Happy New Year 2023

Dear followers,

Another year has passed, and I was once again lucky enough to work on some outstanding projects and share amazing times with very precious people. Kind, smart and sensitive people who touched my heart, and brought me back to life. I was simply given the chance to be in good company, and that counts more than anything else.

The project I am most proud of if the one that was used to generate the wishing card: Quantum of Sol-R. A good old (but still fast!) ray-tracer that makes use of real photons to improve the quality of the rendering. By using a random generator device based on quantum properties of real photons, the ray-tracer is now capable of using pure randomness to process light transport. God does play dice, and that’s good news to me.

I am wishing you all a wonderful 2023. Take care of yourselves, and be kind to each other. We’re only humans after all.

Quantum of Sol-R: A singular graphics engine making use of quantum physics

Ten years ago I wrote a graphics engine as a personal project, perhaps one of the first to want to access the Holy Grail of computer-generated imagery: real-time ray tracing.

To learn this extraordinary news that is the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Physics to Mr Alain Aspect sounded like a reminder. It's been a while that I wanted to integrate in one way or another a little quantum in my work, the opportunity to get started was too good.

Quantum coincidence or not, I work in Geneva and the company ID Quantique happens to have its premises in Carouge, a 30-minute walk from my home. This company designs, produces and markets a random number generator based on the quantum properties of photons, and my graphics engine is in dire need of random numbers.

Better, it is the quality of the randomness which determines the beauty of the final image. What could be better than asking the best experts, the photons themselves, to help me transport light correctly in this virtual world?

The complete source code of the graphics engine is online, and available to everyone but I am still waiting for the Quantum device provider to allow me to make the code public. In the meantime, run it, modify it and improve it. The beauty of science is endless, it's up to you to bring it to light! (As if light could play a role in this world 😉 )

https://github.com/favreau/Sol-R

If it is still impossible for me to visualize the quantum world, perhaps it is given me now to be able to contemplate the random it creates.

EPFL: Scientific Exploration

 

My work at the Blue Brain Project is all about scientific exploration.

Exploration relies on building software that combines data integration, analysis and interactive visualization to build, modify and navigate through large scientific datasets. For this, Blue Brain built and open-sourced the Blue Brain BioExplorer.

The Blue Brain BioExplorer (BBBE), which started as an internal project, is now open source. It was originally developed to answer key scientific questions related to the Coronavirus as a use case and to deliver a visualization tool.

 

Today, the BioExplorer allows to reconstruct, visualize, explore and describe in detail the structure and function of highly-detailed biological structures such as molecular systems, neurons, astrocytes, blood vessels, and more. You can see the first application of the BioExplorer in ‘A Machine-Generated View of the Role of Blood Glucose Levels in the Severity of COVID-19’ study.

More information here.

OUTREACH: Brain(s) - CCCB - Barcelona (27 July — 11 December 2022)

The human brain is the most complex object we know of and the one that raises most questions in the fields of both science and philosophy. Brain(s) looks at how, throughout history, art, science, and philosophy have studied and represented this fascinating organ

 

https://www.cccb.org/en/exhibitions/file/brains/237851

I am proud to contribute to that project by creating an open-source software (Blue Brain BioExplorer) that could generate the images that stand aside of Cajal's originals.