VizWorld.com

As US Airways 1549 made it’s historic plunge into the Hudson River, data was being collected from radar stations, NEXRAD weather stations, and many other sources in real-time.  The NSTB and Exosphere3D have combined all of this into an animation of the various sources showing the accident with startling detail.

The quality of these visualizations is meant to withstand the rigors of qualification for presentation either as demonstrative evidence or, if sufficient witness testimony is available, real evidence. Interestingly, “The raw data files for each radar facility are more than 1 million lines each and must be sorted and reduced into meaningful information before they can be plotted on a map.”

The results are available on their website as a collection of high-resolution Youtube videos.

Visually Reconstructing Flight US Airways 1549 (Landing in the Hudson) via - information aesthetics.

Graphics, Science exosphere3d, historic, hudson, video

OnLive, the popular but yet unreleased remote gaming technology company, reached an important milestone today by demonstrating their system working on an iPhone.

Today, at a Wedbush financial conference in New York I showed OnLive running simultaneously on 2 iPhones, a TV, and a computer. What is really cool is that all 4 devices had access to the full OnLive Game Service, so they could play the same games, spectate on each other’s (and Beta users’) game play, watch Brag Clips, check out Gamer Profiles, etc.

Now, they’re careful to note that the experience is tuned for Computers, and I have to admit I’m not so sure how the latest Modern Warfare 2 would work with nothing but a touchscreen interface.  Nonetheless, it’s an important step towards bringing remote gaming to the masses.

via OnLive in the Palm of Your Hand « OnLive Blog.

Hardware iphone, mobile, onlive, videogame

InsideHPC has the scoop from Nvidia on the new Fermi products including specs, ship dates, and pricing!  I’ll let him do the talking:

The new Fermi “Personal Supercomputer” products are the C2050 and C2070, complementing the older C1060 card (for reference: 933 GFLOPS single precision, 78 GFLOPS double, 4 GB memory). The C2050 is rated at 630 GFLOPS double precision, has 3 GB of ECC memory, and will retail for $2,499 when it ships in Q2 of 2010. The bigger C2070 ups that to 6 GB of ECC memory and will retail for $3,999 when it ships in Q3.

Tesla is also plugging Fermi into the datacenter line, complementing the S1070 (for reference: 4.14 TFLOPS single precision, 345 GFLOPS double, 4 GB memory/GPU). The S2050 is rated between 2.1-2.5 TFLOPS double precision, has 3 GB of ECC memory/GPU, and will retail for $12,995 when it ships in Q2 of 2010. Big brother S2070 again ups the memory to 6 GB of ECC memory/GPU and will retail for $18,995 when it ships in Q3.

via NVIDIA announces Fermi products for 2010 ship | insideHPC.com.

Hardware fermi, nvidia

A project from Ryan Habbyshaw, Brad Simpson, and Todd Vanderlin visualize the traffic of the Boston Transit Authority systems with beautiful results.

The subway data from August 12, 2009 was parsed in openFrameworks and Matlab using custom applications. Statistical analysis was performed in Matlab for subway loading (temporal and geographical including the entire MBTA, individual lines, and individual stations), rate of subway activity, and associated data. openFrameworks was used to generate the central visualizations for the project.

You can order posters and see larger versions of the graphics on their site.

via Vanderlin | A Day in the Life of the MBTA. via Infosthetics

Science mbta, visualization

So VizWorld has finally arrived at SC09!  We’ve got out Exhibitor’s Map in pocket, but the floor doesn’t actually open until tonight (6pm).  Take a quick look and you can see that SC doesn’t seem to be feeling the same kind of economic crunch that shows like Siggraph felt this year.

My super mojo has me already on the floor, however, so if you’re somewhere near by drop us a line and say hi!

Hardware, Science conference, sc09

Lightworks has announced the results of the most recent Lightworks Image Competition, with the winners (two of them this time) being Alex Bonner and Marius Louw.

Alex is a Design Engineer, working for JCB in England and his 4WD Teletruk image was created using Siemens PLM’s NX software. He used HDR lighting and ray tracing to add greater realism to his image entry. Marius is based in South Africa and he uses Caddie software from ACS for modelling alongside the Caddie Vio plug-in which incorporates Lightworks rendering technology.

