LittleBigPlanet artist Rex Crowle helped out UK agency Poke London in the creation of a collection of augmented reality mini-games designed to promote Coca-Cola’s fruit drink “Oasis”. Called “RubberDuckZilla“, it uses markers that were included within a copy of yesterday’s “Sun” newspaper.
See a video demonstration after the break.
Following up on their previous “7 failed VR technologies” article, io9 has a look at 7 successful VR technologies. Much like my previous statements, they cover Virtual Reality’s use in training, therapy, and medical procedures.
So far, virtual reality has mostly been a colossal disappointment. But VR has had its share of breakthroughs and innovative applications. Here are seven VR technologies that work, and that may yet point the way to truly successful virtual reality.
via io9 – 7 Virtual Reality Technologies That Actually Work – Technology.
It’s conference season, and you know what that means. For some of us it means swag, parties, and wining and dining with deep-pocketed vendors. For others it means submission deadlines, frantic mad dashes, and putting your work on display for thousands of people. Some are done and some have yet to begin! Which ones are you going to? What are you hoping to see there? Visit the forums and let us know!
Visit the forums, and let us know!
Some news has come out about NVidia‘s scheduled presentations at SIGGRAPH2009, and it’s an impressive colleciton of 13 presentations, with 6 special sessions. The 6 special sessions include:
And their equally impressive collection of accepted papers:
NVidia is careful to note, however, that the list is subject to change. So keep checking back for updates! No word if the Computex babes will be in attendance.
The short film “La Main des Maitres”, created with Houdini, shows some fantastic steampunk fantasy work that really shows off the features of Houdini.
Smoke explosions were created using particle simulations with metaballs copied to all the particle points to add volume. The set geometry was then tagged as colliding geometry and characters were knocked out using shadow mattes. The effect was then rendered with a billowy smoke volume shader using Houdini’s Mantra renderer.
See the movie after the break.
Rumors are flying fast and furious about the new NVidia GPU, the GT300. Michael Feldman of HPCWire taps his inside sources for some information, and writes it up.
According to Valich’s sources, the GT300 will offer up to 512 cores, up from 240 cores in NVIDIA’s current high-end GPU. Since the new chips will be on the 40nm process node, NVIDIA could also crank up the clock. The current Tesla GPUs are running at 1.3-1.4 GHz and deliver about 1 teraflop, single precision, and less than 100 gigaflops, double precision. Valich speculates that a 2 GHz clock could up that to 3 teraflops of single precision performance, and, because of other architectural changes, double precision performance would get an even larger boost.
His article focuses more heavily on the HPC side of the chip (it’s use in CUDA & GPGPU), but it still sounds like it’ll be a pretty powerful gaming/rendering chip.
SIGGRAPH 2009 chair Ronen Barzel sits down with CGSociety to talk about the upcoming conference, and some of the new stuff we’ll be seeing this year.
SIGGRAPH 2009 is ‘embracing’, ‘opening up’ into new areas like Visual Computing, Sound and Music, and GameJam! We’re not leaving behind the core areas of computer graphics and interactive techniques, nor all the elements that make SIGGRAPH great. But as technology and our understanding continue to advance, Computer Graphics interacts more and more with other fields and other senses, and so we want to make sure to open up to those.
I just got some news from Collider about the process behind the Liquid Chocolate commercial they made for Nestle. If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend you check it out. The commercial was made about half with RealFlow fluids, with the remainder done with animated displacement maps in Autodesk Maya. The 3D team consisted of three people:
Jamie Watson was also involved in the compositing, done in Shake. The entire project took 2 months.
The density of four-year universities and colleges by U.S. state with Fall 2007 acceptance rates and 2008-09 tuition and fees. (From EducationOnline.net)
Frantic Films VFX worked with John Woo on the visual effects for the upcoming ‘Red Cliff’ feature, the most expensive Chinese-language picture ever made. In particular, they pioneered some interesting technology to create a massive naval fleet.
“With shots that called for a fleet of 2,500 of the same 26-meter boats, giving each of the boats a unique ‘hand-crafted’ feel was both a creative and technical challenge,” explained Jason Crosby, VFX Supervisor, Frantic Films VFX. “We really wanted to avoid the repetitive look that comes from using the same CG model. To do this, we broke the boats down into components that were randomly assembled using a rule-based particle system called Thinking Particles, which also propagated and animated the fleet.”
via Frantic Films VFX Battles John Woo’s ‘Red Cliff’ – Frantic Films VFX – pitchengine.com.
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