The quest for omnisight

18 September 2019
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As a wearer of glasses since the age of eight, I’ve always envied those lucky, lucky people who have perfect/near perfect vision. They wake up in the morning and they can just see everything in full 8K resolution as it should be. What a pure joy that must be!

Conversely, the first few seconds for of my myopic world (my sight, that is, not my attitude…) is a soft, blurry sub-240p view until I’ve stuck my arm out, located my specs by hand - a bit like “Thing” from the Adams Family - and put them on my face. Then, the world is brought back into resolution.

Don’t get me wrong. I generally like wearing glasses and have never considered Lasik or similar. Contact lenses, while a bit of a faff, are just fine when I want to go glasses-free. However, now I’m reaching the age where I need two sets of glasses - my usual pair for distance resolution and now a pair of reading glasses - the first few seconds of my day just got a little more complicated.

Another brick

Personally, though, I would never go down the bi-focal route. With apologies to those with bi-focals - no offence intended - for some reason, they have always reminded me of the animated villainous teacher from Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” music video...“We don’t need no edu-ka-shun!” It’s a great tune, but the video freaked me right out as a kid. I’m not even sure if the animated character is portrayed with glasses, let alone bi-focals - but that’s what my memory recalls.

Anyway, I’m getting somewhat off-topic. While the problem with my short-sighted eyes is about the light focusing in front of the retina as well as the shape and size of my eyeballs and so on, the different kinds of glasses bring it all back into focus and resolution at different ends of the vision spectrum.

The challenges of handling different resolutions and formats exists with our customers - albeit very differently, of course. We see a mix of requirements across situational awareness, ISR and radar applications for everything from totally new, very high resolution and frame rate platforms to upgrade platforms where there is a mix of new high resolution and lower resolution I/O to integrate with older cameras or displays. Our customers expect us to meet both ends of their vision and display needs - and with the new NVP2102, we can do exactly that.

Huge punch

The NVP2102 is pretty smart in that it has the capability to handle and process multiple video I/O standards to accommodate both ends of the spectrum. Like the recently launched NVP2000, it packs a huge GPGPU performance punch on the small XMC form factor (up to 2.3 TFLOPS peak) with the NVIDIA Pascal P2000 chip-down GPU.

But: what’s equally as impressive is the video it can capture and output. Want to capture and interface to high-speed serial digital interface cameras? No problem; the NVP2102 provides four 3G-SDI inputs and two 3G-SDI outputs. Want to output and interface to the latest DisplayPort displays? You’ve got it; the NVP2102 provides two DisplayPort 1.4 outputs. Want to output and interface to older displays? Absolutely; the NVP2102 has that covered too with two DVI outputs and a VGA output.

Remarkably, the NVP2102 fits all this on to the XMC form factor to offer this huge breadth of flexibility and performance to a wealth of vision and image process applications.

”All in all, it’s just another … pretty cool Abaco product”.

Hmmm… Not as catchy as the original...

Stuart Heptonstall

Stuart is Abaco’s Global Product Manager for graphics and related products, including the extensive work we are doing in AI and machine learning, based on NVIDIA’s technology. Located at our European HQ in Towcester, England, Stuart achieved a BEng in Communications Systems Engineering at Leeds Metropolitan University, and an MBA from Loughborough University.