ANAHEIM, CA — At SIGGRAPH 2013, Motorola Mobility announced the development of new mobile graphics processing technology designed to create a rich platform for handheld entertainment and built on Pixar Animation Studio’s open-source standard, OpenSubdiv.
The result is a vivid creative canvas made for the small screen that allows for more visually complex characters, more organic shapes, and enhanced new experiences. Motorola sees this as a breakthrough opportunity for creators and has been collaborating with Oscar-winning animator Jan Pinkava and team of animators, modelers, and sound experts to explore this new entertainment landscape.
"Storytelling is foundational to our history, our teachings and our relationships. We tell stories to our children and one another. They bind us together. So it's exciting for us to start exploring what happens when we make stories for perhaps the most personal devices we own - our smartphones," says Regina Dugan, senior vice president of ATAP, a division of Motorola Mobility.
Motorola has developed technology to make optimum use of the graphics processing unit (GPU) capability. The result is that 60 percent of the previously untapped power can now be made available for additional visual content. The creative storytelling canvas built by Motorola taps into this performance and incorporates Pixar's OpenSubdiv standard for the first time in a mobile device. This represents a technological leap in smartphone graphics utilization.
"We're investigating how a mobile device can permit stories to be told in a more immersive, interactive way. This is not a flat content experience or the viewing of stories made for the big screen and shown on a small one," explains Baback Elmieh, technical program lead in the Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group of Motorola Mobility.
Motorola is sharing this work by contributing back to OpenSubdiv and discussing the technical lessons learned at SIGGRAPH 2013.
Motorola's contribution to the open source code will be available soon.