VizWorld.com

Ole Østring’s latest infographic visualizes his recent roadtrip across Europe as a fantastic collection of maps, graphs, and data.

This poster (800×1000mm) was designed to summarize and explain the summer holiday of 2009: a roadtrip/ moving house expedition undertaken by my partner Marthe and I, from Norway to England and back.

It started as a tool for keeping track of costs, but was developed into a full trip overview as more details were added. Key data such as cost, distance and time are presented in various ways to create a rich data log.

Hit his site for a downloadable PDF and zoomable graphic.

via oostring/weblog » Roadtrip poster final.

Graphics infographic

Researchers at the University of Houston Texas have built a new imaging technology they call optical-coherence tomography which has captured the highest-resolution ever live-video of a 3D beating heart in an embryo.

The video was made using an imaging technology called optical-coherence tomography. Though it looks grainy, this and other video of the developing heart made by the Houston group are some of the best ever taken. “These are the first images at high resolution of the beating [mammalian] heart,” says Kirill Larin, assistant professor of biomedical and mechanical engineering at the University of Houston. “You can see the blood vessels, the heart chambers.” The current resolution of the technique is six micrometers and Larin expects to get it down to two.

via Technology Review: Blogs: TR Editors’ blog: A 3D Video of the Embryonic Heartbeat.

Science 3d, biomed, tomography

Unigine Corp has just released their first DirectX11 benchmark, claiming it’s the first DX11 benchmark ever, showcasing several of the new technologies to come out over the last few months.  Even if you aren’t on DX11, you might want to download it and check it out.

“Heaven” benchmark excels at providing the following key features:

• Native support of OpenGL, DirectX 9, DirectX 10 and DirectX 11
• Comprehensive use of tessellation technology
• Advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion)
• Volumetric cumulonimbus clouds generated by a physically accurate algorithm
• Dynamic simulation of changing environment with high physical fidelity
• Interactive experience with fly/walk-through modes
• ATI Eyefinity support

Check after the break for an example video of some of the benchmark features.

via The first DirectX 11 benchmark released on the basis of Unigine engine | Unigine (3D engine for games and real-time virtual worlds).

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Hardware, Science benchmark, directx11, unigine

SpatialKey has taken the available data on San Francisco’s crime rates, available at DataSF.org, and correlated it with the 2002 HUD “Urban Renewal Area” designation (shown in red) and shown that the designated area is still a hotzone for crime.

That was almost 8 years ago, but the crime data in the image above is as recent as last week. There are of course many ways to interpret this data. It could indicate that the city is not making much progress reducing drug crimes within the Urban Renewal Area. Or it could mean that the city is actively targeting the area (which will lead to higher arrests) and that the indication of higher concentrations in the Urban Development Area is a good thing.

Their sample report is available online with much more information and statistics.

via Crime in San Francisco’s Urban Renewal Area | SpatialKey blog.

Science crime, sanfrancisco, spatialkey

Are you a fan of Autodesk products, but unable to attend the Autodesk University conference in Las Vegas?  Autodesk shares your pain and has a great solution, the “Autodesk University Virtual”.

AU Virtual offers both free and low-cost options to help you stay competitive while you stay within your budget. And the AU Virtual Premier Pass (US$99) is free for Autodesk Subscription customers. Plus, everyone who registers for the physical conference in Las Vegas receives four (4) complimentary Premier Passes to share with colleagues back home.

Plus, if you get a Virtual Premiere pass by November 13th, you get a chance at a free all-inclusive conference pass (including accomodations) to AU2009 or AU2010 (your choice), a $2,400 value!

Don’t forget to point your Twitter Readers at the AU_Online account, or the #AU2009 hashtag!

via Autodesk University Blog.

Graphics autodesk, conference

Here’s a beautiful 16-minute animated short to cap off your Friday.

‘The king of the island’ is the second short film directed by Raimondo Della Calce and produced by artFive animation studio. The movie tells the story of Gioannin, a shy and lonely child, left no father because of a mishap occurred at sea years before. Gioannin is a kid, he doesn’t know the meaning of the word death. And if his father left and never returned, then it means that he must have stopped somewhere on an island, and with his extraordinary ability he must now be the king. From the exasperated dream of Gioannin comes the title of the movie, which goes back in time, in the early 1900′s Genoa, Italy, with its port at work, the alleys, the old pier and the famous lantern.

