CGSociety has concluded their latest CGChallenge and announced the winners of the “Secret Agent” Challenge. First place goes to Jose Alves da Silva for ‘Mouse Love’, with several other awards going to some fantastic videos and stills.
CGSociety – SECRET AGENT – XXIV CGChallenge Winners Announced..
EASports has created the “Fifa Earth”, visualizing the results of the 2 million FIFA 10 Sports games played each day.
The online “data visualizer” consists of 3 distinct live and interactive elements. “Fifa Buzz” shows recent Twitter messages that contain key words or hash-tags such as ‘Goals’, ‘Fussbal’, or ‘Soccer’, or any other number of searches such as players ‘Rooney’, ‘Benzema’, or ‘Xavi’ that relate to FIFA or football. These tweets are geo-located and time-coded and placed in real-time on a 3D football-shaped globe.
It’s a massive dataset to manage with over 2 billion games played last year.
via FIFA Earth: Visualizing more than 2 Million Daily Soccer Video Games – information aesthetics.
WebDesigner Depot has compiled a list of 30 great infographic maps covering everything from interactive sites to posters, beer to Starbucks.
Map illustrations are a dime a dozen however, a strong and balanced display of graphics, information, and colors is what makes an infographic stand out and reach its target audience effectively.
As designers, we’re constantly searching for ways to improve and style our designs, this is exactly what the following 30 infographics and sites display below; the breaking of rules.
via 30 Superb Examples of Infographic Maps | Webdesigner Depot.
Just received the official statement from NVidia and Mental Images regarding the RealityServer cloud-rendering solution.
The NVIDIA RealityServer platform is comprised of an NVIDIA® Tesla™ RS GPU-based server running RealityServer software from mental images. While photorealistic imagery has traditionally taken hours or days to create, this first-of-its-kind, integrated solution streams images of photorealistic scenes at rates approaching an interactive gaming experience.
“This is one giant leap closer to the goal of real-time photorealistic visual computing for the masses,” said Dan Vivoli, senior vice president, NVIDIA. “mental images fully embraced the concept of GPU co-processing to enable Interactive photorealism anywhere, any time – something that was science fiction just yesterday.”
Read the full release after the break, and be sure to check out the VizWorld Coverage.
NVidia and Mental Images just announced their newest product offering at the Web2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CA: RealityServer3 and TeslaRS.
RealityServer is a product of Mental Images, which NVidia acquired back in 2007. Mental Images is well known for their popular Mental Ray renderer, and RealityServer has been around for a while, with version 2.3 coming out back in July. What makes RealityServer3 new and exciting is the integration with their recently announced iray real-time raytracing system, and pushes the whole thing across the web to create a web-based interactive ray-tracing solution. Build yourself a nice cluster with NVidia hardware and RealityServer software, and you can push high-resolution high-quality graphics anywhere in the world with internet access and web browsers. iPhones, desktops, laptops, even gaming consoles suddenly have access to the type of rendered visuals previously reserved for Hollywood studios.
But what kind of hardware would you deploy this on? NVidia hopes it will be the TeslaRS.
Read up on the details of RealityServer & the TeslaRS after the break.
David McCandless and Stefanie Posavec collaborated on created a nice infographic that showcases the differences between the US “Right” (Conservative) & “Left” (Liberal), shown now on Information is Beautiful.
This kind of visual approach to mapping concepts really excites me. I like the way it coaxes me to entertain two apparently contradictory value systems at the same time. Or, in other words, I like the way it f**ks with my head.
His site is suffering a bit under the load, so click on the image above to see it.
Age progression has been around for a long time as a tool for guessing or predicting what children (or even older suspects) would look like after a long time has passed. Over on BoingBoing they talk to Glen Miller from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children about how they use Adobe Photoshop to “Age” photos.
We use Adobe Photoshop CS4 to manipulate the photos. We stretch the face to approximate growth, blend it with parental photos, and put a hairstyle on each child. The clothes are transformed to be more appropriate for that age. We use powerful Macs with lots of memory and speed, and drawing tablets instead of mouses. With this technology, we can complete one age progression in about three hours.
We build faces in virtual environments for people to recognize, but the only way we really know we’re successful is by having results. We can compliment each other on how great an age progressed image is, but the public is the true test of success. To say we love feedback is an understatement. We crave it. It encourages parents of long term missing kids that there’s hope, and that’s one of the most important things about what we do. We’re giving people their identity back.
via How forensics use Photoshop to find missing children – Boing Boing.
Spike Jonze’s “Where the Wild Things Are” is a box office hit, and showcases some of the work done by UK’s Framestore. You might think that the entire creatures are CG constructs, but you’ld be wrong.
And the faces in Wild Things were brought to life at London-based Framestore primarily using a new twist on an old technique known as “sequence projection” or “projection mapping,” often used to create talking animals. For Wild Things, however, it had to be taken to a new technical and artistic level. Character suit performances were filmed with static faces. The faces or heads were tracked in 3D and a CG articulated head was animated on top to achieve the appropriate performance to match suit and dialogue.
via Getting Wild About Facial Animation | AWN | Animation World Network.
NewScientist has created a visualization entitled “Where’s the remotest place on earth?” (Is that bad grammar? I think it’s “most remote”, not “remotest”) where they visualize the travel time to everywhere in the world, with black indicating the longest trips.
Plotted onto a map, the results throw up surprises. First, less than 10% of the world’s land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city.
What’s more, many areas considered remote and inaccessible are not as far from civilisation as you might think. In the Amazon, for example, extensive river networks and an increasing number of roads mean that only 20% of the land is more than two days from a city – around the same proportion as Canada’s Quebec province.
The most remote location? The Tibetan plateau, with 21 days travel time: 1 day by car, 20 days by foot.
via Gallery – Where’s the remotest place on Earth? – Image 1 – New Scientist.
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