

WebGL Anaglyph 3D using Three.js

I have been meaning to get into WebGL for a while, and a few days ago I discovered this excellent WebGL library called Three.js on Github.

Someone requested an Anaglyph WebGL Renderer for it, so I thought I might give it a try. After reading up on the code I came up with an example you can find here (NOTE: Works best on latest version of Chrome and Firefox).

The author of Three.js has already fixed my version and incorporated an actual anaglyph renderer into his code. Here is an example.

If you are interested in WebGL development I would recommend checking out Three.js.