It’s on YouTube & iTunes, and should be hitting your podstreamers soon. Enjoy!
Updates: Sorry for any problems people have had getting the Large-format version of this podcast. I think it’s finally straightened out, and hopefully it’ll be hitting your iTunes soon.
Andreas Nicolas Fischer has some coverage in Cool Hunting from making physical data visualizations.
Proving himself as both a skilled craftsman and experienced analyst the young artist makes statistical mappings like “Fundament ” which shows the allocation of the world’s gross domestic product in comparison to the worldwide derivatives volume pictured at right .
He’s also got some beautiful work done in digital images, but his website shows his interest in physical media like Wood and Paper.
TeraRecon is in the news again this week, this time with a press release announcing that they’ve reached 10,000 simultaneous users of their remote Aquarius solution.
Our installed base of servers has now grown to the point where even by the most conservative estimates, more than 10,000 users are able to access our solutions concurrently, far more than the number of licensed users any independent competitor can claim, for applications of the nature offered by the company.
Epic, makers of the U3 Unreal Engine, have announced that they’ll be releasing new features at GDC this year. From their release:
Unreal Lightmass, a new global illumination solver, will be shown for the first time at GDC. Unreal Lightmass produces high-quality static lighting with next-generation effects, such as: soft shadows with accurate penumbrae; diffuse and specular interreflection; and color bleeding. Furthermore, Epic’s new Swarm distributed computing framework enables lighting to be generated up to 10 times faster. The new lighting features are bundled with Unreal Engine 3 and benefit all current and future engine licensees. Like all of Epic’s engine features, Unreal Lightmass is available at no additional cost to licensees.
Soft Shadows and color bleeding are impressive enough, but doing it 10x faster is a huge one. Can’t wait to see this in the next round of games.
Someone sent me a link to Aaron Koblin’s website where he has alot of spectacular information visualizations shown. We’ve covered his work before in Uranium & 24 Hours of Flight.
Nick Haemel blogs over on the FireUser.com site about how the OpenGL Spec is built and progresses from Ideas to ARB Extensions to Core Spec. Of interest I found line about the difference between DX and OpenGL:
A really common question I have seen is “I see feature XYZ in the DX spec why isn t it in OpenGL ” There are several reasons. First and most importantly OpenGL is a unique separate and independent specification. It does not and should not follow any other API. Second OpenGL makes decisions that are in the best interest of the industry not of one company.
Mashable has gathered 6 visualization tools specific to twitter that do some interesting Info Vis stuff to the massive torrent of data coming from Twitter.
When reading the Twitter stream becomes stale or repetitive, try using some useful and fun Twitter applications that visualize trends, map out locations, or just please the senses.
Over at the Syncretia blog, they’ve got an article about a new art exhibit in Second Life called “body parts”. While the article is big on the meaning of physical bodies and incorporeal forms (lots of artsy fartsy stuff), the visuals are pretty impressive. The entire thing was generated with Second Life, and can be viewed within it.
Students studying the “MDS Diploma of Visual Effects & Motion Graphics” have created a short animation, with the use of Autodesk’s Combusion for some fun compositing effects, showing the city of Auckland (New Zealand) reimagined in the year 2100.
Information Aesthetics has found a set of visualizations called “Who Moves? Who Stays Put? Where’s Home?” that shows domestic migration within the US.
[...]a set of geographical data visualizations that display patterns of domestic migration, that is movement of people among the nation’s regions and states. They show gains and losses only from people who move from one state to another. The maps use estimates from the American Community Survey for 2005-2007, and from the American census from the 1980, 1990 and 2000 census.
VizWorld.com 
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