VizWorld.com

New version of OpenSceneGraph is out.  This version adds “osgAnimation” and “osgVolume” libraries, DICOM support, and more.

PERTHSHIRE, Scotland – 12th February 2009 – OpenSceneGraph Professional Services announces the release of OpenSceneGraph 2.8, the industry’s leading open-source scene graph technology, designed to accelerate application development and improve 3D graphics performance. OpenSceneGraph 2.8 written entirely in Standard C++ and built upon OpenGL, offers developers working in the visual simulation, game development, virtual reality, scientific visualization and modeling markets – a real-time visualization tool which eclipses commercial scene graph toolkits in functionality, stability and performance. OpenSceneGraph 2.8 runs on all Microsoft Windows platforms, Apple OS/X, GNU/Linux, IRIX, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and FreeBSD operating systems.

via News/Press/OSG2.8 – osg.

Science openscenegraph

The folks at ARSights have integrated the Google Earth browser plugin with a Webcam & Augmented reality system.  The result lets you browse Google Earth until you find a nice 3D Model of a building or landmark of interest, and then view it via an Augmented Reality display on a printable Marker.

They’ve also got a nice video of it in-action, linked after the break.

ARSights.

Read more…

Science augmented reality

VFXWorld has an article up about the compositing used in various scenes of the new Friday the 13th Movie.

A major part of Asylum’s contribution in the pre-production stage was to evaluate the script and pinpoint precise scenes in which vfx could be used to enhance or augment the scares. Asylum’s Mitchell S. Drain had a crew of about 10 working on Friday and, in the end, the house only ended up working on about 25 shots total. Still, despite being few in number, their subtlety added a lot to the scare level.

….. >> VFXWorld / Feature Articles << …...

Graphics

Henry Selick, director of Coraline, is getting alot more press these days as the movie moves towards awards season.

One Step at a Time for the Puppet of a Thousand Faces – CGSociety

Director Henry Selick on Coraline | Studio Daily.

Graphics

Andy Beaulieu took information from the Descry project and used it to turn a boring Bar Graph of the world’s population into an interesting-to-watch “Bucket” graph.

Data Visualization is a hot topic right now, and understandably so. It seems that a diverse amount of data is being collected for every aspect of human life, and RIA technology is being used to create new ways of interpreting and using that data.One interesting Data Visualization project using Silverlight is the Descry Project which contains several open source visualizations which are available on Codeplex.

via andy.beaulieu.com > Home – Data Visualization with Physics.

Science

Over at the “Information Aesthetics” blog, they challenged their users to come up with physical visualizations of various datasets.  Ranging from recreations of classics to some fairly new techniques, it’s a great collection of photographs.

Paper-Based Visualization Competition: The Winner and More – information aesthetics.

Science

The “Design O’Blog” has a short interview with Von Glitschka of Floating Banana.  Von Glitschka is an amazing designer & illustrator with a knack for being silly.  Alot of the interview is silly (“If you could be any illustrator tool”), but it has a few nuggets of worth:

Most don’t realize I worked 15 years for others prior to starting my own business in 2002. I wouldn’t recommend a freelance career right out of art school, get some experience under your belt, learn from veterans, make mistakes on other peoples dime, and build a network.

10 Questions With Von Glitschka | The Design O’Blog.

Science

A life-size virtual construct named the “Holographic Virtual Assistant” is now running at the Audi Center Sydney, Australia.  Using 3M’s dynamic Vikuti rear projection film and a projector, the life-size image is projected onto a 1cm chick chunk of Perspex.

Audi and Australian firm PDM have announced that a new holographic virtual assistant is in use at Audi Centre Sydney. The hologram is reportedly designed to facilitate enhanced communication and customer experience by delivering special digital content and technology to customers in the showroom.

via DailyTech – Australian Audi Dealer Gets Help from Holograms.

Hardware hologram

HotHardware lives up to it’s name covering BFG’s latest product:  A Water Cooled NVidia GTX295 called “BFG GeForce GTX 295 H2O graphics card with ThermoIntelligence Water Cooling Solution.” The GTX295 is one of NVidia’s latest “combination” cards, sandwiching two video cards together for a 1-slot SLI solution.  Of course, this makes developing a watercooled solution a little “unique”.

As for specifications, the card contains 1.8GB of GDDR3 memory, a 576MHz core clock speed, a 142MHz shader clock speed, a 1998MHz memory date rate and 480 combined processing cores. If you’re eager to slap one of these into your rig, you can find it available for shipment starting tomorrow in North America and Europe, though no price is mentioned. For those needing additional performance right out of the box, you should probably hold off for the factory overclocked version, which is on track for a March 2009 release.

via BFG First With Water-Cooled NVIDIA GTX 295 GPU – HotHardware.

Hardware nvidia

AV Interactive Magazine has an interesting case study about a 3D Virtual Reality lab built in Germany capable of holding 30 people in a half-cylinder+floor environment.

At the University of Siegen, Germany, the faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Science decided to set up an impressive 3D installation in their Virtual Reality lab: They created a presentation room with an area of about 50 square metres that has room for up to 30 people. This is an absolute novelty, because it is technically quite advanced: A half-cylinder and floor projection in a room about 5.0m in diameter and 2.6m in height allows the users to work interactively in a computer simulated, virtual environment.

via CASE STUDY: University of Siegen 3D Lab | News | AV Interactive | Audio Visual News | AV Magazine | avinteractive.co.uk.

Science