VizWorld.com

The Harris Corporation has worked with the Baltimore Orioles to update their website with a new feature ‘Virtual Birdland’.  They created multiple 3D Flyover videos of the areas around the Camden Yards, allowing anyone with a web browser to ‘virtually’ fly over the park, adjacent parking lots, and Inner Harbor.

“Virtual Birdland provides Orioles fans with a clear view of what they will see prior to arriving at Oriole Park, and helps familiarize them with traffic patterns, ample parking options, and other area attractions surrounding the ballpark,” said Greg Bader, Orioles Director of Communications. “This is especially convenient for first-time visitors who are unfamiliar with the area and want to become more comfortable with where they are going, and how to get there.

This was done with the same technology used to create the Virtual Parade Route a few months back.  Read the full press release after the break.

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Graphics, Science baseball, geospatial, harris, pressrelease, sports

All of you Matlab folks out there might want to head on over to AccelerEyes and check out Jacket v1.1.  Big features in this release, including:

• Support for double-precision arithmetic. This enables a higher-level of accuracy for applications requiring fine precision.
• Expanded type support, including support for logical, int32, uint32, etc.
• New Developer SDK enables integration of custom CUDA kernels into the Jacket runtime. This allows custom code to inherit Jacket’s optimizations for memory transfers, kernel executions, and system performance within MATLAB.
• Expanded support for filtering functions, such as conv2, convn, filter2, etc, to include kernel sizes up to 10×10.
• New licensing scheme to support Concurrent Network licenses.
• Expanded support for reductions functions, such as sum, min, max, any, all, find.

Requires NVidia’s CUDA 2.2, and a 15-day trial is available to try before you buy.

20090622-AnnouncingJacket1.1.pdf (application/pdf Object).

Science accelereyes, cuda, gpgpu, jacket, matlab, nvidia

At a technical conference for financial analysts last week, NVidia spoke about the power of GPU computing and how the recent combination of the economic recession, Moore’s Law, and the simple architecture of modern PC’s will drive the move towards GPU computing.

“You compute for a long time and you vizualise at 60 hertz. We believe we can bring computation acceleration to that market. The GPU could be used for all kinds of simulations and the incredible speed up that people have seen. Imagine if it took a day to do a simulation and then it took an hour, it would change your life.”

Of course, NVidia expects to be the big dog when this finally comes around, with significant investment in CUDA and OpenCL making them the de-facto standard in GPGPU computing for the moment.  They didn’t, however, mention that Intel’s Larabee might provide a worthwhile alternative.

via TG Daily (c) – Nvidia’s boss aims for computing hegemony.

Hardware, Science conference, gpgpu, nvidia

Octagon Research Solutions, Inc, a provider of software and services to the life sciences industry, will be presenting a set of talks at the 45th annual Drug Information Association (DIA) meeting.  Their technology experts will be presenting on a wide variety of topics such as regulatory, clinical, and information technology.  One interesting talk:

Terek Peterson, MBA, director, Clinical Programming, will present a session entitled, ‘Increased Team Effectiveness Through Information Visualization: An Interactive Environment’ within the ‘Information Technology’ track. This session will be held, Thursday, June 25, 2009, 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM.

Nice to see the medical and life sciences industry getting on-board with Information Visualization.

via Life Science Leader – Octagon Research Solutions, Inc. To Exhibit At The DIA 45th Annual Meeting.

Science biomed, conference, dia, infovis, octagonresearch

An interesting new video from “The Friends of Butter” shows the fascinating history of Butter and it’s archnemesis Margarine (Marj).  No matter which side of the debate you’re on, you’re sure to learn something you didn’t know before, such as the oddity that Yellow Margarine is still illegal in Missouri, or that Marj used to be pink to make it intentionally look gross.

See the video after the break.

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Graphics, Science animation, butter, food, infographic

Piero Zagami has built an interesting collection of visualizations around the United Nations Security Council Resolutions.

UNSC/R: this is the abbreviation for the United Nations Security Council Resolutions. These documents represent the decisions of the UN’s executive body. This massive amount of data (more than 1700 documents) doesn’t come in any organized form. The purpose of this project is to apply information design strategies to create visual maps of the Resolutions to help students in politics approach the subject of the UN.

Most of the visualizations appear circular in form, mapping colors to the quantity of resolutions passed over time.  It’s a massive tome of information, although I see no way to procure it.

via UNSC/R : pierozagami.com.

Graphics, Science example, infographics, political

With the recent closing of some old names in the VFX industry, the effects of last year’s writer’s strike are more evident than ever. Combined with the recent economic downturn and studios are looking at new and creative ways to trim budgets and save costs.  One of the newer tools is outsourcing VFX work from the big names in Hollywood to India.  COO of Mumbai’s Visual Computing Labs notices it:

“In 2003 and 2004, when I would visit the U.S. and meet with visual effects companies, I’d be told we can’t outsource it. It requires creative control and you are too far away,” said Pankaj Khandpur, the company’s creative director.

Now, he said, those naysayers are telling him, “’Hey, let’s talk.”’

via India grabs more U.S. film special effects work : Tech : Ventura County Star.

Graphics india, movie, outsourcing, vfx

Scott Farrar at ILM is the guy in charge of the special effects of next weekend’s Transformers 2, and he sits down with the San Francisco Examiner to talk about some of the VFX shots:

While the first “Transformers” spawned 14 robots, there are 46 this go around; all were created at ILM.

If all of the effects’ texture maps were printed on one-square-yard sheets, they would cover 13 football fields.

The first film took up 20 terabytes of disk space; this film takes up 145 terabytes (seven times larger). It would take 35,000 DVDs to store 145 terabytes; stacked one on top of the other without storage cases, they would be 145 feet tall.

via Effects wizard keeps ‘Transformers’ looking amazing | San Francisco Examiner.

Graphics ilm, movie, vfx

Barco, the popular high-end projector company, has announced a new 46″ LCD for video-display walls.  Sporting a surprisingly low WXGA (1366×768 px) resolution (although it claims 1080p support, presumably via rescaling) the real kicker on this display is the bezels:  varying from 2.4mm to 4.3mm .  The smallest bezels I’m aware of are half-inch (12.7mm), making these significantly smaller.

See video of a 4-panel construction after the break.

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Hardware barco, bezel, display, lcd, renderwall

A nice pair of announcements of advances in OLED technology came out today.  First off is from IGNIS, a new backplane technology they’re calling “MaxLife” which boasts an impressive 75,000 hour lifetime with no image degradation.  In normal usage that’s 20 years of 10-hours a day viewing, with no burn-in.

Second is a new process from Vitex System Barix using alternating layers of ceramic and polymer films that can create an OLED display stronger than glass but only 50micrometers thin.  Videos show existing Ca film layers literally evaporating in seconds of open-air exposure, while this process survives indefinately while being subjected to some brutal hammer-tests.

See videos of both after the break.

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Hardware amoled, display, ignis, oled, vitex