This time it's a double, French-flavored announcement: Realviz (assets) and Kynogon are now officially part of Autodesk. According to the Realviz acquisition press release, Realviz Matchmover, Retimer and VTour will no longer be available as standalone products, and technology from these applications will be integrated into future versions of Autodesk's existing software. It should be noted that a cut-down version of Matchmover called MMTrack was already being offered as a Max plugin, and as reported a while ago, it had been made available to Max users for free. Kynogon, on the other hand, are the developers of Kynapse, an AI engine that gives characters spatial awareness, enabling them to navigate digital environments.

Read the news at TechnologyReview.com and CrunchGear.com.

Read the news at TechnologyReview.com.

Good to hear, Wacom's pressure-sensitive tablets are always appreciated by artists, but what we'd really like to see at this point is something that resembles drawing on paper (e-paper display?) with an undo button and all the capabilities of the digital realm. Either that or a tablet with and HDR display that would justify the backlighting. According to the press release, Wacom's new developments compared to older touchscreens offer superior optical performance, increased sensitivity and durability. Read the press release for more.

The weather in La Jolla gets a bit humid during certain parts of the year. Wojciech Jarosz, Matthias Zwicker and Henrik Wann Jensen from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) have presented a new method for calculating volumetric photon mapping that is faster and produces images with less noise. Read the article at UCSD.edu for more.

NVidia's CEO gave a long talk on his views on the future of visual computing. Read the article at Bit-tech.net.

Phun is a Master of Science thesis project by Computer Science student Emil Ernerfeldt at the Umeå University in Sweden. Check out the sample video and download the latest version.

Check 'em out at Autodesk.com.

The new release of Sorenson Media’s compression and encoding software offers speed increases, improved audio and video quality, workflow enhancements and many pre-processing options. More information at SorensonMedia.com.

According to the article Mental Images and Gelato teams are working together on hardware acceleration for Mental Ray and ray tracing. Read the details at VFXWorld.com.