VizWorld.com

Some NVidia engineers have been trawling internet forums and posting some interesting responses to common complaints popping up recently.  A particularly good response comes from “NickStam” on the Hexus Forums.  A few choice quotes:

What is NVIDIA’s answer to ATI Eyefinity technology?

ANSWER: With GeForce you would need to use more than one graphics board to support more than two active monitors. If this is a feature our customers want, we will look in to adding it for GeForce. Our focus has been on other display technologies like 3D stereo, and our 3D Vision products, but we understand multi-mon gaming with many monitors could be a cool addition.

Why does NVIDIA detect AMD GPUs in Batman: AA and turn off AntiAliasing?

“In the case of Batman’s AA support, NVIDIA essentially built the AA engine explicitly for Eidos – AA didn’t exist in the game engine before that. NVIDIA knew that this title was going to be a big seller on the PC and spent the money / time to get it working on their hardware. Eidos told us in an email conversation that the offer was made to AMD for them to send engineers to their studios and do the same work NVIDIA did for its own hardware, but AMD declined.”

Why do new NVIDIA drivers punish AMD GPU owners who want to leverage an NVIDIA card to compute PhysX?

Answer: We’re not trying to punish gamers. Our GPU and PhysX drivers are interconnected to optimize performance. In the future we expect this interdependence to deepen. This alone makes it difficult to support a third party GPU.

In order to make sure our customers have a great experience, we QA every release of our PhysX and Graphics drivers by testing approximately 14 NVIDIA GPUs for graphics processing with 8 GPUs for PhysX processing on 6 common platforms with 6 OS’s using 6 combinations of CPU and memory. This is over 24000 possible configurations. While we don’t test every possible combination, the work and cost is substantial. Adding AMD GPUs would significantly increase the necessary work and cost for NVIDIA so we decided not to support this.

He also discusses some of the recent SLI Restrictions, the Vista Driver debacle, and support for DX10.1 and DX11.

Opinions – A look back at NVIDIA’s GTC – Page 4 – HEXUS.community discussion forums.

Hardware amd, nvidia, physx

A new iPhone app from Zensify called ZenNews combines social media and networking with popular news sites to present a “popularity” visualization with tag-clouds, providing an interesting visualization of what’s trending in the social media world.

When you open ZenNews up, you see keyword clouds for the news stories that are currently gaining traction and being discussed across the world. The bigger the cloud, the more coverage or discussion associated with the topic.

Click on a keyword and you can further drill down a specific aspect of that keyword (so clicking “Pakistan” might lead to clouds that include “bomber” or “coordinated”) and clicking on those keywords will lead to a list of stories from various news sources. You can also view keyword clouds from specific news sources, like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The BBC and even TweetMeme

The app is available in iTunes (link).

via Zensify Combines News Visualization and Social Media on iPhone.

Hardware, Science iphone, news, zennews

Got a presentation coming up and need some data for a graph?  Well, Data360 aims to please with their open data collection.

Data360 is an open-source, non-profit and free website. The site hosts a common and shared database, from which any organization which is committed to neutrality and non-partisanship (meaning “let the data speak”), can use the site for presentation of their reports and visualizations about the data.

They’ve got a great collection of visualizations and datasets, all freely available.  Some of the charts we’ve covered before as they come from the New York Times or USA Today, but there is a lot of new material there.

via Data360 Homepage. via Simple Complexity.

Science data, database, list, Website

I found this over on FailBlog, which typically isn’t a source of great visualization material.  However, this poll result from the Washington Post has so many errors, I had to post it.

At first glance, it seems that there’s an overwhelming “yes”, as evidenced by the red bar.  But look closely at the percentages inside the bars, and you see they are both 50% .  Look closely at the legend across the bottom, and the entire legend is 50%.  What this really means is that the results (once you account for a reasonable margin of error) are essentially equal, roughly 49.9% vs 50.1%.

At a panel this week at VisWeek, “Changing the World with Visualization”, Sarah Cohen made the comment that they typically don’t label charts very well because they aren’t expected to leave the newsroom.  Evidently this one snuck out.

Online Poll Fail « FAIL Blog: Epic Fail Pictures and Videos of Owned, Pwnd and Fail Moments.

