Our Technology

The 3D Experience Engine

What is a GPU?

What about the CPU?

Behind Tenomichi's product range is a powerful new type of software engine called 3D Experience. 3D Experience is similar to software engines used to make computer games however, rather than being built to run a particular game;

"3D Experience enables the real-time combination, streaming and manipulation of 3D objects, 3D scenes, media and images within a GPU".

OK, 
If that statement is bit more techie than you feel comfortable with then stop reading this web page, download our free beta here, have a play with it and then continue reading.

Engineers, software programmers, press, geeks and those who have an interest in technology read on..

Displaying what's on you computer

Hardware accelerated playback of DVDs and high definition DVDs

Real-time special effects

Well, the CPU is still a vital part of your PC and Tenomichi products use this too whether you have a single core CPU or multicore CPUs. There are certain parts of Tenomichi's products that use the capabilities of CPU's and certain parts that use the capabilities of the GPU. Fundamentally these two pieces of silicon do different things and we use these capabilities to their maximum.

Well for those of you who are not familiar with 3D and how it works, here are a few basic concepts.

Lets imagine that you are hungry and want a veggie burger but you decide you want to make the image of one on your computer, kinda like a 3D burger. To make it, as well as the 3D burger we are going to need some other things. The collective name for everything we need is called a "Scene".

A Scene consists of;

An object. In this case it's our 3D burger

A light so we can see the 3D burger. Without a light it would be dark and we could not see our burger

A camera so we can see our 3D burger

We call this a scene of a burger. 

To make this burger you need a 3D mesh of a burger, some images to wrap around it to make it look real, a light.

What's displayed on your monitor is what the camera sees.

So that's it, a scene of a burger but lets go further and add a video to the foil and may be even animate my burger with sound.

Well in this example we have used a hi end 3D program called 3D studio max to create this animated burger-news-reader, but that's exactly what 3D Experience can do on a standard computer with a GPU graphics card. Combine 3D objects with video, animate them and render the synchronized scene and in real time.

The User Interface (UI) of 3D Media Center and Tenomichi's other applications are created using 3D objects of buttons and screens and are animated. We call this new application programming technique scene based programming. It shares many of the similar characteristics of computer games programming but instead  of making a game, we make applications; 3D applications.

The 3D experience engine is a piece of complex software that co-ordinates all the different types of data and synchronizes them. It uses the GPU to create a complete 3D interface and uses the GPU hardware to accelerate the playback of different video and 3D files. 

Here's a block diagram of how it works.

As you can see 3D Experience can handle almost every video and audio file format as long as you have a Direct Show codec for it. It can transcode from format to format, MPEG2 to Dvix to WMV etc. In addition to 3D models 3D Experience can load complete 3D models, parts of 3D models and a 3D UI. 

3D Experience takes these data types and synchronizes them into "Chunks" of data. These chunks can contain anything from audio, video, 3D meshes, animation data, texturing data, UV mapping data and more. The animation manager can accept meshes and animation data from any published modelling package but we have not yet released a plugin for the mesh formater.

A "Chunk" contains all the data necessary to create  a frame of multimedia. There can be as many frames in a second as you wish but there typically 25/50 frames per second or 30/60 frames per second or 24 frames per second (feature film).

3D Experience creates a connection to DirectShow and DirectX by using the GPU's memory and a patented technique called Managed Networked Render Targets (MNRT) see here. 3D Experience OpenGL ES is presently being developed with the assistance of Mobile graphics chip manufacturers.

DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA), new mesh acceleration techniques and direct memory management is used to fully take advantage of the graphics hardware. Video and images are mixed within a 3D scene and it is within this scene that pixel shaders and vertex shaders can be used to add special effects.

Finally the content can be output in various different formats from WMV HD to MPEG4 and even some initial MPEG21 formats like PhotoZip.

3D Experience has been used to rapidly create a whole range of products. We hope you enjoy using our products.

The 3D experience engine is a piece of complex software that co-ordinates all the different types of data and synchronizes them. It uses the GPU to create a complete 3D interface and uses the GPU hardware to accelerate the playback of different video and 3D files. 

Here's a block diagram of how it works.

As you can see 3D Experience can handle almost every video and audio file format as long as you have a Direct Show codec for it. It can transcode from format to format, MPEG2 to Dvix to WMV etc. In addition to 3D models 3D Experience can load complete 3D models, parts of 3D models and a 3D UI. 

3D Experience takes these data types and synchronizes them into "Chunks" of data. These chunks can contain anything from audio, video, 3D meshes, animation data, texturing data, UV mapping data and more. The animation manager can accept meshes and animation data from any published modelling package but we have not yet released a plugin for the mesh formater.

A "Chunk" contains all the data necessary to create  a frame of multimedia. There can be as many frames in a second as you wish but there typically 25/50 frames per second or 30/60 frames per second or 24 frames per second (feature film).

3D Experience creates a connection to DirectShow and DirectX by using the GPU's memory and a patented technique called Managed Networked Render Targets (MNRT) see here. 3D Experience OpenGL ES is presently being developed with the assistance of Mobile graphics chip manufacturers.

DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA), new mesh acceleration techniques and direct memory management is used to fully take advantage of the graphics hardware. Video and images are mixed within a 3D scene and it is within this scene that pixel shaders and vertex shaders can be used to add special effects.

Finally the content can be output in various different formats from WMV HD to MPEG4 and even some initial MPEG21 formats like PhotoZip.

3D Experience has been used to rapidly create a whole range of products. We hope you enjoy using our products.