VizWorld.com

A new player has popped up in the 3D Television market, HDI of Los Gatos, showcasing a whole new take on the industry: Laser Televisions.

Now comes the next step, in this 100-inch screen. The colors are richer than anything else, because they come from lasers. The lasers are cheap. They’re low power, consuming just 1W each. Try that with your plasma. And it’s true HD. Not just 1080p, but 1080 Hertz.

Hit the link for the video report.

via Startup unveils 100 inch 3D laser TV – 9/14/09 – San Francisco News – abc7news.com.

Hardware 3d, laser, tv

Last month (August 14th), we published a feature story from Paul Adams about the ioXTreme card from FusionIO.  From his article:

The new 80 GB ioXtreme from Fusion-io was recently displayed at SIGGRAPH 2009 in New Orleans, LA. The ioXtreme is a solid-state drive (SSD) that fits into a x4 PCI Express slot. The beauty of the using the PCI Express slot is that you can really obtain great performance. Fusion-io is claiming that their drive can achieve a write bandwidth of 500 MB/s and a read bandwidth of 280 MB/s.

While those number match the performance data given to us in Phone Interviews and the DataSheet they handed out at SIGGRAPH (We still have it, & verified it), FusionIO contacted me today requesting a correction.

• Read Bandwidth    697 MB/s (64 KB packets)
• Write Bandwidth      288 MB/s (64 KB packets)

The changes have been integrated into Paul’s original article, go check it out for details on the fastest SSD solution on the market.

Hardware feature, fusionio, storage

As iPhones, Palm Pre’s, and Blackberry’s take over the world, we find ourselves having to redefine and recreate many of the information visualization and HCI paradigms that have grown over the last decade.  A great slide-deck from Luca Chittaro at the University of Udine, Italy talks about important considerations in designing interfaces for mobile devices and shows several examples of both good and bad implementations.

Mobile devices have now powerful graphics capabilities that enable the creation of novel visual interfaces – based on 2D (or even 3D) graphics – to help users on the move in dealing more quickly and easily with larger amounts of information. This tutorial introduces participants to what we can learn (and what we need to adapt) from the field of visualization to build effective visual interfaces on mobile devices. It also introduces future challenges and briefly show how information visualization techniques are useful to create new tools for studying the behaviour of mobile users. No particular background in information visualization is required.

via Interattivo: Mobile HCI Tutorials (files from the presentations).

Graphics, Science hci, infovis, iphone, mobile

Our recommendation for this week goes out to anyone interested in getting their feet wet in information visualization via the Processing Language.  Ben Fry, an MIT Graduate who helped build the Processing language, has a great O’Reilly book entitled “Visualizing Data: Exploring and Explaining Data with the Processing Environment“.  The book description:

This book teaches you how to design entire interfaces around large, complex data sets with the help of a powerful new design and prototyping tool called “Processing.” Used by many researchers and companies to convey specific data in a clear and understandable manner, the Processing beta is available free. With this tool and Visualizing Data as a guide, you’ll learn basic visualization principles, how to choose the right kind of display for your purposes, and how to provide interactive features that will bring users to your site over and over. This book teaches you:

• The seven stages of visualizing data — acquire, parse, filter, mine, represent, refine, and interact
• How all data problems begin with a question and end with a narrative construct that provides a clear answer without extraneous details
• Several example projects with the code to make them work
• Positive and negative points of each representation discussed.

The focus is on customization so that each one best suits what you want to convey about your data set.  The book does not provide ready-made “visualizations” that can be plugged into any data set. Instead, with chapters divided by types of data rather than types of display, you’ll learn how each visualization conveys the unique properties of the data it represents — why the data was collected, what’s interesting about it, and what stories it can tell. Visualizing Data teaches you how to answer questions, not simply display information.

Who knows, for ther mere $26 price tag you could become the next Aaron Koblin.

Science book, feature, processing, resource of the week

Some more information has come out about the Hayden Planetarium Show we discussed last month, this time more about the HPC resources and simulations used to create the spectacular datasets.

To create the simulation used in the show, Rempel and his team first designed a three-dimensional virtual domain to replicate a region on the sun 31,000 miles in length and height and about 5,100 miles in depth. The domain was large enough to fit an entire sunspot, which has a typical size of 12,000 to 19,000 miles, and provided enough resolution to view substructure on the scale of 20- to 30- miles.

