Home » Archives for October 2009
Shearvision has constructed a new mammoth 200-inch TV that uses iTrans technology, offering a 1.7mm pixel size (cmpared to the 6mm LED pixel sizes of comparable TV’s) and 2000Cdm brightness.
“It is capable of outperforming tiled plasma in brightly lit environments like transport terminals. With a fill factor of 95 per cent the screens continue to look good close up rather than breaking up into pixels as some large display screens do.”
The resulting television hits all the major requirements: high resolution, multiple viewing angles and distances, works in high-light environments, and no glare. Unfortunately each screen is currently custom-made to order, so the pricing is “unavailable” (read: way out of the realm of mortal men). Read the full announcement after the break.
Read more…
Hardware display, extreme, itrans, shearvision, television
September 11th is still a sore memory for many Americans, but Mobilizy, a company from Salzburg that just released Wikitude, has just released a new upgrade to implement 3D visual overlays and now you can relive the view of the Twin Towers before that horrible day.
Their idea was to build a virtual memorial in remembrance of the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. and the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City. The result will be the ability to point their Android and iPhone application at the place where the World Trade Center once stood and witness a 3D rendering of the Twin Towers, once more.
From their instructions:
Go to the area around ground zero in NYC and you see a 3D icon on the left side of the cam view (in Wikitude v7.8 – on Android based phones). Click on it and the World Trade Center will appear as it looked pre-9/11.
See a video demo after the break.
via Twin Towers seen once more via Augmented Reality iPhone app.
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Hardware, Science augmented reality, iphone, mobile
Guaranteed to be Disneys next big hit, and an instant classic, Disney’s “The Princess & The Frog” is a return to classic hand-drawn animation. If you can’t wait until December 11th to watch it, then you can cruise on over to YouTube and check out the first 5-minutes of the movie online. Now, it’s still an early draft so it contains some hand-sketch uncolored sections, but it’s still great to watch.
See both segments after the break.
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Graphics animation, disney, movie, preview
It’s making a huge buzz on the internet right now and if you’re heading to SIGGRAPH ASIA then you’ll get a chance to hear alot more about it. What is it? PhotoSketch.
We present a system that composes a realistic picture from a simple freehand sketch annotated with text labels. The composed picture is generated by seamlessly stitching several photographs in agreement with the sketch and text labels; these are found by searching the Internet. Although online image search generates many inappropriate results, our system is able to automatically select suitable photographs to generate a high quality composition, using a filtering scheme to exclude undesirable images. We also provide a novel image blending algorithm to allow seamless image composition.
Each blending result is given a numeric score, allowing us to find an optimal combination of discovered images. Experimental results show the method is very successful; we also evaluate our system using the results from two user studies.
Cliff notes version: Draw a basic sketch of what you want and label the components (as shown above), and the system automatically extracts the necessary components from a huge database and composites them together. The research consists of 2 main parts: A new blending algorithm to make the images fit in their new environments much better, and a new filtering and classification system for images.
You can read the full PDF of their work here (with many more examples than the sailboat/kiss floating around everywhere), and see a great demonstration video after the break.
Read more…
Science algorithm, image processing, siggraph
If you’re doing research in HDR imaging, visual media, or stereo processing, then you should quickly gather up your notes and get to work on a short-paper for the upcoming Conference on Visual Media Production to be held at the BFI Southbank, London on the 12th & 13th of November.
The deadline for the submission of one-page papers, presenting novel research-in-progress, is October 14th. Full details are available online, and short papers are invited from across the broad spectrum of visual media production, including: HDR imaging, pre-visualisation, stereo and 3D video capture and processing,, human motion capture, CG modelling, VFX, interactive media and games, digital image enhancement and content management. Submitted papers will be considered for presentation as posters in a special session.
In addition to research, they’ve got some great presenters on schedule from Moving Picture Company, Thomson Corporate Research, and more. Read the Final Call & full Press Release after the break.
CVMP Website
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Graphics, Science conference, cvmp
It’s been a while since I’ve found enough news to even warrant Pixels Posts, so here’s some links for you to check out today:
Graphics, Hardware pixels
Bungee’s Halo 3 : ODST (Orbital Drop Ship Troopers) has a fantastic commercial done by Asylum showing a tear-jerking scene of a warrior’s return home in a casket, and his rise from nobody through boot camp and into the front-lines. Digital Arts talks to Asylum’s Rob Moggach about the project:
“Our biggest challenge with this project was time. We had just under three weeks from when we received 2K plates to finish the 2:30 film. Integration with the almost entirely hand-held, motion-blurred footage proved to be the next biggest challenge.
“In the end we used a lot of brute-force visual effects to get the job done quickly instead of devising any complex revolutionary technique. We did make use of the Flame’s 3D capabilities for doing the reflective visor replacements but the rest of the work can be attributed to just pushing hard until the image looked right.”
See the commercial after the break.
Digital Arts.
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Graphics asylum, bungee, commercial, video game
Galaxy has earned a name for itself recently by introducing the world’s first single-slot version of the power & cooling-hungry GTX260+ from NVidia. In a decidedly sexy and small form factor it uses Vapor Chamber technology to pack something similar to water-cooling into a single-slot self-contained design.
No word on pricing or availability yet, so we’ll just have to keep an eye out.
Galaxy Delivers the First Single Slot GTX260+ Accelerator – Expreview.com.
Hardware galaxy, nvidia
A new tool from Strata, called Strata Foto 3D CX, uses technology developed by Canon and Creative Dimension Software to turn any digital camera into a 3D Model scanner.
Strata Foto 3D CX lets you use a standard digital camera to capture real-world objects as fully textured 3D models. Its ideal for difficult to model objects like organic shapes, soft forms and hand made items.
Looks like you simply take several pictures of the image from multiple angles and it reconstructs a basic 3D model and textures it automatically. It comes with an optional (printable) mat to aid in image registration, and plugins to allow you to manipulate the models in Photoshop.
Buy it now for only $695.
strata3d.com.
Graphics, Science image processing, modeling, software, strata
Looks like last week’s rumor is true, as a new announcement today from NVidia & Adobe states that they are working together on bringing Adobe Flash Player 10.1 to netbooks & mobile devices. The iPhone is still lacking, but betas are expected to be out for PalmOS & Windows Mobile later this year, with Blackberry, Symbian, and Android joining the club in 2010.
Apple will want to jump on board soon, though; Flash Player 10.1 opens up some interesting multimedia possibilities for other platforms. The player supports multitouch, accelerometer and screen orientation, all of which makes for the optimal video-watching experience. It also supports gesture-based controls, which is a boon for gaming. Adobe said that the player won’t be a drain on battery life, either. For example, the player goes to sleep when you receive an incoming call.
Currently the reports are rather high of hype and low on substance. NVidia’s contributions seem to be in the Tegra (embedded) and GPU-acceleration capacities, but people everyone are harping on “Hulu on your BlackBerry!” and “Tower Defense on your Symbian!”. Only time will tell what the reality is.
Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Comes to Smartphones – PC World.
Hardware adobe, flash, nvidia
VizWorld.com 
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