VizWorld.com

ASSIMILATE, makers of the SCRATCH Digital Process Solution, have just announced a new reseller in the UK market in CWPro, and a new cooperation with projectiondesign that you’ll be able to see later this week.

ASSIMILATE, in cooperation with projectiondesign (www.projectiondesign.com), manufacturer of high-performance projectors specifically made for post production, will showcase, 2K and 4K real-time post in SCRATCH, as well as the new Rocket Fuel bundle for optimised RED ONE™ 4K workflow, using projectiondesign’s new cineo series of production-specific projectors. These display colour-accurate 2D and 3D stereo in REC709 and DCI colour spaces, and fit 2m to 8m-width screens. The event takes place at The Slug & Lettuce, 80-82 Wardour Street, from 12.00 to 17.00, Thursday, 29th Oct.

Read the full announcement after the break.

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Science

Further proof of the benefits of Augmented Reality in mechanical situations, as first evidenced by Boeing many years ago, comes from the US Marines who have adopted goggles & Android smartphones as a possible replacement for massive field manuals on repairs.

A test with six Marine mechanics found that they performed up to 46 percent faster on making repairs to a light armored vehicle when using the AR goggles, according to Technology Review. The jarheads typically rely upon technical manuals displayed on laptops.

Besides the heads-up display, the AR system uses text instructions, floating labels, arrows and even 3-D models of tools needed for various tasks. An Android smartphone provides the wrist interface for cueing up new instructions.

via Augmented Reality Goggles Make Marine Mechanics More Efficient | Popular Science.

Hardware android, augmented reality, mobile

NVidia has published most of the recordings from the recent GPU Technology Conference on their website.  Head on over there to download the posters, watch the keynotes, or see the recordings of any of the sessions.

GPU Technology Conference.

Hardware, Science conference, gtc, nvidia

Samsung is unveiling a new “world’s slimming” television, the 120hz OLED 40″ HDTV that is a mere 3mm thick.  This destroys their previous record of an 8.9mm display.  As usual no word on pricing or release date other than “ASAP”.

Akihabara News via Samsung’s 3mm-Thick HDTV – Samsung 3mm thin HDTV – Gizmodo.

Hardware display, oled, samsung, tv

A new ad for the UK McDonald’s Coke Glasses promotion showcases some spectacular CG imagery from Royale.  Not many details on the process, but it’s a beautiful ad to watch.

See the ad, and some concept boards, at their site.

We Are Royale.

Graphics commercial, royale, vfx

If you thought kite photography was the realm of bored college kids with disposable cameras, think again.  The picture above was captured via kite by Scott Dunn, and he describes all of the technique and hardware required to make it work.

Scott was photographing the Liberty Island Swim, an open water swim race in New York Harbor. Morty Berger, one of the race organizers, got permission from the National Park Service for Scott to photograph the swim from Liberty Island. Getting the proper clearance was required since the legal flying limit for large kites is usually 500 feet. Higher than that and you are entering into regulated airspace. This picture was taken in the morning, immediately after the swim race and before it began raining.

So that’s a $200 kite holding a Picavet to suspend the camera, a GS-1 radio control servo with gyro stabilization to steady it, and a DuneCam remote for shuttler and directional control.  All of that to get that one awesome picture.

via Shoot new angles with kite photography | Digital Photo | Macworld.

Hardware camera, kite, photography

We’ve talked about ARhrrr from the Graz University & Georgia Tech, but it seems they’ve recently made another live demonstration at the NVidia GTC, and revealed some of the details on how it works on the Nvidia Tegra hardware.

The ARhrrr pipeline is simple: the camera uses OpenMAX [multimedia acceleration API] to take in the image featuring AR Tracker. Second step is using the GPU for creating the 640×480 EGLImage Textures [OpenGL|ES 2.0 API] which are then further processed inside the GPU to downsize the images to 320×240 at 8bpp and then sent to the CPU for the AR system [NFT tracker] to make the transformation from camera to real world.

Third step is game engine calculating and sending the needed 3D game objects back to the GPU so that it creates the final rendered image combining the camera stream with the 3D game objects. As you can imagine, the amount of video processing is significant.

Still no work on when, or if, it will ever come to a playable device.  I can hardly wait to start blasting some zombies.

via Zombies hit nVidia’s Tegra thanks to Augmented Reality – Bright Side Of News*.

Hardware augmented reality, nvidia, tegra

Users of OpenInventor, the popular scene graph technology, will be happy to know that the latest version (8.1) adds in support for multi-GPU solutions like the NVidia Quadro Plex.

“This innovative package makes it possible to manipulate and access massive scenes in a practical, efficient way,” said Jean Bernard Cazeaux, CEO of VSG. “An application powered by Open Inventor 8.1 with CompleX running on a Quadro Plex system delivers a smoother, faster frame rate, and offers a much more interactive experience for engineers and geophysicists when viewing a seismic dataset of 100 million triangles. Without it, the performance would be unbearably slow.”

They’ve implemented it via NVidia’s CompleX application acceleration engine, so it’s optimized for NVidia hardware.

via NVIDIA and VSG Accelerate Oil & Gas Exploration.

Hardware, Science multigpu, nvidia, openinventor, vsg

BOXX Technologies, provider of graphics design workstations worldwide, has just rev’ed their entire product line with support for Windows7, adding improved performance and higher-powered machines.

Windows 7 will be available with all BOXX workstations, including the 3DBOXX 4850 Extreme (the fastest Intel® Core(TM) i7 based workstation on the market), 3DBOXX 8500 (featuring Intel® Xeon® processor options resulting in 16 virtual cores for multitasking), and GoBOXX (the industry’s fastest mobile workstation), which allows digital artists to create outside of studio confines without sacrificing professional workstation performance.

You can see all of the BOXX products on their website.

via BOXX Solutions With New Windows 7 Offer Real Benefits for Digital Artists | .NET Developer’s Journal.

Hardware boxx, microsoft, windows7

Steven F. Palter, MD proudly demonstrated their use of RED Camera’s to report and broadcast a laporascopic procedure in 4K.

I am so excited to report that I have performed the world’s first laparoscopy in 4K – using cameras with a resolution 4 times that of HD. I presented the details and shared the images with a crowd of 3500 at the 65th Annual Meeting of the ASRM this week in Atlanta in my invited plenary lecture. We showed the audience how the digital technology being developed to transform movies could be directly applied to take surgical performance to tthe next level.

They worked with a company called Offhollywood to combine the RED One cameras, Sony 4K projectors, and RealD 3D Lenses for the final solution.

via docinthemachine » Post Topic » World’s First “4k” Laparoscopy Performed- Surgery in 4X HD!.

Hardware, Science biomed, offhollywood, red, sony, surgical