VizWorld.com

Yesterday we told you about the YellowBird spherical camera with it’s unique 6-part lens.  I just found out that ImmersiveMedia has a competing camera called the “Dodeca 2360″, which uses an 11-lens system in a 25-pound package suitable for mounting on a bicycle, backpack, or surfboard.  ImmersiveMedia first came on the scene with Google’s “Street View” which they helped launch back in 2007.

You can see an example of what spherical video looks like in their new campaign for Armani Jeans. Note: it’s a very slow & length load, but a nice interactive spherical video to demonstrate the technology.

Immersive Media / 105.

Hardware 3d, camera, immersive media, video

Terminator Salvation opened this week and Millimeter sat down with McG and some of the VFX studios involved (ILM and others).

ILM primarily used Autodesk Maya for animation; Apple Shake, The Foundry Nuke, Inferno, and ILM’s inhouse tool, Sabre, for compositing; and the company’s inhouse Zenviro technology for painting photographic textures onto CG geometry.

They also discuss some of the cameras and film-tricks they used to simulate what life would look like in a post-apocalyptic world.

The Future Does Not Look Pretty.

Graphics ilm, movie, vfx

Daden Limited has worked in data acquisition and visualization technologies for several years, but yesterday announced a new tool called “DataScape”, a virtual environment for managing multiple streams of incoming data simultaneously.  Built on top of Second Life, it’s a 3D environment that allows users to manipulate maps, geographic data, CCTV and webcam feeds, RSS and Twitter feeds, and various other remote sensing technologies within a single virtual world.

“We are particularly keen to see how such spaces can provide collaborative responsive planning centers for natural disasters and humanitarian emergencies allow representatives from NGOs Governments and communities around the world to meet and plan in virtual space in a way that was previously only available to the military and intelligence agencies.” While Datascape is currently only compliant with the Second Life platform Burden told Virtual Worlds News he “may look at ActiveWorlds next.”

A video showing an older version of the DataScape product for Aircraft tracking can be seen after the break.
Read more…

Hardware, Science daden, secondlife, virtual worlds

Steve Roberts, founder of eyeon, sits down and looks at how the field of VFX has changed over the last 30 years.  Years ago, a single artists was in charge of everything from lighting to rendering.  Now, it takes entire teams with things broken down to specialties of such minute grain that you have Hair specialists, texture specialists, cloth specialists, etc.

A significant change is taking place in the film world as the use of visual effects increases dramatically. As we all know, it is not just the number of shots on a project; it is the complexity and scale of those masterpieces that are expanding rapidly. These changes say a lot about where we are heading as an industry.

As motion tracking, stereoscopics, and full-CG movies gain in momentum, how will this impact the VFX tools and software of the future?

via ….. >> VFXWorld / Feature Articles << …...

Graphics future, vfx

Andrew Averkin has a walkthrough of a fantastic steampunk-style rendering of a mechanical spider.  The image was modeled with 3D Studio Max, tweaked a bit with Photoshop and using FumeFX for the smoke.

Making of the Spider – CGArena.

Graphics 3dsmax, example, fumefx, photoshop

Wordle pops up alot in visualizations on the internet these days, partly because it’s simple to do and partly because it’s pretty.  The bright colors, good choice of fonts, and effective display of word counts make it an interesting way to view large blocks of text.  However, it really does nothing from a “visualization” perspective, as there’s no real information to gleam from it.  Seth Grimes makes a good argument that word-counts alone are a pretty useless metric.

Wordle images are pretty but they may give a deceptive picture of word significance. The occurrence-counting approach is simply too simplistic. Author Jonathan Feinberg does writes in the Wordle FAQ that Wordle doesn’t stem words, that doing so would be beyond his goals, and there are other linguistic deficiencies. Wordle is nice effort despite the short-comings, but as it is, it pretty much implements a very shallow approach as presented by Luhn in his 1958 paper:

As an example of his argument, I fed the entire text of his article into Wordle to generate the image above.  From that image, you can’t really gleam anything about the meaning of his article, other than it’s about Wordle and words, with something about physicians and chemistry in Chicago thrown in there.  Very pretty? Yes. Very Useful? No.

via Limits of Visualization: Wordle Misses Meaning | The Intelligent Enterprise Blog.

Science infovis, wordle

NVidia’s been complaining all week about Intel’s chips giving them an unfair advantage in the netbook space due to pricing, and from recent information about Intel’s new “Pine Trail” platform, you can see why.  The new chipset combines a memory controller and graphics core onto the existing CPU silicon, forgoing the need for a separate chip (currently from Via or NVidia).

Of course the integration of a graphics component onto Atom chips is not something that will make Nvidia too happy, but according to Intel, Pine Trail can still be integrated with the firm’s Ion graphics for netbooks. This will come at a considerably higher cost, though, which will likely intensify complaints about Intel’s allegedly unfair pricing schemes – $45 for the processor alone but just $25 for the entire three-chip Atom platform.

via Intel talks about new Pine Trail mobile platform – TechSpot News.

Hardware atom, intel, ion, nvidia, pineview

Simul Weather, a volumetric C++ Cloud and Weather library, has just reached v1.2.  Their website has some stunning examples of what it can do.

Simul Weather is a C++ library which generates weather system data and updates it in real time. Simul Weather creates volumetric cloud data, and provides realtime access to that data via a lightweight API. The cloud system generates pure volumetric data, it is cross platform and renderer-independent. The sample applications that come with the SDK show how realtime clouds can be rendered using the generated cloud data, in various graphics API’s.

via Simul » Simul Weather.

Science sdk, video game, weather

HDRLightStudio is a 2D authoring tool for designing 3D HDR Lighting Environments to be used as textures on HDR Lighting Spheres in other rendering packages.  v1.5 is coming soon, and they’ve released some information on the new features of the tool.

HDR Light Studio™ 1.5 now includes a wide range of ‘Real Lights’ – full HDR captures of studio lighting, including different shapes of soft boxes through to spot lights with barn doors and even some windows. These capture every detail and nuance of the real light sources and will bring new levels of photo realism to your renderings.

We have taken our existing synthetic lighting a stage further. HDR Light Studio™ 1.0 lights have a fixed graduation from the center of the light. With 1.5 you can now move the position and width of your light bulb to create a vast array of graduation effects.

A Free trial version is available for download from here.

Version 1.5 is coming soon….

Graphics hdr, software

Rumors are that AMD is suffering from yield issues in the 40nm process used in the Radeon HD4770 chips, and the backstock of the HD4830 is beginning to dwindle.  What’s AMD going to do to remain profitable?  Apparently they’re going to shrink the 4830 card, add in GDDR5 memory,  and re-release it as the Radeon HD4730, which will use the more mature 55nm process.

It’s an unusual move, definately meant to work in the short term.

Radeon HD 4730 in The Works – Expreview.com.

Hardware amd, ati