The economic downturn and the lack of investment led us to focus on our money making business. All our projects use YVision so we never stopped refining and adding new features to it but, unfortunately, we had to hold on for documentation and releases.

We have now removed the download for the OS X version as the required an old version of MonoDevelop that is not available from their website.

In this picture you can find out what we’ve working on lately. This is for internal consumption but we hope to have better and more frequent news.

EDIT: Let me add that we dropped Silverlight support as Microsoft literally stopped supporting it.  After more than an year, they haven’t fixed any of the issues we mentioned in our previous post.

Dynamically generate a test page

When running your Sliverlight application in the browser, you need to have an HTML page that embeds the control and loads your application. If the application has 3D graphics, you need to add the following parameter to the HTML:

<param name="EnableGPUAcceleration" value="true" />
 

Fortunately, Visual Studio has a “dynamically generate a test page” option in the project properties, saving you some development time. Unfortunately, they didn’t add the required parameter in the page generator, making the generated page pointless.

We have created our own page generator that fixes this issue. When using the YVision project templates for Silverlight 5, you find it called as a post-build event. To use the generated page when debugging, open the project properties, click on the “Debug” tab and then check the “Specific Page” radio button. Click on the “…” button and select the .html page that is now part of the project.

User permisson required to use GPU acceleration

We all know that the browser has the great responsibility of only executing secure code. The 3D graphics depend on an essential third-party component, the graphics board driver. These drivers may have bugs that can be exploited to execute malicious code.

It’s fair that Silverlight should ask for permission to use the GPU, just like it does for the microphone and the webcam. Unfortunately, the Silverlight team chose a solution that requires at least 8 mouse clicks and no explanation at all.

When entering your web site the user will have to:

• Right click on the Silverlight plugin and a context menu will appear.
• Click on the “Silverlight” menu item.
• Open to the “Permissions” tab.
• Look for the host address of the page you’re visiting.
• Select the “3D Graphics: use blocked display drivers” option , that should have “Denied” right in front of it.
• Click on the button “Allow” located after the list.
• Click on “OK” top close the dialog and then (at least with YVision/Axiom) you’ll have to reload the page.

I really hope there will be a Silverlight 5.1 that shows a message and requires a single click. Just like it does for the webcam and the microphone. It’s that simple…

No support for GPU acceleration outside Windows

Silverlight runs on the major browser both on Windows and Mac OS X but, 3D accelerated graphics are only supported in Windows.

I can’t find any official information about this. If you google for this information you’ll only find people asking this same question. The closest I can find is “At Mix11, speaker said that 3D support was being considered [for Mac] and they knew it was important to many. So, not-committed.” 

We would love to have an official stand on these three issues!…

Check out the features in this latest release:

• Support for Silverlight 5 final (RTW) – Now you can run your 3D interactive applications in the browser. Extensive work has been done to make sure you app compiles for .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 5 with minimal code changes. Check out a couple of demos at our cases page.
• SLARToolKit on .NET 4.0 – Now you can take advantage of the popular augmented-reality engine on other platforms other than Silverlight. SLARToolKit is now included in the SDK, you don’t need a separate download. Be sure to check the SLARToolKit license to make sure it fits your needs.
• Steering behaviors – These allow you to apply to your objects the behaviors defined by Craig Reynolds like seek, flee, pursue, evade, wander, arrival, obstacle avoidance, containment, wall following, path following and flow field following. These can be combined in the behavior trees to achieve complex behaviors like flocking, queuing and many more.
• Settings and visualizers – You can now easily expose settings to the users so that they can customize/calibrate the application.
• New project templates, item templates and code snippets – In our continuous effort to simplify your work, we added many more templates.  The samples are provided as templates so that you can mess around with them as much as possible. All the samples work on Silverlight and Windows.
• Multiple bug fixes - The framework has shown to be very robust but not without its issues. If you find any new issue, please report it to us…

This is one of the samples supplied with the YVision SDK, demonstrating the use of computer vision, realtime 3D graphics and physics. It also demonstrates the use of the multiple-cores of a CPU and the support for GPU acceleration in Silverlight 5.

Download the SDK to check the source code and customize it to your needs.

For security reasons, Silverlight 5 requires your permission to use 3D graphics. To do this, right click on the application, click on “Silverlight” item menu and then on the “Permissions” tab. Select the “http://www.yvision.com:80″ site, click on the “Allow” button and then on “OK”.

NOTES:

This demo requires a webcam and Silverlight 5.

If the camera image does not appear, you may have the wrong video input device assigned. To fix this, right click on the application, click on “Silverlight” item menu and then on the “Webcam / Mic” tab. Select the correct webcam in the “Video Source” drop-down and then click on “OK”.

Silverlight 5 supports 3D graphics in Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome on Windows. Currently, Silverlight 5 does not support 3D graphics on Mac OS X.

This is one of the samples supplied with the YVision SDK, demonstrating the use of computer vision, realtime 3D graphics and physics. It also demonstrates the use of the multiple-cores of a CPU and the support for GPU acceleration in Silverlight 5.

Download the SDK to check the source code and customize it to your needs.

For security reasons, Silverlight 5 requires your permission to use 3D graphics. To do this, right click on the application, click on “Silverlight” item menu and then on the “Permissions” tab. Select the “http://www.yvision.com:80″ site, click on the “Allow” button and then on “OK”.

NOTES:

This demo requires a webcam and Silverlight 5.

If the camera image does not appear, you may have the wrong video input device assigned. To fix this, right click on the application, click on “Silverlight” item menu and then on the “Webcam / Mic” tab. Select the correct webcam in the “Video Source” drop-down and then click on “OK”.

