[Oliver Kreylos] is using an Xbox Kinect to render 3D environments from real-time video. In other words, he takes the video feed from the Kinect and runs it through some C++ software he wrote to index the pixels in a 3D space that can be manipulated as it plays back. The image above is the result of the Kinect recording video by looking at [Oliver] from his right side. He’s moved the viewer’s playback perspective to be above and in front of him. Part of his body is missing and there is a black shadow because the camera cannot see these areas from its perspective. This is very similar to the real-time 3D scanning we’ve seen in the past, but the hardware and software combination make this a snap to reproduce. Get the source code from his page linked at the top and don’t miss his demo video after the break.

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The Blender Foundation has just received a new render farm. It came in the form of a four-drawer file cabinet something akin to the popular Ikea clusters. Each draw holds four motherboards, power supplies, and hard drives and the whole cabinet will eventually add up to a 16-node cluster. Join in on the geeky excitement by watching the delivery and unpacking video after the break. We love it when organizations share the details on the hardware they use. Read the rest of this entry »

Building a render cluster doesn’t mean you have to spend a lot of money, even if you’re buying brand new hardware. [Janne] built this 6 unit cluster inside of a 6 drawer IKEA Helmer cabinet. He wanted the cluster to be low power and low cost. After finding a good price on 6 65nm Intel Core 2 CPUs, he found 6 cheap Gigabyte motherboards. The memory on each board was maxed at 8GB. With 24 2.4GHz cores consuming 400W, the power consumption and cost isn’t much more than a high end PC. Each board is running Fedora 8 and mounts an NFS share. Dr Queue is used to manage the render farm’s processes. [Janne] says jobs that previously took all night now only require about 10-12 minutes. The estimated capacity is 186Gflops, but plans are already in motion for a12Tflop version.

His site also has plans for an underwater camera housing like our recent post. If you want to see more IKEA abuse, check out IKEA Hacker, even if it’s not very technical.

[via Hackzine]

[UPDATE: yep, we duped ourselves]