I don’t really know what to say about this other than it’s a pretty neat use of persistance by four guys of “OK Go” to make a neat music video. If the name rings a bell, you may remember them from their previous “Treadmill” music video.
See the video after the break.
Last week’s feature on the NextIO PCI-Express Virtualization & Expansion appliance drew some questions on what kind of bandwidth you could expect from the device. Some people believed that you could get a full x16 of bandwidth out of it, so I sent the question on to NextIO and here’s their response:
GPU density and performance per server is application dependent. The NextIO appliances support multiple x8 Gen2 PCIe connections per server and a Gen2 PCIe connection per GPU. As a user adds more GPUs to the cluster, more bandwidth to the server can be added based on application demand. By way of comparison, the nVidia Tesla S1060 GPU appliance supports 4 GPUs with 2 x16 Gen2 server connections. This is an average of x8 Gen2 per GPU. The same server bandwidth is available with the NextIO appliance. Additionally, if an application does not require full x8 per GPU, more GPUs may be consolidated per server connect.
So essentially they say that the existing “top of the line” offering from NVidia, the S1060, offers 4 GPU’s on 2 x16 connections, giving you an effective x8 to each card, which is the same as their offering.
NextIO – PCIe Expandability, Virtualization, & Hot Swap | VizWorld.com.
Do you own an iPhone or iPod Touch? If you do, and you play games, then odds are you’ve got some firsthand experience at just how powerful the Unity Game Engine is as it’s quickly becoming a major playing in the iPhone Gaming Market. From the current rankings on AppShopper.com, Unity powers:
Any many many more ( Battle Bears, Downhill Bowling, Inkvaders, ouch KO; Rasta Monkey; RC Heli: Indoor Racing; Vans SK8: Pool Service; Biplane – Wings of Raccoon; Crazy Snowboard; Monkey Diving; Scarecrow; Realmaze3D; Downhill Bowling; Little Runner; Inkvaders; Castle Warriors; Samurai: Way of the Warrior and Human Body 3D Anatomy). Why so popular?
“Game engines are the glue to put together all the components of your game. Unity iPhone has been our special super glue offering a great PhysX engine and solving the hard parts of iPhone / iPod Touch compatibility which have allowed us to focus on the game itself rather than the engine,” said Jonathan Czeck, co-founder of Graveck Interactive, developers of Skee-Ball. “Without a doubt, it helped us overcome the many competitors on the App Store as we rose all the way to the # 1 spot of best selling games.”
And don’t forget the price point: $399 gets you started with your iPhone & Unity app development.
Seimens new ACUSON S2000 ultrasound system boats a new feature from an unlikely source: Support for 3D Imaging and visualization care of NVidia’s 3D Vision stereoscopic glasses and NVidia QuadroFX cards.
“This technology takes 3D/4D ultrasound imaging to the next level,” said Barbara Del Prince, Global Segment Manager, Obstetrics and Gynecology at Siemens. “Our fourSight Workplace, combined with the NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics solution and 3D Vision technology, offers a truly remarkable experience that's rewarding for parents and their doctors, while also delivering practical benefits in medicine.” This quality improvement may provide additional information to the physician and assist in communication with surgeons and patients or to aid in treatment or surgical planning.
Demonstrated at the RSNA Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting, it’s a full implementation of quad-buffered stereo on Dell Precision T5500 workstations and a SamSung 2233RZ 22-inch LCD Television.
via NVIDIA, Siemens Healthcare Take Immersive 3D From the Movie Theater Into the Doctor’s Office.
A fun little website called MappaTweet comes from the visual analytics startup “Visualytics“. Parsing the real-time feed of Twitter and using the new Geolocation features they’ve added, it generates heatmaps of twitter activity for an area. Written in Adobe Flex and using their new Pixel-Bender shaders to create the heatmap, it’s a fun little toy for watching activity in an area.
Robert Kosara (known to many as @eagereyes) posted a simply abysmal chart recently featured on Fox News showing approval ratings for various possible 2012 presidential election candidates. A pie chart is really not the proper avenue for this data, and the presentation really makes it look ridiculous, a strange combination of the Google Chrome logo and bad numbers.
Joel Jeff Dubin took the heart model from Zygote’s 3D Science Model Collection, along with base materials and pre-animated morph target states and created a nice animation of a beating heart. However, he found some issues with Cinema4D and the model:
The problems that arise with the morph target technique of animating this model are twofold:
1. The morph targets do not take into account the coronary vessel models which hug the surface of the heart. Animating via morph targets results in these static vessels intersecting with the surface of the heart as it pumps. Not good.
2. In my opinion, the included morph target animation sequence, although correct from a technical point of view, lacks fluidity, and comes off rather stiff and rigid.
He addition he gets into some problems with Cinema4D’s in-camera depth of field post effect with causes some distracting flickering effects. See his video after the break.
via Pumping heart using deformers in Cinema 4D « The Scattered Shaman.
Perlita Labs has an infographic online comparing the many topologies, visualizations, and data structures available in a wide variety of popular visualization tools. It’s pretty comprehensive, including about 13 different libraries and almost 20 different features.
Avatar hasn’t hit theaters yet, but companies aren’t wasting any time in preparing the consumer media blitz. Avatar: The Game (for the Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii) is nearing release and ArsTechnica took it for a spin and find that much of the fancy technology that’s being used to make the film so appealing will appear in the game as well.
Like the film it’s based on, the 360 version, which will be the same as the versions hitting the PlayStation 3 and PC, will support 3D visuals. Displayed on a not-yet-available television utilizing Sensio 3D technology, Avatar: The Game looked absolutely stunning.
The lush, alien world of Pandora really pops, with fog and smoke swirling just off the screen. But by far the most impressive bit of visuals were the flying sequences. The 3D rendering of the helicopter looks great, and I had to fight the urge to reach out and grab the tail of the craft as if it was actually in front of me.
But while I was able to view the game on a $4,000 3D enabled set, I was told that it would also run on TVs that are 120Hz capable and have an HDMI output.
With so much of the movie being done in “virtual space” (CG and 3D models), I’m sure the game designers were thankful that so many of the models and designs were already in a suitable form for rendering. As movie assets are translated into video game assets, and video games increase in realism and detail, how long before the two are seamless? (Fans of Final Fantasy might argue they already are.)
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TrapTCG has posted a 2-part tutorial on creating a hand rig in Autodesk’s 3dsMax. The two parts:
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