VizWorld.com

James Cameron’s Avatar has generated huge hype and incredible expectations in the press, but can it live up to it?  Greg Passmore believes it could, but for unexpected reasons.

Responding to a recent NY Times article about Avatar, where behavioral neurologists commented that Mr. Cameron’s work could tap brain systems that are undisturbed by conventional 2D movies, Greg Passmore, a 3D film producer himself, smiles.

“It’s never been done before on this scale,” says Passmore. “And the effect could be mind-blowing.”

These are some wild claims, but Passmore has some credibility.  Him and his team built a volume-renderer for use in seismic exploration, which was later adapted to neurology.  Since then he has participated in brain mapping studies that reveal the inner structures of the brain works.

“The tools are here now. By comparison, good 3D filmmaking, by design, should provide more memorable movies. And I believe this is exactly what James Cameron is trying to pioneer with Avatar,” explains Passmore. “Stereoptic film provides a greater sensation of physical presence and thus stimulates autonomic arousal of risk, provoking emotion and thus memory tagging the event.”

via Fellow 3D Producer Echoes Cameron’s Use of 3D to Tap Brain Activity for Avatar.

Science 3d, biomed, movie

WGBH, Boston’s PBS station, producted over a third of the nationally broadcast PBS television programming, and therefore archives hundreds of thousands of hours of video content, still images, and related documentation.  It’s a huge and valuable archive, but finding anything inside of it is a nightmare.  In 2006, they launched the “Open Vault”, a searchable online site highlighting the contents of the archive, but quickly found that scholars need a completely different set of tools.  With help from teh Andrew W. Mellon foundation, they developed a new small-scale prototype and put it in front of users, with great results.

The lesson here is that, for our scholarly audience, the attractive yet random mosaic was “pretty” but not substantive enough. Yet the working relationship map, while it has the possibility of being very interesting, is not intuitive as currently implemented. We need to spend more time striking a balance between utility and usability for this feature.

All of these visualizations are made possible by the depth of cataloging we have for our prototype record set. We have cataloged to the item level and sometimes have gone farther to tag people, places, dates and topics within the content of a record. In the Robert McFarlane example above, a PBCore record describes the interview media asset, while a TEI-encoded transcript provides the links into the video content itself.

Other visualization possibilities we can explore with this depth of data include tag clouds, maps and timelines. We are looking into placing records in context along a timeline of life or collection dates that would look something like what is illustrated by Figure 5.

The entire paper, with examples of the visualizations they produced and results, is available on their site.

via Bulletin June/July 2009.

Science archive, infovis, pbs, tv, video

While not our usual content here at VizWorld, I wanted to give a little publicity to the plight of the VFX experts who worked for Meteor Studios on “Journey to the Center of the Earth”.

The curtain closes this weekend on an offer to more than 100 mainly Canadian movie special-effects artists attempting to recuperate nearly $1.2 million they claim is owed them for work done on one of last summer’s biggest blockbusters.

Monday is the deadline for them to accept or reject about 63 per cent of that amount from the owners of Meteor, the Montreal facility that closed in November 2007 after wrapping up Journey to the Centre of the Earth, then filed for bankruptcy.

If you’re not familar with their story, they worked relentlessly during the creation of the picture, and the studio went bankrupt during that time.  They’ve since been labeled unsecured creditors and have not been paid for their work.  This has been going on for over a year now.

via Deadline nears for settlement.

Graphics legal, meteor, news, vfx

Jim Clark, the Stanford University computer scientist who founded SGI, along with Netscape and several other web companies, talks to Silicon Valley’s MercuryNews about some of what he remembers about the early days of SGI and his endeavors.

Q How would you assess your record as a “visionary” in tech?

A The vision of Silicon Graphics was certainly mine. I taught the seven other founders computer graphics. The so-called Graphics Library, which now (as the OpenGL) is in practically every computing product on the planet, was the outgrowth of my teaching computer graphics for almost 10 years.

In particular, I absolutely love this exchange:

Having spent a lot of time thinking about networking at SGI, when I realized what the Web would become, I was all in (with Netscape). People thought I was nuts until we generated $70 million of revenue in year one, and $300 million in year two. Microsoft killed the company, but at least AOL bought us before we expired. Ironically, if Microsoft had focused on how to leverage it, rather than how to kill it, they might be in Google’s position today. Serves them right.

Update:Sorry, the previous link would redirect to a “Purchase a Subscription” page and caused all kinds of weirdness. Fixed now.

via Tech visionary Jim Clark speaks his mind – San Jose Mercury News.

