Lopht Magazine has a great article on the process & techniques used to create “Dr Manhattan” in the Watchmen film.
Crudup’s suit was also equipped with 2500 LEDs to create Manhattan’s diffuse blue glow. (Initial tests to ensure the suit’s effectiveness occurred in June 2007 with a naked Beowulf, also created by Sony Imageworks, standing in for Manhattan.) The lights stretched from Crudup’s head, fitted with a light cap, down to specially built high-tops with blue LEDs in the soles, and even special gloves, leaving only his face and neck uncovered. “He looked,” Travers says, “like a character from Tron.”
Tableau Software has announced their 2009 Customer Conference in Seattle.
Tableau’s annual Customer Conference returns to Seattle, this July 20-23. Join colleagues and top analytics experts for three days of information, interaction, insight and inspiration.
The conference is more than an opportunity to network with fellow viz fanatics – it’s an opportunity for you to become your company’s data rock star. We’ve added valuable new sessions and brought back better versions of last year’s most popular ones. Learn about new trends in business intelligence and visualization and be among the first to learn about our exciting new technologies.
Registration is open ($1195), and the first 100 registrants get a guaranteed appointment with the “Tableau Doctor” for one-on-one assistance.
The University of Illinois is announcing a new “eDREAM Institute”, a branch of the Advanced Visualization Laboratory, to focus on Digital Media & Data Visualization.
The new institute, already approved by the Illinois Board of Higher Education, is an outgrowth of the Advanced Visualization Laboratory. It recently presented to members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science its work on Ultra Hi Res Stereo Theater.
In that, the laboratory collaborates with scientists to produce digital visualizations or depictions of scientific data. Visualizations have been created in the areas of cloud formation and air flow, the nonlinear evolution of the universe, and an F3 tornado.
The laboratory also works with the Museum of Science and Industry, Adler Planetarium, the American Museum of Natural History and other museums where artists and scientists collaborate to produce data-driven digital visualizations.
In a strange move, NVidia has come out claiming that AMD & NVidia are stifling innovation and trying to edge them out of the marketplace.
The regional public relations director at Nvidia, Luciano Alibrandi, said: “What is happening is they are trying to control their market. That’s why it’s tough at the moment, because we are coming up with a great solution, and Intel is saying ‘Hey guys, don’t use it. You don’t really need it’.
“For us, they are trying to stop innovation. They are telling you that what you have is good enough. And we are telling you, for the same price why don’t you get the best?”
Strange to hear NVidia complaining about it, since they did the same thing to Voodoo & ATI.
In another mainstream win for Augmented Reality systems, Topps Baseball cards this year will support Augmented Reality models of famous players.
The new cards use technology from a company called Total Immersion. The tech has reportedly already been used in the theme park and auto design markets for a while. With Topps, the technology allows fans to take the baseball cards, hold them in front of a webcam and on the computer screen they see a 3D avatar of the player on the card, which can be used to play basic games like batting, catching and pitching.
CNet News has the story of a new startup named “Caustic” that’s attempting to build dedicated real-time Ray Tracing hardware. This isn’t a new claim, but they seem to actually have some hardware to do the job already:
The company says its software and chips allow graphics chips to carry out ray-tracing calculations at a 20-fold speed-up compared with existing PC hardware. It said it expects to deliver chips by early 2010 that will be about 200 times faster.
In a demonstration, Caustic executives manipulated a photo-quality image of a sports car, removing components and changing lighting and background settings to change reflections on the vehicle’s surface.
The REVERIE ConceptArt.org 2009 conference in Dallas, TX March 28-31 has been announced.
The ConceptArt.Org & Massive Black International Art and Design Workshop is a multi-day training event, designed by top professionals and educators in the fields of video games, toys, comic books, film, illustration, and Fine Art. This event draws students and professionals from around the globe and throughout the USA and Canada, who attend with the purpose of improving key creative skills, sharing ideas, and learning together under the guidance of world renown professional artists and designers.
Some good information is also available on CGSociety.
Information Aesthetics has the story on a group at MIT that has developed a visualization called “Los ojos del mundo (the world’s eyes)” that takes geolocated photographs around Spain left by Tourists.
Los ojos del mundo (the world’s eyes) [mit.edu] illustrates the photos people visiting Spain leave behind on Flickr as evidence of contemporary tourism in the country. Through data mining and visualization techniques, the project uncovers the evolution of the presence and flows of tourists. As photos pill up to reflect the intensity of the tourist activity, they uncover where tourists are, where they come from and what they are interested in capturing and sharing from their visit. The analysis and mapping of this data allows understanding the attractiveness of leisure cities and their points of interest. In contrast it also reveals the unphotographed regions of Spain still free from the tourist buzz.
They also have a video (shown below after the break) showing the visualization in action.
In Vienna, Austria today, TeraRecon Inc has announced “Aquarius INtuition” (“AQi”), a Remote Visualization system.
With AQi 4.4, TeraRecon has delivered the world’s first fully-featured client server advanced visualization solution. iNtuition is the only true client-server advanced visualization technology available on the market today, that can address the suite of applications generally expected to be available by medical imaging providers.
The article is light on details as to how their system works, but it seems to be heavily focused on Medical visualization.
VizWorld.com 
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