See the movie after the break.

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Graphics animation, short

UK’s ComputerArts has released a new free tutorial showing how to combine the new 3D features in PhotoShop with AfterEffects to create a fun mashup of 3D and 2D visuals.

After Effects has long been considered the Adobe tool for creating motion graphics. Usually these were 2D compositions made up of Photoshop layers or video footage, but 3D has been sneaking into After Effects little by little. With the arrival of the advanced 3D capabilities in Photoshop CS4 Extended, you can now import a 3D object directly into After Effects as a PSD composition.

In this third part of our extended workshop, we create a full-blown CS4 mashup as we revisit our robot from the first Photoshop project, and bring him to life in After Effects. We then animate the character in 3D, and have him interact with the magician character we met in the earlier Flash project.

The 3D tools in CS4 are more powerful than they ever have been. You can now create, manipulate and export 3D creations directly from the CS4 suite of software without the need for thousands of pounds-worth of expensive 3D software.

via Computer Arts – Blend 2D and 3D in After Effects.

Graphics aftereffects, photoshop, tutorial

Axis Three, makers of the Portrait3D system for imaging/module breasts for breast augmentation visualization, have just announced a new system to adapt their technology to facial modeling as well.

Axis Three’s surgical simulation offerings are intuitive, straightforward, and easy to navigate. They also leverage functional input from leading U.S. board-certified plastic surgeons. The Company’s revolutionary Tissue Behavior Simulation (TBS) technology allows surgeons to combine a patient’s individual body attributes with specific implants from manufacturer’s catalogues, for more accurate visualizations of results prior to surgery. Through an exclusive licensing agreement, Axis Three has integrated patented image-capture technology developed by Siemens with its own proprietary software toFace Module User Interface create a powerful, flexible, and intuitive platform that can be tailored to a variety of surgical needs.

The system combines Siemens image-capture technology with their own software to make a powerful interactive simulation suite.  The entire package, with their new XS-200 camera (Shown) is $30,000.

via Axis Three » Axis Three Introduces Portrait 3D Face Simulation Module.

Hardware, Science axisthree, biomed, surgical

John West spoke with Ed Seidel, director of the NSF’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure, about some of what the NSF is doing in the HPC arena and discovered that they’ve created an “Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure (ACCI) divided into 6 task forces.  One task force is dedicated to Data & Visualization, considering tools, algorithms and policies for the field.  The 6 task forces are spending the next 18-24 months conducting workshops and gathering information for a report they will submit to the NSF, guiding the direction for the next 3 years.

“Software is really becoming the broader language of science,” says Seidel. “Even broader than mathematics, but we don’t really know how to fund it.” He notes that we have decades of experience funding hardware, and we now have a culture that knows how build and run very large scale datacenters. By contrast, software efforts to date have been very individual, and “there is less and less efficiency in that model” he says. “Software needs to be treated like a first-class citizen. So much is riding on the software side that it is really time to rethink how we build, fund, and maintain it.”

Great to see some large organizations working on bringing the Data Visualization & Analysis into the petascale, as well as the simulations.

via Ed Seidel on the state of HPC software | insideHPC.com.

Science hpc, nsf, software

NVidia has published a whitepaper of their upcoming Fermi (GT300) architecture detailing the new features and various case-study results.  The cliff-notes version:

• 32 CUDA Cores per Streaming Multiprocessor
• 8x double precision performance over GT200
• Unified Address Space with full C++ Support
• Full IEEE 754-2008 32-bit and 64-bit Precision
• Predication
• ECC Memory SUpport
• 10x faster context switching
• Out-of-Order thread block execution
• 3Billion Transistors
• 768K L2 Cache (didn’t exist in GT200)
• Up to 16 concurrent kernels (Didn’t exist in GT200)

Looks like Fermi is going to be an awesome processor to work with. Read the full report on their site.

NVIDIA_Fermi_Compute_Architecture_Whitepaper.pdf (application/pdf Object).

Hardware fermi, nvidia, whitepaper