Hardware, Science interview, jim clark, netscape, opengl, sgi

As more and more people get into computer graphics, the bar on “awesome” is being continually raised.  As render times climb ever higher and higher, rather than investing in a huge workstation, maybe you want to rethink the process.

If you’re looking at buying a new machine and are thinking of spending big bucks to get a bleeding-edge system, you might want to step back and consider whether it would be more effective to buy the latest and greatest workstation or to spend less by investing in a few additional systems to be used as dedicated render nodes.

The article gets into processor differences, rack-mount vs deskside, and scaling issues present in larger farms.  A good read for anyone considering building their own.

via How To: Building Your Own Render Farm : Introduction – Review Tom’s Hardware.

Hardware howto, renderfarm, review

For the last year, Lowry Digital has been restoring the footage of the original Apollo 11 lunar landing.  Sadly, the original footage has been lost to time and Lowry has had to work from the multitude of reproductions and copies from around the globe.

The original images beamed back to Earth–via slow scan television (SSTV)–were captured at 10 frames per second, with 320 lines of resolution for the live telecast. NASA also tracked down a number of copies around the world that were recorded in a variety of formats. One source was an 8mm wind-up film camera that was handheld and aimed at a video monitor at mission control. Amazingly, this 8mm film copy includes the only extant copy of some portions of the telecast.

The project is ongoing, expected to finish in September.  Brief clips have been released by NASA to commemorate the 40th anniversary, and can be viewed on their site.

via Studio Daily Blog » Lowry Digital Restoring Apollo 11 Footage.

Graphics, Science lowry, nasa, restoration, video

The Khronos Group, the braintrust behind OpenCL and OpenGL, have announced a trio of BOF’s and a list of papers that they will be presenting at SIGGRAPH2009 in New Orleans.  The BOFs are:

• OpenCL – by Neil Trevett, NVidia
• COLLADA – by Remi Arnaud, Intel
• OpenGL – by Barthold Lichtenbelt, NVidia

The three papers they list are on on Shader-Based OpenGL and programmable shaders.  Visit their website for registration information.

Siggraph 2009 New Orleans – Khronos Group Events, Seminars and Presentations.

Hardware collada, khronos, opencl, opengl, siggraph

Opcoder’s  “Graphic Designer Toolbox” has just released v1.2.0 for Mac OSX, and has now hit 101 blocks to experiment with.  If you’ve never tried it:

Copenhagen/Denmark, Juli 17, 2009 — Opcoders today released GraphicDesignerToolbox 1.2.0, a free update to their powerful Mac OS X graphics editor. Perfect for web designers that need to compose seamless tiling textures, trim pixels, prepare thumbnails and add shadows, plus much more! A round milestone is crossed, the 100 building blocks.

It uses a pipeline architecture to allow you to go back and edit any of the earlier stages of the graphic, without having to navigate multiple levels of undo/redo each time.  A free trial trial (restricted to 10-blocks in a single project) is available, and the full version retails for just under $50.

Graphic Designer Toolbox software.

Graphics graphic designer toolbox, opcoder, software

A new visualization from Flink Labs shows the Melbourne train system over a single operating day.

The day starts and the train network awakens, slowly at first, then increases to peak hour levels around 9am. A steady active state continues through the day, then increases again as school students, then workers, commute home from the city. Finally, the system quietens as the last trains depart at the end of the day.

This project transmogrifies the viewer from the scale of a single train, station, or route, to the level of the city and system as a whole. Through this de-magnification, patterns of movement that were previously hidden become magically visible. The movement of train traffic across the network becomes obvious, and the complexity of the system evident.

See a video of the resulting visualization after the break.

Read more…

Science flink, infovis, melbourne, trains

Vicon will be at SIGGRAPH2009 showing the newest version of their popular motion tracking tool ‘boujou5′.  In the new versiohn they’ve added sequential solvers that work per-frame, making it significantly faster and allowing human intervention, and new graph editors.

Phil Elderfield, Product Manager at Vicon explains, “Customers have been asking for greater control, and that’s exactly what we’re delivering with boujou 5. The new manual tracking tools will give users the ability to step in and work directly with the data. Even the trickiest shot can be solved in boujou 5.”

Full information can be found on vicon’s website.

via Vicon to showcase boujou 5 at Siggraph 2009 – BroadcastNewsroom.

Graphics boujou, siggraph, software, vicon