Sanyo has a press release (in Japanese) talking about a new laser projector. Projectors are usually nothing special, but this one can create a 150-inch display with only 90cm of distance. On the downside tho, the picture you see is not exaggerated. The projector is 2370mm wide (7.77ft), making more of a piece of Furniture than equipment.
Bit more after the break…
Mashable has gathered some fun videos of people visualizing Social Network data: Flickr, Twitter, Last.fm and more. They all show how information visualization is becoming more than a collegiate experiment and is moving down to art and mainstream culture.
Sarah Cohen, database editor for The Washington Post’s investigative team and recently named professor of computational journalism at Duke University, presented at a recent National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting conference on how reporters can use interactive graphics for exploratory reporting.
She recently talked to Steve Myers at PoynterOnline about how it can be used.
Can you describe some of the forms these visualizations take and how they have guided or improved the reporting?
Cohen: Again, most often it’s some combination of place and time. Almost any complex story will benefit from some kind of chronology. The ability to do this interactively rather than on paper has the advantage of being able to zoom in and out on specific periods of time, turn on and off various types of entries or players.
Frantic Films VFX contributed 334 shots to the upcoming “Dragonball: Evolution” movie. The movie is based on the popular manga by Akira Toriyama, and Frantic acknowledges that any story with such a cult following will be extremely scrutinized by fans. As such, they spent extra time making the effects “just right”.
Frantic created full digital versions of these Fulum Assassins that had to match up seamlessly with shots of the actors in costume. During one dailies review, the Frantic team actually had to remind the producers which characters were real and which were digital replacements. Additional work done by Frantic on this scene included extensive sky replacement and the scripting of custom tools for Frantic’s in-house fluid simulation toolset Flood to generate the photo-real lava.
Popular British girl-band “Girls Aloud” got their latest music video tweaked by “The Mill” Framestore, with some interesting VFX of the girls inside crystal spheres/futuristic force-fields that crash into the earth’s atmosphere.
An ambitious and technical film, created and directed by Marco Puig, The Mill were required to split the VFX work for ‘Untouchable’ into pre and post shoot. Puig wanted to do as much work in camera as possible, so The Mill used back projection to create much of the space-scapes before the shoot. This work was then cut into three films – back projection, side projection and reflection projection to put onto the glass spheres.
via Framestore Creates Magic For Girls Aloud | CGnews.
Update: This work was initially attributed to The Mill. Original article and this article have been corrected.
Building on the buzz of the US’s “data.gov” government data portal, some European groups have started building “EPVotes“. The European Parliament elections are just 2 months away, and they hope that by exposing the individual trends of the parliament members, that perhaps the EU can see some of the “change” that the US is hoping for.
Laurent the website’s current designer is open for your constructive design critique “The main idea for the design was to keep it simple… no fancy graphics use lines and white spaces a reduced colour pallet and build the page in such a way that one does not need explanatory texts. But by adding features I see that it starts to be crowded. I would need to think about something new. Unfortunately my design talents are only so good : Do you have some comments “
via EPVote: Tracking the Votes of the European Union Parliament – information aesthetics.
Elizabeth Currid and Sarah Williams collaborated to create “The Geography of Buzz”, an interesting combination of geographical maps and statistical “heatmaps” showing the concentration of various gatherings (parties, premieres, broadway shows, etc). The resulting maps show not only the popular places to go, but an interesting view into the invisible connections between the events.
It was not a culturally comprehensive data set, the researchers admit, but a wide-ranging one. And because the photos were for sale, they had to be of events that people found inherently interesting, “a good proxy for ‘buzz-worthy’ social contexts,” they write. You had to be there, but where exactly was there? And why was it there?The answers were both obvious and not, a Möbius strip connecting infrastructure (Broadway shows need Broadway theaters, after all), media (photographers need to cover Broadway openings) and the bandwagon nature of popular culture.
‘The Geography of Buzz,’ a Study on the Urban Influence of Culture – NYTimes.com.
CGSociety has named the masters that will be featured in the upcoming EXPOSE7.
The Master Artists have been chosen by the EXPOSÉ 7 Advisory Board and recognized as having produced the best work submitted in their category of submission.
Stay tuned for the Pre-release of EXPOSÉ 7 coming soon.
A spectacular youtube video is making the rounds this week of some fantastic showy mountainous terrain. What you may not know is that this is completely CG scenery, created in a mere 4 kilobytes of code. It’s from RGBA and TBC, as part of the 4K Code Competition at the Breakpoint 2009 demo-scene.
MPC has updated their website with information on their new Toyota commercial that uses some extensive cloth and fabric simulations produced by Ciaran Bennet and CHI and Annabel Ridley at RSA.
Using a classic illusion with a modern twist, this film executes the ultimate sleight of hand as the viewer witnesses Toyota’s range unveiled by the simple act of pulling on a piece of cloth. ‘We always thought of this ad as a sort of magic trick- says Director Brett Foraker
Uses CG and Frame set extensions with some matte paintings for the archway, the final composited result is a pretty impressive piece of work. The commercial will begin airing April 4th in the UK. The commercial can be viewed at the link below.
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