The researchers then used TACC’s Ranger supercomputer to solve complex solar equations for each of 268 million points spaced 20- to 30- miles apart within the virtual domain. This involved processing approximately a terabyte of data and took several days to run on 512 processors.

via Feature – Visualizations go big in planetarium show.

Science astronomy, hpc, nsf, teragrid

Time to start filling out those travel request forms and see if you can get your boss to foot the bill for an exotic trip to Milan, all in the name of Scientific Visualization as the 22nd annual AEIMS Congress has been announced.

The Scientific Programme Committee has worked out an outstanding scientific programme covering the most recent developments in scientific visualization. The overall programme consists of abstracts and a workshops which are designed to cover both medical, scientific and naturalistic visualization. In addition, this meeting has an educational objective in exposing young illustrators to an international rather than a national audience.

The aim is to present an overview of fundamental and applied aspects of scientific visualization.

The conference will run from November 5-7th, with the 5th being open to the public.

via AEIMS Congress 2009 – Milan.

Science aeims, conference

Ars Electronica is over and Information Aesthetics has a great writeup on the massive “30 Years of Ars Electronica” exhibit.  Some details.

Dietmar explained that the projects were developed by studying 3 main points of the data:

1. Quantitative Analysis: What are the submissions, how many they are and how they are categorized.

2. Social Networks: Who were the jury members throughout the years? How they are connected to each other as well as awarded artists.

3. Art Historical Context: What is the effect of awarded projects in the history? Where they appeared after the awards(i.e. books,exhibitions), how they influenced the genres and fields of media arts.

Hit his website for several photos and a ton of information about the project.

via Mapping The Archive: 30 Years of Ars Electronica Visualized in Huge Scale – information aesthetics.

Science ars electronica, conference, infographic

Taking an 11-minute short film created for a school thesis and turning it into a major motion picture that’s been the buzz of the internet for the last year is no small feat, but ’9′ has bucked the trend and created a real masterpiece of digital cinema.  Over at CGSociety, Renee Dunlop got some inside information on how they made the transition from ‘garage’ to ‘Hollywood’ and managed to preserve their limited-resource mindset to keep the film in check.

“We weren’t doing fancy cloth simulations or subsurface scattering; we were a couple years behind the newest technology,” explained Ksander. “But again, because our time was so short and our budget was small, you are forced to be creative and efficient. So our characters have no skin, no hair. We were judicious about where we spent that money, like in terms of the FX. Our FX guys did some great stuff.

via CGSociety – ’9′.

Graphics 9, movie, vfx

If you’ve been saving your pennies and holding your breath for the new NVidia super-card, the GT300, then we’ve got some bad news for you.  NVidia has gotten back the first silicon dies of the new GT300 chipset and the news is amazingly bad.

How many worked out of the (4 x 104) 416 candidates? Try 7. Yes, Northwood was hopelessly optimistic – Nvidia got only 7 chips back. Let me repeat that, out of 416 tries, it got 7 ‘good’ chips back from the fab. Oh how it must yearn for the low estimate of 20%, talk about botched execution. To save you from having to find a calculator, that is (7 / 416 = .01682), rounded up, 1.7% yield.

So 416 chips were made.  7 were “good”.  And good doesn’t mean “functional”, just “as designed” (a design flaw would carry through).  If they can’t iron the kinks out of the process, we may never see the GT300 as advertised.

via SemiAccurate :: Nvidia GT300 yields are under 2%.

Hardware gt300, nvidia

Gamer is the story of a futuristic First-Person Shooter game where the combatants are real people with real weapons and real consequences.  Building this game was a huge undertaking that was divided amongst several VFX studios.

Gamer contains about 1,000 vfx shots divided among such vendors as yU+co (568 shots), LookFX (381 shots), Furious FX (209 shots), Therapy (120 shots), Sub/Par (the in-house staff, which did 107 shots), Duran Duboi (61 shots), Celluloid (24 shots), Gradient (four shots) and Luma (four shots).

AWN has an interview with VFX Supervisor James McQuaide where they discuss the technology and tools used in the film.

via Gamer: A New Kind of Mind-Control Mayhem | AWN | Animation World Network.

Graphics movie, vfx