VizWorld.com

Lots of hardware announcements today thanks to IBC and IFA.

• Panasonic’s full HD 3d Plasma TV & Blu-Ray combo
• Philip’s 56-inch 21:9 3D TV
• Aggregating Online Trends on Isometric Maps

Hardware, Science pixels

Another list, this time compiled by Denis Designs, of 20 awesome CG vehicle renderings.

We are going to look at some vehicles from some very talented CG artists. I love cars, and to see all the details and everything in these is just awesome. We tried to get a nice variety, everything from old and new Dodge Chargers, to the old and new Chevy Camaro, to all kinds of race cars. Enjoy!

via 20 Awesome CG Vehicles | Denis Designs.

Graphics car, list

Yesterday we announced that the University of Texas at San Antonio won a $5 million grant that comes from funds in the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009.  Today, we announced that the University of Arkansas received a $3.3M grant from the same source.  Given that this money was supposed to aid in the recent economic downturn by creating jobs, how do you feel about it being used in this way?

Put your answers in the comments on whether you think it’s a good idea, or a big mistake?

Science arra

Have you ever wondered what New York looked like before the city rose?  If so, then check out The Mannahatta project.

Now, after nearly a decade of research, the Mannahatta Project at the Wildlife Conservation Society has un-covered the original ecology of Manhattan. That’s right, the center of one of the world’s largest and most built-up cities was once a natural landscape of hills, valleys, forests, fields, freshwater wetlands, salt marshes, beaches, springs, ponds and streams, supporting a rich and abundant community of wildlife and sustaining people for perhaps 5000 years before Europeans arrived on the scene in 1609.

Check out their site for a fully interactive map to browse the topology.

Mannahatta » Home.

Science history, map, new york

Smoke and Mirrors New York (SMNY) that just completed a commercial for the Denver Museum of Nature and Science advertising their new dinosaur exhibits, and discusses the entire spot in a great interview with Ian Failes of FXGuide.

The background elements had to look like it was the Denver Museum. We weren’t that close to Denver, obviously, so we took an HD camera and shot all the elements in Central Park. Then we had the agency commission a photographer to take stills of the area in Denver from specific camera heights, and we comped those into the background. It was real ground from Central Park but the skyline and buildings are taken from stills of the Denver area.

Those shots were tracked in 3D. The ice was completely bleached out white. As soon as you put shadows on something like that, you should be able to see details. So we had to re-create the ice field so we could re-light it for the detail. We sculpted the dinosaur from scratch

via fxguide – visual effects school – Smoke and Mirrors for a Denver Museum.

Graphics commercial, smoke and mirrors, vfx

New South Wales has created an online data repository focusing the home of Sydney, and focuses heavily on innovation and visual design.

The website culls data from many different sources, ranging from the usual “archival” suspects like the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the State Records NSW and the National Archives of Australia, in addition to some refreshing collections from the NSW Film and Television Office, the Historic Houses Trust and the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

This means users can do more than searching for images and articles on popular topics related to New South Wales, and also browse artworks, heritage sites, museum artefacts and related information on a map, or explore demographic data and compare different regions to each other.

Information Aesthetics has a great collection of links about the design and construction of the system that make for great reading.

via About New South Wales: Putting Open Data Online, the Australian Way – information aesthetics.

Science australia, data, government, portal

Researchers at the University of Arkansas and other colleges have received a $3.3 Million grant from the NSF, via more ARRA funds, called the “CI-TRAIN”, or Cyberinfrastructure for Transformational Scientific Discovery in Arkansas and West Virginia (yeah, the acronym and the words don’t match up.. guess that wasn’t a requirement for the grant proposal).

From a research perspective, the overall goal of the project is to create a nationally competitive environment for computation and visualization – techniques for creating images, diagrams and animations of scientific concepts and processes – and to develop both hardware and software to create and capture data that will enable a broad range of research in science and engineering.

It does involve procurement of one large cluster, to be at Arkansas, as well.  Just like yesterday’s announcement, glad to see money invested in Cyberinfrastructure and Vis, but not so sure it’s the best use of ARRA funds.

via State Researchers Receive $3.3M Stimulus Grant for Cyberinfrastructure – ArkansasBusiness.com.

Science arra, grant, nsf, research

DataVisualization.ch has the story on a new toy called uncontrol.com from Manuel Tan which generates interactive 3D pie charts of Digg Comments surrounding a story.

Commentry is an interactive 3d visualization of comments on a popular digg story. Digg’s rating system combined with word counts allows us to see the status as well as health of a story. Heated debates can easily be found as well as popular reactions(good or bad) made by a given user.

More interesting than the site itself is the commentary on the posting, which contains a great back-and-forth between the authors of Simple Complexity and DataVisualization.ch on some of the design decisions behind the product.

via Interactive Comments from Digg.com on Datavisualization.ch.

Science digg, interactive, socialmedia

If you’re a fan of VisualComplexity’s huge catalog of beautiful visualizations, then you should check out reMap.

reMap displays visualcomplexity.com projects allowing navigation using a semantic approach and depicting relations among them. All images and texts belong to vc portal. Tags are assigned using a semantic engine created by Bestiario.

Currently it seems to be having a bit of difficulty retrieving assets, but even still it’s pretty impressive.

via Cool Infographics: reMap: An Amazing Visual Browsing Interface to VisualCompexity.com.

Graphics, Science flash, infographic, interactive, web

Via the OnLive Blog, they’ve just announced that they’ve pushed the service into beta and are letting real people log in and try out games.  The purpose: gathering data on network latencies, speeds, and general bugfixes.

One of the key challenges that OnLive technology addresses is providing a high-quality, fast-response gaming experience over a wide range of situations: different speeds/locations/types of broadband services, a variety of different PC and Mac configurations, several kinds of input and display devices, etc. So, a major focus of OnLive Beta is to test as many of these different situations as we can

If you don’t recall what OnLive is, you can read our previous coverage of their impressive web-based remote-gaming technology via our OnLive tag.

via OnLive Opens the Beta Program « OnLive Blog.

Hardware beta, onlive, video game