VizWorld.com

Another winner from GOOD magazine, this time visualizing the largest bankruptcies in history as the sinking boats they are.  It even includes the recent GM & Chrysler bankruptcies as the little pink boats.

Last week, General Motors began the fourth largest bankruptcy proceedings in history, joining the many other large and venerable companies that have sunk to the bottom during this economic crisis. In fact, eight of the 20 largest bankruptcies have happened during the last two years of crisis. Our latest Transparency is a look at the biggest sinking ships in business history.

See the fullsize graphic at their site.

via Transparency: The Largest Bankruptcies in History | GOOD.

Graphics economic, example, good, infographic, infovis

Social media is ubiquitous now. With more 200 millions registered users now on Facebook, visualizing the large amounts of connections between online friends is a challenging information visualization problem. Infovis researchers have proposed various approaches to visualize these large connectivity graphs in various ways. Here are a few of those techniques and some of the other approaches that have been seen online to visualizing social media.

Read after the break.

Read more…

Science feature, infovis, socialmedia, twitter

Cobra

CyberPower, makers of high-end gaming PC’s, has announced a new line of systems named “Fang” which sports a special Intel BIOS to facilitate overclocking.

The Fang series was co-developed with Intel and other leading manufacturers to offer one of the most unique and advanced gaming platforms in the world. The Fang series with Venom incorporates a special BIOS designed to allow for higher overclocking. The BIOS supports real time readings of CPU speed and additional options for QPI signal and CPU Clock Skew features, all of which improve overclocking capability.

The systems aren’t cheap, priced at $2400-$4000, but they do have some killer specs.  Full press release after the break
Read more…

Hardware computer, cyberpower, intel, nvidia

Pixologic, the guys behind ZBrush, have announced a new pair of tools called Lightbox and Spotlight for plugins into ZBrush4.  From their release:

• What if the world was your palette and ZBrush was your Canvas?
• What if you could have instant access to billions of images?
• What if you could then use those images for reference, texturing, and sculpting?
• What if you could do this without ever leaving ZBrush?

In short, it looks like a pretty impressive combination of tools.  They’ve integrated an image browser into ZBrush that draws from a huge online library of textures and graphics, and then integrated tools to allow you to use those photographs as paintable textures or reference images.  The demonstration video shows dozens of examples of loading an image, aligning it in 3-space to a model, then “painting” it as a texture (either a color texture or a displacement/normal map) onto the model.  Very powerful stuff.

Visit the link to see the demo video.

ZBrushCentral – *** Introducing Spotlight and Lightbox….

Graphics pixologic, plugin, software, zbrush

L-3 Link is talking about their new “HD World”, an amazing F-16 flight simulator that runs on 120 Intel Dual Core PC’s containing $400 graphics cards inside a special industrial casing.  The result is a 20-40 visual acuity system, just slightly under 20-20 but better than the usual 20-80 most other systems give you.  The display is run from 9 projectors, creating a 180-degree field of view display in front of the viewer.

Link’s new simulation systems incorporate the latest developments in high-definition video, off-the-shelf digital imaging technology developed for animation and gaming, and a “physics-based environment generator” that allows creation of up to 30,000 interactive images in a single simulation.

Flight Training to get HD Treatment.

Hardware flightsimulator, l3link, military

Just saw this come in from EVGA, their new GTX285 For the Mac is ready to go.

EVGA is proud to announce the highest performing graphics card for the Mac today; the EVGA GTX 285 Mac Edition! With 1GB of DDR3 memory and 240 processing cores, your performance is maximized with graphics-intensive applications like 3D gaming, motion graphics, 3D modeling, rendering and animation. Take full advantage of the performance using NVIDIA CUDA and OpenGL applications. Upgrade your Mac Pro system with the EVGA GTX 285 Mac Edition today for extreme performance!

Sale price seems to be in the $449 range, available at Newegg and others.

via EVGA | Articles | EVGA GTX 285 Mac Edition.

Hardware apple, evga, nvidia

John Dickinson at Motionworks has a great tutorial in-progress.

In this 3 tutorial series we’ll look at how to build a glass shatter effect using Illustrator, After Effects and Cinema 4D. This section includes capturing the template in After Effects, creating paths in Illustrator and setting up imported splines as polygons in Cinema 4D.

All three parts are now online as MP4′s for ou to download and enjoy.

• Part 1 – 10 Minute, 40MB MP4
• Part 2 - 15 Minute, 40MB MP4 & Materials
• Part 3 – 32 Minute, 60MB MP4

Graphics adobe, aftereffects, cinema4d, illustrator, tutorial

No doubt that information visualization has become insanely popular in the last few years.  Driven by the spread of open data and web-based technologies to bring it to the masses, it’s cropping up in the unlikeliest of places.  Jennifer Bove of Creativity Online sits down with two experts in the field, Stamen Design’s Tom Carden and Dopplr.com’s Boris Anthony, to talk about it.

Consider this: we’ve gone from custom-made illustrations drawn with ink on paper to single-purpose computer programs that could only handle a specific set of data and present it one way, to now entire frameworks that allow someone who is not necessarily a professional to make any kind of visual representation out of any kind of data set.

via Blogs | Creativity Online.

Graphics, Science infovis, interview

I just found this paper by Yuko Uematsu and Hideo Saito of the Graduate School of Science and Technology in Japan.  Titled “Visual Enhancement for Sports Entertainment by Vision-Based Augmented Reality”, it discusses ways that Augmented Reality can aid in simple sports games.  Two specific examples include replays of classic Baseball games, and an interactive bowling game.

AR Baseball Presentation System is an observation system of a virtual baseball game. Users place a real baseball field model on the tabletop and input a baseball game history (scorebook) that they want to watch into the system. Then, they can watch the game by replaying with virtual baseball players on the field model in front of them. On the field model, 2D markers are placed for registration of the virtual players. Therefore, the users can watch the game from their favorite viewpoints around the field.

The entire paper is available at Hindawi publishing as a PDF.

via Visual Enhancement for Sports Entertainment by Vision-Based Augmented Reality.

Science augmented reality, entertainment, paper, sports

I.E. Effects made some of the effects regarding the “Lamia” in Sam Raimi’s “Drag me to Hell”, and shows some behind the scenes of how they made the shots.

David Kenneth, visual effects producer and founder of I.E. Effects, explained that the facility handled some 35 shots in total. “The project called for a lot of character design and animation. We were honored with creating the CG monster for the film – the Lamia,” said Kenneth. “Shots like these typically go to much larger facilities, but our previz was so well received that they awarded us the finishing work.”

via I.E. Effects drags us to Hell.

Graphics ieeffects, movie, vfx