Home » Archives for May 2009
MIT has a new online visualization of call activity during the presidential inauguration. Combining call volume with caller location and destination location, they’ve generated a beautiful visualization of phone traffic.
The data analyzed consists of hourly counts of mobile phone calls served in Washington, D.C. and includes the origin of the phones involved in the calls. The map of Washington, D.C. is overlaid with a 3D color-coded animated surface of square tiles (1 tile represents an area of 150 x 150 meters). Each tile rises and turns red as call activity increases and likewise drops and turns yellow as activity decreases. On the left, a bar chart breaks down the call activity by showing the normalized contributions of calls from the 50 states and 138 foreign countries grouped by continent. The timeline at the bottom illustrates the overall trend of call activity in the city during the week of the Presidential Inauguration.
See videos of the visualization after the break.
Obama | One People via Information Aesthetics.
Read more…
Graphics, Science government, inaugural, mit, phone
A new freeware tool called GPUmat allows you to run your Matlab code directly on a CUDA-enabled GPU. The execution is transparent to the user, and enables up to a 40x speedup, and it’s completely free to download and use.
GPUmat.
Hardware, Science cuda, gpgpu, matlab
In an interesting twist on an old magazine, the latest issue of The New Yorker was drawn by artist Jorge Colombo uses Brushes, a $4.99 iPhone App. Taking only an hour, he was able to draw the cover on the right.
See a video of the art in-progress after the break.
Artist Draws New Yorker Cover on His iPhone | Smarterware.
Read more…
Graphics iphone, magazine
For years, things like Electronic Microscopes have dominated biomedical visualization. However, these solutions often required damaging or killing the tissues to be viewed, making visualization of live processes impossible. Now, classic microscopes are coming back in a big way with new technology that allows nano-scale visualization of individual cells and cell components.
Now light is making a comeback thanks to giant steps in the use of fluorescent molecules – like those that impart glow to certain species of jellyfish. Using various techniques these molecules can be inserted in cells and then activated to outline live subcellular structures down to the level of a few nanometers. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter barely larger than an atom; a dust mite measures about 200 000 nanometers. “Lens-based microscopy has toppled a barrier that was thought would stand forever ” said Stefan W. Hell director of Germany s Max Planck Institute of Biophysical Chemistry and a leader in the new field.
via Secrets of a cell – The Boston Globe.
Hardware, Science biomed, visualization
DisplayLink is back in the news today with announcements of a new line of their popular USB display adapters. The new line is targeted at High-Def applications, with increased display resolutions.
- Up to 2048 x 1152 for the DL-195, designed for high-end monitors, docking stations and adapters.
- Up to 1920 x 1080 for the DL-165, designed for cost effective docks, mainstream monitors and adapters.
- Up to 1440×1050 for the DL-125, designed for entry-level monitors, mini-monitors and projectors.
via DisplayLink Ships Higher Performance USB Chips Delivering HD Graphics to New Samsung Lapfit Displays – Desktop Virtualization (VDI) News, Support and Training Resources.
Hardware display, displaylink, usb
With a movie like Terminator Salvation, you know the VFX are gonna be a huge part. With Terminator specifically, you know most of the characters (the Terminator Robots) will be CG and VFX, and put it on the other side of “Judgement Day”, and you know most of the environment will as well. With so much of the movie in the hands of the Visual Effects crew, they have alot to talk about.
“We re-projected this onto the (CG bridge) so I could have the truck fall over the edge, because in the original, it didn’t fall over the edge,” Snow said. And “those sort of techniques are just some of the things that we’ve been perfecting over the years: re-projection, the ability to say, ‘Well, we can go and do this, shoot at three different locations, and we don’t always have to use blue screen.’ …We can make it so you don’t know which bit of the bridge is CG.”
via Visual effects shoots for realism in explosive ‘Terminator Salvation’ | Geek Gestalt – CNET News.
Graphics ilm, movie, vfx
NormalMapper, a standalone normalmap-generation tool for Windows, hasn’t been around for very long. However, they just recently decided to go free & donation supported.
Introducing NormalMapper, the first standalone tool to create and modify normal maps as a native object instead of another color layer. NormalMapper can generate directly from a source image or can be used to create from scratch or modify existing normal maps via tools that manipulate the normals as 3d vectors, not color channels.
You can download NormalMapper at their website.
via The Official NormalMapper Website.
Graphics normalmapper, software
A new single-board computer from Extreme Engineering called the Xport4100 integrates the AMD Radeon E2400 graphic chip onto the board for a single-board solution that can drive dual 1600×1200 displays with 3D Acceleration. Full specs for the board:
- AMD Radeon E2400 graphics processor
- 128 MB GDDR3 SDRAM
- 2D/3D graphics
- Dual independent displays
- UXGA 1600 x 1200 DVI resolution
- PCI Express interface
It’s available immediately for $2,995.
via PR-CANADA.net – Extreme Engineering Solutions, Inc. (X-ES) Introduces XPort4100: A Rugged Graphics PMC/XMC Module.
Hardware amd, extremeengineering
It was way back in January when Bill Dally was announced as NVidia’s newest Chief Scientist, and he’s been pretty busy since then. NVidia’s made some huge pushes in CUDA and GPGPU programming since then, and VentureBeat got the chance to sit down with him and talk about what he believes to be the future of the GPU.
VB: How big is GPU computing going to get?
BD: If you think of it as throughput computing, it’s going to be all of computing, except in certain niches where single-thread performance is critically important. It’s an interesting transition where throughput computing is mostly graphics now. It’s starting to make progress in scientific computing, video processing, security and a whole bunch of areas. It will become the default for the way we do computing. It’s that food chain. You deliver more value to the user by writing a parallel program.
via Stanford’s Bill Dally leaps from academia to the computer graphics wars » VentureBeat.
Hardware bill dally, cuda, interview, nvidia
VizWorld.com 
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