ARM Community: Play with me… GPUs and CPUs optimized - ARM Community

People often ask me “so why does everyone get so excited about the touch screen phones?” What they really want to know is what is the secret sauce that’s led to the explosion of sleek keypad less objects which we love to stroke and poke? Well it’s actually pretty simple...It is in our nature as human beings to interact through visual and tactile means.

Here is a simple illustration... A while ago I took up diving and spent many happy hours drifting around in the red sea looking at all the pretty coloured life that abounds in the warm seas off the Sinai peninsula. After I gained a little more experience and confidence it was very interesting to watch newbie’s diving for the first time. One of the rules of diving, particularly around coral reefs is Don’t Touch! Primarily to protect the wild life, but also to protect you from yourself, as some of the prettier things are actually pretty nasty. Even though having been told this the enticement to touch and interact with all these new fabulous weird and wonderful creatures is extremely hard to suppress. They taunt you with their vivid colours, playful dances and energetic displays. It’s this urge to interact in this way that the device manufacturers have tapped into. Using the performance available to them through GPU and CPU technology device manufacturers are enticing us to interact by creating shoals of brightly coloured icons which swim across the screen inviting us to reach out and touch them.

So is multi touch and slick 2D UI the limit of this technology? Hell no! We have full 3D UI, stereoscopic displays, 3D tracking and sensing to look forward to yet... this is not the end, this is just the beginning. If you thought deftly stroking your way through your album collection was a joyfully experience, wait until you’re waving a hand through virtual objects popping out of the screen with force feedback pads gently providing biofeedback as you connect (repeat after me... “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for...” ). When you are lost in your Minority Report fantasy have an appreciation for the complexity needed to get all of this to work. From the image processing which is capturing camera input and recognising your hand gesture and tracking each finger to pushing the pixels creating the stereoscopic image and the 3D UI. We work hard to make this stuff look easy... its why I get out of bed in the morning.




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Ed Plowman, Technical Marketing Manager - Media Processing Division, ARM, Ed has recently returned to ARM Ltd after a stint at Intel where he worked as a games industry evangelist. During his time at ARM Ed guided the graphics processing strategy for a number of years. Ed was also a founding member of Khronos and a significant force in the creation of the OpenGL ES working group. Ed has continued his work within Khronos occupying a seat on the Khronos board of promoters for many years and more recently has taken up the post of Khronos treasurer. Ed started his career as one of the founding members of Argonaut technologies which later became ARC cores, an off shoot of Argonaut Software, working on CPU based 3D graphics technology and later helping create the ARC processor core.