Some truly beautiful renderings in the contest.  Hit their site to see the entries, and read the full press release after the break.

Competition View.

Read more…

Graphics contest, lightworks

Robert Oschler of ExtremeTech sat down with some of the higher-ups at NVidia and Mental Images and got the scoop on the previously-announced RealityServer product.  He was privy to a live demonstration (the same office-space used previously) and has some great comments on well it works.

Using shared meeting software to pump images from RealityServer to my screen, I saw in real time how a virtual room that existed only in silicon reacted to different combinations of lighting and materials. (See the video below for a demonstration.) The blinds were closed part way, then all the way. A different view of the room was chosen while the time of day was changed with a few mouse clicks, and then another click added a virtual table complete with chairs. After each change, the view changed in seconds to reflect the new choices and the resulting image looked so realistic, that when they showed me the first image at the start of the interview I told them I thought it was a photograph. Without the help of the remote server running RealityServer, each image would have taken my computer hours if not days to render.

Although, I think his article has a few errors (he says that the RealityServer Servers have a minimum 8 GPU’s per server, where I believe that’s a Maximum), it’s a good insight for anyone interested in the product.

via Ubiquitous 3D: Nvidia’s RealityServer. (Linked to the Print version, all on one page).

Graphics interview, mental images, nvidia, realityserver

Everyone knows the famous 2D Mandlebrot fractal, but it’s 3D equivalent has been difficult to find.  Daniel White has been working on it for the last few years with help from several mathematicians and has finally stumbled onto a formula that looks like it could be the elusive 3D Mandlebrot, the Mandelbulb.

Our story starts with a guy named Rudy Rucker an American mathematician computer scientist and science fiction author and in fact one of the founders of the cyberpunk science-fiction movement . Around 20 years ago along with other approaches he first imagined the concept behind the potential 3D Mandelbulb barring a small mistake in the formula which nevertheless still can produce very interesting results – see later and also wrote a short story about the 3D Mandelbrot in 1987 entitled “As Above So Below” also see his blog entry and notebook . Back then of course the hardware was barely up to the task of rendering the 2D Mandelbrot let alone the 3D version – which would require billions of calculations to see the results making research in the area a painstaking process to say the least.

Hit his site for several more pictures and details.

via Mandelbulb: The Unravelling of the Real 3D Mandelbrot Fractal.

Science fractal, mandlebrot, math

Both NVidia and MSI have responded to recent rumors that MSI delayed their Hydra-powered motherboard, the Fuzion, due to guidance from NVidia and rumors that NVidia plans to disable Hydra at the driver level.  They claim they fully support the Hydra product, and it’s just regular product delays getting in the way.

The second product in our Big Bang line will be the MSI Fuzion motherboard featuring Lucid Hydra technology. Although we had planned to release this product by now, we decided to postpone it until early next year to make sure it delivers the best possible experience for our customers. We are continuing to work closely with Lucid to bring this exciting product to market.

We want to be clear that the reason for the delay has to do with software, and not external pressure from others. NVIDIA did not delay or impede the production of Fuzion in any way.

via NVIDIA Denies Involvement in the Fuzion’s Delay – Expreview.com.

Hardware hydra, lucidlogic, msi, nvidia

A new whitepaper from Intel shows how you can use the new Intel Smoke Framework, a multi-threaded game engine, to create procedurally generated trees and fire for a burning forest.

The Tree and Fire Systems are part of the Intel Smoke Framework, a multi-threaded game engine.  Procedurally generated trees and procedurally generated fire were inspired by the need to generate a virtual burning forest.

To animate a burning forest, you must illustrate many natural variables. To be convincing, procedurally generated content must be predictable and consistent, yet must also have believable variation. This paper explores the implementation of the Tree and Fire Systems for procedurally generated trees and the procedurally generated fire. It also describes the creation and implementation of the grammar and parser used to create the trees, as well as examining the Fire System which uses the Smart Particle Engine to set the trees on fire.

Procedural Trees and Procedural Fire Wp – final1 1_rose.pdf (application/pdf Object).

Graphics engine, intel, realtime, video game