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The guys at TweakTown have uncovered an article in a Taiwanese magazine “PC Home Advance” that shows how to circumvent NVidia’s SLI restrictions in the ForceWare drivers through simply reflashing your BIOS.
PC Home Advance in Taiwan managed to work out if you flash GIGABYTE’s EX58-UD4 motherboard with the latest F6 GIGABYTE UD4P BIOS (this board has official SLI support) from the GIGABYTE website, it will enable SLI support on the cheaper UD4 model.
A neat trick for sure, and one that proves that NVidia’s restrictions are largely just based on making money from licensing fees, as this non-SLI board obviously supports it.
Only 2 days after their previous announcement, NVidia has just announced that they’re got PhysX in the Wii SDK now as well.
“Nintendo has reshaped the home entertainment and video game market with the success of the Wii console. Adding a PhysX SDK for Wii is key to our cross-platform strategy and integral to the business model for our licensed game developers and publishers,”
This is great news for Gamers & Game Developers, as it puts the NVidia PhysX system in both consoles. However, the Wii is significantly less-powerful than the PS3 and lacking in the Coprocessor-support that the PS3 has (Cell processor’s contain several stream processors). In addition, the Wii is based on ATI’s Hollywood chipset, a direct competitor to NVidia. I guess it’s better to have something than nothing.
Information Aesthetics has tipped me off to two fascinating new web-based visualization tools for Twitter analysis. First, the “Social Collider:
The Social Collider [socialcollider.net] data visualization reveals cross-connections between conversations on Twitter. One can search for usernames or topics, which are tracked through time and visualized much like the way a particle collider draws pictures of subatomic matter. Posts that did not resonate with anyone just connect to the next item in the stream. The ones that did, however, spin off and horizontally link to users or topics who relate to them, either directly or in terms of their content.
Then, the “Social Weather Mapper”:
Social Weather Mapping [smalltalkapp.com] geo-locates recent tweets in the US that contain the terms “sunny”, “rainy”, “snowy”, “windy”, and “foggy”. The size of the circles are determined by the number of tweets, and are colored by its current dominant weather. As sufficient “weather” data is aggregated, it can be used to form a multi-dimensional picture of the weather and the effect is has on our lives.
Both are part of the Google Chrome Experiments website, so they are entirely JavaScript & In-Browser.
An interesting Art Installation in Melbourne, Australia.
DATAFLUX 0.1 gallery installation at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia. Using vvvv. Mapped to pillars with sound and strobe light synchronisation. (currently seeking sponsorship to venture into more dynamic territories and space to exhibit. Please feel free to contact me for further information). I will be showing a new work in April at blindside.org.au in Melbourne where I will be using the entire gallery architecture as the canvas, creating a much more dynamic and immersive experience. More work at kitwebster.com.au
Frameboxx has announced the Frameflixx2009 Awards for animation, visual effects, and short films.
Our core objective is to invigorate your right brain and unite the brightest creative minds in the country on a unique platform that recognizes and rewards skill and the spirit of achievement. If you’re a student of Animation, Visual Effects or Film Making, you are invited to compete in our exciting categories and get a chance to get rewarded on a platform that aims to bring you closer than before to the exciting Media & Entertainment Industry.
They’ve got four separate awards with various requirements for entry (props & dialogue mostly), and some recognition awards. Entries must be received by March 21st, and the awards will be handed out in Mumbai on April 3rd.
A cute, short 60s animation done by David OReilly for Pictoplasma.
My friends over at Pictoplasma commissioned me to do the opening animation for their festival next week. It will play before all the cinema screenings and be used for general publicity, including on Berlin’s u-bahn screens for a while.
Gamer’s Digest has a great writeup on the process of making the Intro Cinematic for the new Killzone2 game for the PS3.
Assets were processed and created in Modo, Z-brush and Maya, exported to Maya, where they were rigged and animated, then exported to Houdini which was used as the primary 3d application for all the final stages in the project including shading, lighting, rendering and visual effects. All layers where rendered using Mantra, Houdini’s own renderer before being composited in Digital Fusion.
The Omidyar Foundation has just givem $4m to the Sunlight Foundation to develop new web-based data visualization tools of government data. They’ve been at this for a while, and in fact this is Omidyar’s second investment, the first one also being $4m.
The Omidyar Foundation has a long history of funding experimental new projects on the web, from nonprofit grants like this one for Sunlight to investments in ground-breaking private companies like Digg, Seesmic, Wikia and Linden Labs.
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