Science bad, poll, visweek, washingtonpost

Assimilate has just announced a new bundle of their popular ROCKET product for managing RED ONE digital camera material.  Created specifically for cost-sensitive industries like indie filmmakers, it’s only $10,999 and comes with a full loadout of an NVidia Quadro FX3800, the RED Rocket Card, and the SCRATCH CINE 4k post workflow.

The first integrated product solution to support RED ROCKET, and offered exclusively by ASSIMILATE, the ROCKET FUEL bundle, along with a PC-based workstation, gives anyone working with RED 4K material the following workflow functionality:

• Tape dailies to a variety of formats, from NTSC and PAL, up to dual-link 2048X1080

• Screening in virtually all formats

• Accelerated data output to Quicktime and file sequences

• Quality check (QC) for on-set and for post dailies

• R3D conform from editorial EDLs

• Pan/Scan and Output in real time, with animated curves

• Set-up for SCRATCH FINISH – a low-cost method of getting timelines set-up for migrating to FINISH for final mastering and delivery

• Set-up and transcode for DI – a low cost method of getting timelines set-up and rendered for migrating to other DI systems.

All this functionality, and more, is from full-resolution, uncompressed, fully debayered and demosaiced 4K.  Fully tested, SCRATCH CINE v5.0 is a native 64-bit application with Win7 x 64 as the operating system.

Read more…

Hardware assimilate, red, software

Another day, another Augmented Reality app on the iPhone.  This time it’s the popular restaurant chooser Urbanspoon, which has just added the “Scope” feature.

The AR adds to Urbanspoon’s existing featureset, where you can browse or search for a good restaurant nearby or, with a surprisingly fun gesture, shake the phone to get a random local result. With the new “Scope” feature, you’ll see a Google Map showing your position in blue and the red pins representing restaurants nearby.

If you point the iPhone at the horizon, however, the app will detect the change via the accelerometer and switch to camera display view with an augmented reality overlay of those restaurants. They appear as bright circles with smaller size representing farther distance. Each circle contains a percentage of how many app users “liked” that particular restaurant, with more liked restaurants appearing a deeper orange and less liked restaurants fading into shades of grey.

via AWESOME: Urbanspoon iPhone App Adds Augmented Reality.

Hardware augmented reality, iphone, mobile, urbanspoon

We first discussed TopoGun back in August, but back then it was Windows-only.  Looks like they’re ready to change that as the TopoGun 1.05 for OSX will begin betatesting in just a few days.

TopoGun 1.05 for OS X is ready and the betatesting will start in a couple days.

Everyone who wants to join the betateam should register to the TopoGun forum and join the Betatesters usergroup.

TopoGun requires at least OS X version 10.5.5.

via TopoGun beta for OS X announced – TopoGun Forum.

Graphics software, topogun

We’ve discussed Layar before, but until now it’s been Android only.  Now it’s available on the iPhone.

Since OS 3.1 dropped, giving devs (almost) open access to the iPhone’s camera we’ve seen a minor avalanche of augmented reality apps hit the store; some have been interesting, like Yelp’s, but most feel a little bit like tech demos. Layar, for what it’s worth, has grown up since we last saw it: now you can overlay all kinds of data, from geotagged Wikipedia entries to Flickr photos to local Tweets.

via Android’s Best Augmented Reality App Hits the iPhone – Layar – Gizmodo.

Hardware, Science augmented reality, iphone, layar, mobile

Reminescent of Urbanscreen’s 555 Kubrik exhibit, Telenoika has created something similar for the first edition of Ingravid Festival in Figueres.

Audiovisual Mapping made by the Telenoika Cultural Association into the Jardí Theater facade, on the first edition of Ingravid Festival in Figueres. 20 min.

Very impressive to watch, but a bit long at 20 minutes. See the video after the break.

Read more…

Graphics art, telenoika

The ACM has published the list of accepted papers at the upcoming SIGGRAPH Asia conference, several of which are available in pre-print PDF form.

Leading international experts from Asia and beyond present peer-reviewed research in physical simulation, animation control, real-time and photo-realistic rendering, geometric and urban modeling, hair capture and styling, texturing, image and video processing and resizing, GPU algorithms, and sound. One session of four papers includes duplicate presentations in Japanese.

via Technical Papers > For Attendees > SIGGRAPH Asia 2009.

Graphics, Science conference, paper, siggraph