VizWorld.com

MSI has just announced their new N285GTX card with SuperPipe technology. What is SuperPipe you might ask?

Heatpipe is an important component on a graphics card, which is responsible for transferring heat away from the GPU to the cooling find for dissipation. MSI N285GTX SuperPipe features two 8mm thick heatpipes which are 60% thicker than the traditional pipes, and show about a 90% improvement in thermal efficiency. It’s also equipped with a Twin Frozr dual-fan thermal design.

Aside from that, it comes with 1GB GDDR3 memory, and operates at 648/1476Mhz with a special OverClocked edition running at 680/2500Mhz.  Currently available for EUR340 (~$450) in Europe.

via MSI Announces N285GTX SuperPipe Graphics Card – Expreview.com.

Hardware msi, nvidia

The New York Times has an article (registration required) about an upcoming Dance Visualization from the Forsythe Company and Ohio State University’s Advanced Computing Center.  The Forsyth Company dance troupe performed the “One Flat Thing”, a dance comprising 14 dancers and 20 tables in a tightly packed space.  Then OSU analysed the data:

Their analysis eventually focused on three systems for identifying counterpoint: movement motifs, cues and alignments, or moments of synchronization, within the choreography. Decoding these systems and constructing them as visual data took three years, Ms. Palazzi said, and a great deal of work with Mr. Forsythe and three of his dancers, Jill Johnson, Christopher Roman and Elizabeth Waterhouse.

They eventually computed 20 structures of the dance that they could visualize to understand how the dancers interact with each other in the “Cue Visualizer”. Then they created the “Data Fan”, a 3D visualization of the entire dataset in an artistic form.

The entire visualization & dance will be viewable on the OSU Synchronous Objects Website April 1st, 2009.

via Dance – William Forsythe and Ohio State Draw Movement’s Connections Online – NYTimes.com.

Science dance

Similar to recently announced OnLive, Gaikai does something very similar by streaming MMO’s played on high-end server-side computers to a low-end client. But, unlike OnLive, does it with a simple Flash-widget in a webbrowser.

Gaikai is a revolutionary new technology that lets you play any game online in your browser. In the age of the cloud, when all your documents, email, photos and videos are instantly reachable online, it seems archaic that you still need to install gigabytes of game files on an expensive PC with an even more expensive video card. And even then you can only play from that specific computer!

Gaikai takes a radical new approach – we host the games, we run them, we worry about hardware and software updates, and we stream them to you. Full resolution, full speed, stereo sound, low lag, no compromise. The only thing you need is a browser and an internet connection.

It looks like the age of the Thin Client may be upon us.

via Gaikai.

Science gaikai

The Arizona Daily Star recently held a “Star 200” survey to find the largest employers in South Arizona.  Now, they’ve taken that data and worked with the Many Eyes project at IBM to build a nice interactive infoviz of the data.

Here’s a different view of our recent Star 200 survey of the largest employers in Southern Arizona, created with the help of the Many Eyes data visualization project at IBM. Click to load the data visualization, then mouse around to see details. Right-click on a single box (or control-click on a Mac) to zoom in for a detailed view of that industry sector. Try reordering the industry and company views, or moving the color slider bar.

via www.azstarnet.com ®.

Science ibm, infovis

Autodesk has just announced Softimage Mod Tool 7.5, a free modeling and animation package based on the higher-end Softimage.  They’ve added alot of new features includeing the Interactive Creative Environment, a new Shader API, and new learning material from Noesis Interactive that demonstrating creating models for use in Microsoft XNA Game Studio 3.0.

Softimage Mod Tool 7.5 supports the Realtime Shader API version 3.0, which Autodesk says helps make real-time shader development simpler and more flexible. The new version offers an architecture focused on programmable shaders (GLSL, HLSL) and file-based effects (CgFX and DxFX). With these capabilities, what game developers see in Softimage Mod Tool is what they get in the game.

via Autodesk launches Softimage Mod Tool 7.5 for game designers – Network World.

Graphics autodesk, softimage

Popular Mechanics has an interview with the guys at Dreamworks about the technology used to create the 3D effects in the new Monsters vs Aliens (opening today).

In-house tools, in conjunction with Maya 3D animating software, allow filmmakers to compose—and see how the scene will play out—in real time in the stereo-preview window. “At the desktop we can sit and look with our glasses on and manipulate these different stereo camera rigs and build a stereo scene,” McNally says. “The scene could be put together from two, four, six or eight cameras all working together to create this final result, which is a perfect blend of comfort but also retaining as much stereo volume as we can get. And all of these parameters are animateable as well.”

They also get rather in-depth into how the 3D effect is achieved (interaxial distance & parallax distortion).

Monsters vs. Aliens 3D – Behind the Scenes 3D Technology with Monsters vs Aliens – Popular Mechanics.

Graphics dreamworks, maya

FiringSquad takes advantage of the recent price drops on the GeForce GTX260 cards to benchmark and compare three different types of cards: an original GTX260 engineering reference sample, some 65nm cards, and some 55nm cards. So what’s the main differences between a 65nm and 55nm card?

Thanks to its smaller manufacturing process, NVIDIA’s latest 55-nm GeForce GTX 260 GPU delivers improved power consumption, but the results were mixed when it came to temps. Since NVIDIA’s reference design removes the aluminum backplate on 55-nm GPUs to cut costs (including the GTX 285), we actually found that our 55-nm BFG and EVGA GeForce GTX 260 cards ran slightly warmer at load than 65-nm GeForce GTX 260-216 cards we had on hand, although they did run a few degrees cooler at idle.

GeForce GTX 260 Roundup.

Hardware nvidia

CNet News attended Intel’s talk at GDC this week, where they unveiled a few more details about their upcoming Larrabee CPU/GPU chipset.

Larrabee is “Intel’s first many-core architecture,” Forsyth said. “The first product will be very much like a GPU. It will look like a GPU. You will plug it into a machine and it will display graphics,” he said. (GPU stands for graphics processing unit.)

“But at its heart are processor cores, not GPU cores. So it’s bringing that x86 programmable goodness to developers,” Forsyth said. Larrabee will carry the DNA of Intel’s x86 architecture, the most widely used PC chip design in the world.

Given Intel’s currently legal entanglements with NVidia over licensing issues, it’s uncertain what will ever happen with Larrabee, but it’s an interesting architecture.  Intel’s a bit late to the game of massively parallel SIMD chips like NVidia & AMD/ATI use, but they’ve got the engineering knowledge and fabrication potential to put a huge dent in their competitor’s market shares.

via Intel details future graphics chip at GDC | Nanotech – The Circuits Blog – CNET News.

Hardware gdc, intel, larrabee

Just a reminder to anyone attending VisWeek09 in Atlantic City this October, the deadline for Full Papers is March 31st.  That’s Tuesday!

VisWeek09 is still 202 days away.

Welcome to VisWeek 2009.

Science conference, visweek

Not to be confused with the IEEE VAST (Visual Analytics Science and Technology) conference in Atlantic City, the 10th VAST symposium in Portugal has now setup a website.

Welcome to the 10th VAST International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archeology and Cultural Heritage. VAST2009 is the 10th VAST Symposium, promoted by the EUROGRAPHICS Association and the European project EPOCH. The event will take place at the Aula Magna, Old University Building, Valletta (Malta) on the 22-25th September 2009. Previous events were held in Braga Portugal (VAST2008), Brighton UK (VAST2007) and Nicosia Cyprus.

Their first call for papers is now online.

via VAST 2009.

Science conference, VAST