VizWorld.com

As the California wildfires rage on, firefighters find themselves in need of new information on the state of the situation.  Currently, dead spots in their communication networks make this information hard to get, but a new collaboration between Inmarsat PLC and the San Diego State University’s Homeland Security program aims to fix this by combining their existing visualization expertise with the BGAN satellite system.

“By delivering dynamic, real-time information about fire perimeters, weather and ground conditions, Inmarsat and the SDSU “Viz Lab” will enhance the ability of incident commanders to protect lives and property, and enhance the safety of fire-fighters in the field,” said Rebecca Cowen-Hirsch, Vice President, Global Government Services at Inmarsat.

via Inmarsat BGAN to Bring Real-Time GIS Data to Remote Wildfire Teams | Reuters.

Science gis, inmarsat, sdsu

The “demo reel” is a longstanding traditional resume-replacement in the video and motion graphics space, showcasing your talents and capabilities far better than any single-page resume can do.  Designrfix has compiled a great list of 40 fantastic reels guaranteed to inspire you.

The use of demo reels is one of the best ways for a motion graphic designer to show off their portfolios. Once you set static elements into motion and add cool music, you can accomplish visually stunning animations and special effects that will leave you speechless. When viewing these demo reels, it makes you feel like you are actually traveling through the artist’s portfolio and all their works. Here are 40 of the most beautiful and creative personal and company motion reels that I have found. I hope you guys enjoy this.

via Motion Graphics: 40 Most beautiful and creative motion reels | designrfix.com.

Graphics demo, reel, vfx

CyberLink’s MediaShow photo management package has just released version 5 with a new popular feature, face detection.  Just like Apple’s iPhoto, it can now identify faces within photos to allow you to easily search for all photos containing a specific individual.  Unlike iPhoto, however, it uses NVidia’s CUDA technology to accelerate the process.

CyberLink MediaShow 5 searches and organizes your photo collection using a sophisticated face recognition algorithm. By utilizing co-processing – which leverages the massive parallel processing power of NVIDIA GeForce GPUs in tandem with the computer’s central processor (CPU) – CyberLink MediaShow 5 provides up to a 70%(1) improvement in application speed so you can find the photos you want faster.

via NVIDIA Corporation :: NVIDIA CUDA Technology Dramatically Speeds Up Facial Recognition in CyberLink MediaShow 5 Digital Photo Application.

Science cuda, cyberlink, imageprocessing, mediashow, nvidia

Chris Davis and Igor Nikolic have visualized the grown of the wiki.tudelft.nl website since it’s inception in 2004 in a variety of ways and shared the results on the wiki.

After using the wiki in our daily work for several years, we realized that we really did not know what it looked like from a higher level. It was clear that clicking from page to page was a completely inadequate way to get a sense of the scale and shape of it. At the same time, in much of our work, we seek to use insights about Complex Systems Theory. By visualizing the wiki, we were able to vividly provide an educational example of a complex system that we were intimately familiar with, and that other university faculty and students could participate in.

The video, shown after the break, reveals a fascinating cellular growth structure as it evolves over time.  In addition to that, tho, they have a simple chart of Number of edits per user, reinforcing the 90-9-1 theory, and an interesting coauthorship network.

Read more…

Science graph, wiki

Fudzilla has the news that ATI has three new mobile-centric GPU’s in development code-named “Broadway”, “Madison”, and “Park”.

We don’t have many details, but we know that in the top of enthusiast market, ATI is preparing a mobile DirectX 11 GPU codenamed Broadway. This should be the fastest mobile gamer and workstation card in DirectX 11 flavour and you can expect 30 to 60W TPD.

The performance market comes with a card codenamed Madison who should be enough to cover the mainstream market and of course it shares DirectX 11 support but it fits 15 to 30W TDP which is much more acceptable for notebooks.

The third in line is a mainstream card codenamed Park and it looks to us that for mobile GPUs ATI used New York avenue names. This should be “high performing” mainstream DirectX 11 card with 8 to 15W TDP.

via Fudzilla.

Hardware ati, dx11, gpu

If you’re a big Final Cut Studio user, then a new product from Digital Rebellion might go a long way to improving your productivity and fixing some of the routine maintenance tasks you find ourself doing every day: The FCS Maintenance Pack

FCS Maintenance Pack is a group of utilities designed to help maintain your Final Cut Studio system. The tools fall into two categories – those that help keep things ticking along and those that help to fix problems when they arise.

FCS Maintenance Pack can clean up your autosaves, locate corrupt clips within a Final Cut Pro sequence, analyze crash logs, periodically trash caches, salvage data from damaged files, manage plugins, repair projects that refuse to launch, remove bloat from applications, and much much more.

A 15 day trial is available for you to try out, but the full version is a mere $99.

via Introducing FCS Maintenance Pack – Digital Rebellion Blog.

Graphics digital rebellion, finalcut, software

A nice spoof video currently popular on YouTube shows the famous Berlin TV tower being “stolen” by NASA as it blasts into space.  It’s the result of 28-year old Fabian Tischer who created it for fun and posted it on youTube and Vimeo.

See the daring theft after the break.

via Telegraph.co.uk

Read more…

Graphics nasa, vfx

Scientists and Students at Stanford envision a world where the software that runs on digital cameras is similar to what currently runs on mobile devices and netbooks, and open-source user-modifiable operating system where new features can be downloaded onto the device.  To this end they’ve created their own camera to demonstrate it.

Computer science graduate student Andrew Adams, who helped design the prototype of the Stanford camera (dubbed Frankencamera,) imagines a future where consumers download applications to their open-platform cameras the way Apple apps are downloaded to iPhones today. When the camera’s operating software is made available publicly, perhaps a year from now, users will be able to continuously improve it, along the open-source model of the Linux operating system for computers or the Mozilla Firefox web browser.

via New Open-source Camera Could Revolutionize Photography.

Hardware camera, opensource, stanford

Pitch Interactive Jer Thorp has created a collection of visualizations named based on Jer Thorp’s principle of “Colour Economy”, in which pixels of colors are treated as a virtual economy , and colors are treated as nations.

Taking actual human driven data, we mapped out a scenario where each trade between two states created a curved line between the traders. For example, we have the state of #4FB1AC in the nation of Aqua in our first iteration below. From observation, one can see that approximately 30% of their trade is with the nation of Purple (mostly with Purple’s #715E98 state). Each thumbnail below can be clicked to further explore that state’s trade.

I’m honestly not sure what the usefulness of this really it, but the charts are fairly beautiful and nice to look at.

via The Colour Economy – Pitch Interactive – 2009.

Graphics, Science color, infographic

An infographic from the Gartner Group has recently been updated with data from 2009 covering the current state and projected future of various computer interface design technologies.  It’s a bit cluttered and ugly, but at a glance you can see:

• Overhyped technologies expected to fail
• Technologies rising to prominence
• Older hyped technologies on the way out.

Infographic of the Day: The “Hype Cycle” of Computer-Interface Design | Design & Innovation | Fast Company. via SimpleComplexity

Science gartner, infographic, user interface