Silverlight 5 supports 3D graphics in Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome on Windows. Currently, Silverlight 5 does not support 3D graphics on Mac OS X.

Axiom is a port to C# of the popular Ogre render engine. We are helping this open-source project to support environments that don’t allow the “unsafe” keyword (the use of pointers). The video shows a build of the latest source running on a HTC HD7 device.
We will start now working on adding support to YVision for Windows Phone 7 and Silverlight 5, all with the same rendering engine we are using for Windows and Mac OS X.

YVision is developed on .NET and, when we started developing it, it was impossible to find .NET specific projects in these areas. There were only native (non .NET) projects and very few had sister projects for .NET wrappers, enabling their use in .NET projects.

For many years we integrated OpenCV, Ogre and ODE as our primary engines, with their .NET wrappers MOGRE and OdeNet. We didn’t find any OpenCV wrapper with a suitable license so we developed our own, that is also included in the current release of YVision. For video input, we use the DirectShow.NET wrapper.

When we started developing YVision 4.0 we added a new requisite. It has to execute cross-platform and have as little platform-specific code as possible.

.NET is compatible with Windows, Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 but, with Mono (one more awesome open-source project), it’s possible to have .NET applications executing in Mac OS X and Linux, and with Xamarin‘s products, in iOS and Android.

The YVision core is compatible with .NET and Mono, making it compatible with all the mentioned platforms. The challenge was to have third-party engines support all these platforms, as each one of these have its own restrictions.

Mono supports P/Invoke (used by many wrappers) but doesn’t support mixed-mode assemblies (used by some wrappers, like Mogre). Silverlight and the mobile platforms support none of these (Silverlight 5 supports P/Invoke but “Out-Of-Browser”).

The solution to have as little platform specific code as possible is to have fully managed engines (.NET specific code). We looked around and found some good candidates that have already been integrated into YVision 4.0.

Axiom is a port to C# of the Ogre rendering engine. It’s a bit behind in terms of Ogre features but it’s fully managed code, Mono compatible and supports DirectX, OpenGL and XNA rendering systems. It makes extensive use of “unsafe” (a common C# performance optimization) that unfortunately is not supported in Silverlight and Windows Phone 7. We’ve been actively contributing code to fix this limitation. We are experiencing very reasonable frame rates on these platforms, and we hope to have demos very soon.

bullet-xna is a port to C# of the Bullet physics engine. It’s fully managed code but it depends on the XNA math library that is not available in all the platforms. We’ve also been actively contributing code to replace this library by the Mono.GameMath, that is compatible with all platforms.

We’ve also been contributing to SLARToolkit, a fully managed code augmented reality library. For example, we have contributed with an adaptive threshold that makes tracking much more robust to lighting changes. We are waiting for the binary release and approval of some more contributions (Right, René? ).

We are looking to other projects like AForge, to replace OpenCV, and GStreamer, to replace DirectShow.NET.

Currently YVision can be developed and executed on Windows and Mac OS X. Next, we will support Windows Phone 7 and we will upgrade the support of Silverlight 5 to the RTM release (currently depending on the Axiom release). In the near future we will start working on support for iOS and Android.

This version includes the following new features and improvements:

• Support for Mac OS X Lion.
• Upgraded MonoDevelop integration for MonoDevelop 2.8
• Mac specific dialogs for render settings and camera selection.
• Several performance improvements that doubled the frame rate of the samples.

Get this update from the download page and follow the simple instructions on how to install it.

Notice that if you have MonoDevelop 2.6 installed, you’ll have to upgrade to 2.8

Mac OS X is a trademark of Apple Inc.

We are committed to a monthly release with bug fixes, new features and support for more platforms. This month we are happy to announce support for development on Mac OS X.

YVision for Mac OS X is distributed as an add-in for MonoDevelop 2.6, a free open-source integrated development environment (IDE). Mac developers can now take advantage of a modern component-based architecture for the development of robust Natural User Interfaces (NUI) on a powerful and easy to use IDE, with code templates, color highlighting, code completion, integrated debugger and much more.

Just like in other platforms, YVision for Mac OS X features:

• real-time 3D rendering
• 3D physics simulation
• video input handling
• input devices handling
• computer vision
• multi-tasking

Get it from the download page and follow the simple instructions on how to install.

Mac OS is a trademark of Apple Inc.

We are proud to announce the release of one more version of the YVision SDK. This is part of an aggressive schedule of frequent upgrades with new functionalities and new target platforms:

• Silverlight 5 Beta integration: it is now possible to create Silverlight YVision projects with the help of Visual Studio project templates.
• SLARToolkit integration: allow the creation of marker-based Augmented Reality applications on the web.
• New tutorials:
• Tutorial 2 – Behaviors 101: explains the ins and outs of the YVision Behavior concept. Don’t forget to check the project template for this tutorial.
• New Visual Studio item templates:
• Behaviors
• EmptyBehavior
• ActiveIterationCondition
• BehaviorTree
• CooperationDecorator
• InvocationDecorator
• CompositeBehavior
• CompositeCooperate
• CompositeInvoke
• ConditionBehavior
• Templates:
• WorldObject Template
• CompositeTemplate
• New Visual Studio project templates:
• BasicApplication
• BasicApplicationSilverlight
• BoxFall
• BoxFallSilverlight
• MarkerSilverlight: sample of Augmented Reality using SLARToolkit
• Improved camera selection dialog for windows apps.
• Bug fixing.
• Class documentation.

You can find all this on our download page!

Don’t forget to check the support page to give us feedback or solve any problem you may find.