VizWorld.com

Jer Thorpe took the text of two great articles on studies of head injuries in NFL players, one in GQ and another in The New Yorker, and created an interesting interactive visualization tool.

Until this weekend. I spent a few (okay, more like eight) hours putting together a tool with Processing that would examine some of the similarities and differences between the two articles. The most interesting data ended up coming from word usage analysis (I looked at sentences and phrases as well, but with not much luck). The base interface for the tool is a XY chart of the words – they are positioned vertically by their average position in the articles, and horizontally by which article they occur in more. The words in the centre are shared by both articles. Total usage affects the scale of the words, so we can see quite quickly which words are used most, and in which articles.

The results are impressive, and he gets into great detail in his article, but that’s not the end of the story.  Jeff Clark took a look at his visualization and used his Document Contrast Diagrams to perform a similar analysis.

I have previously explored the idea of comparing and contrasting document pairs with my Document Contrast Diagrams. The diagram below was created from the same two articles that Jer used in his analysis. There are obviously a lot of differences between the two visualizations both in appearance and in the technical means of constructing the diagrams but the underlying organizational metaphor is the same:

1. Size of words reflect frequency of use
2. Horizontal position reflects which document uses the word the most
3. Vertical position reflects where the words are used in the documents the most

The two visualizations show the same data in different forms, and wind up emphasizing (and de-emphasizing) various points.  Check them both out and see what you discover.

via Two Sides of the Same Story: Laskas & Gladwell on CTE & the NFL | blprnt.blg. and Two Sides of the Same Story by Jeff Clark

Science infographics, sports

MAXON computer, makers of CINEMA4D and BodyPaint3D, have just lauched a new Spanish-language version of the companies website.

Foreign language accessibility to MAXON software remains a priority outlined Harald Egel, CEO and co-founder of MAXON Computer. “The translation of the website into Spanish will provide easier access to the wealth of information currently available about CINEMA 4D and BodyPaint 3D to our Spanish-speaking customers around the world. These expanded resources including the latest product information, news, customer stories and events will be especially useful in helping artists in Central and South America and southern Europe better understand our technology and achieve their creative goals.”

Seems today is going to be a big international diversity day here at VizWorld, with this & the Mars Rover article.  See Maxon’s full announcement after the break.

Read more…

Graphics maxon, spanish, Website

Discovery Channel’s spanish division has a new Augmented Reality toy on their site where you can check out the Mars Rover in AR, from any webcam-enabled computer.  From their Google Translated Site:

MARS MISSION game is the new Discovery Channel will debut soon for you. And, as progress, and here are the mini version of Rover, manipulable, and digital direct to your desktop.

The original Rover is made mostly of aluminum and solar panels and walk on the Martian surface collecting geological samples. The one you hold in your hands is made of bytes and you’ll be able to move it as you want, on your computer.

Marte en tu escritorio – Experiencias – Experiencia Discovery en tudiscovery.com.

Science augmented reality, discovery channel, mars

Flickr, the popular Yahoo-owned photography sharing site, also plays host to many infographic and artistic products.  FlowingData’s Nathan has compiled a list of 7 groups for infographic artists to check out:

I’ve always thought of Flickr as a place where I can share my photos with friends and family; however, I’m starting to see there’s a whole lot more than that. It’s a great place to find inspiration for infographics and visualizations or to just browse the giganto collection of work from others.

via 7 Visualization Groups On Flickr to Find Inspiration | FlowingData.

Graphics flickr, infographic, list

The Business Intelligence Guru has a great chart showing the trends in unemployment data broken down by region, market, and various other demographic segments which he updates every month.  Just now updated for October, and he updates it every month.

Real Unemployment nears 18%, over 25MM Americans jobless. | Real Business Intelligence. via ChartPorn

Science infographic, unemployment

Hany Farid, researcher at Dartmouth College, has just completed a virtual 3D reconstruction of Lee Harvey Oswald’s face from the famous photograph of him and his rifle.  The goal was to prove or disprove the shadows and reflections on his face, pointed out by conspiracy theorists as evidence that the photo is doctored.

He used a computer program Facegen, to build a virtual 3D model of Oswald’s head. Once that was completed, he added in the background features of the photo. Through a series of computations, he figured out where the camera had to be, the trajectory of the sun and where Oswald was in relation to the camera.

The result is that it’s definitely possible.  That alone isn’t proof that the photo is real, but does eliminate one common point of argument.

via UnionLeader.com – New Hampshire news, business and sports – Dartmouth expert: Oswald photo appears real – Friday, Nov. 6, 2009.

Science facegen, history, research

More big news from NVidia’s recent quarterly earnings conference, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said that they would be fully ramping production of the Fermi chipset in in Q1 2010.

“Next year it is going to be an interesting first quarter because, in fact, we will need more wafers than ever in Q1. The reason for that is because – and I mean more 40nm wafers than ever in Q1 – we are… fully ramping Fermi for three different product lines: GeForce, Quadro and Tesla,” said Jen-Hsun Huang.

This is in addition to their core-logic chipsets for Intel Core Duo and others, so January – April is gonna be big for NVidia.  This debunks the earlier rumor that we might see Fermi in December.

via NVIDIA’s Fermi Products Delayed to 2010 – Expreview.com.

Hardware fermi, nvidia

Adobe has wowed us again by bringing the popular iPhone Photoshop App to the Android OS, making it available for a wide variety of phones.

Perfect your pictures with the Photoshop.com Mobile App on your Android phone. Simply drag your finger to crop, adjust color, apply effects—you name it.

• Crop, rotate, and color-correct with the touch of a finger.
• Add soft focus or change to black & white with a click.
• Go classic by adding a sepia tint.
• Intuitive Photo Browser for viewing local and online images.

When your image is perfect, make it your phone background.

They get bonus points for including a QR Code directly on the page to aid in downloading.

If you’re curious, the QR code decodes to market://search?q=pname:com.adobe.psmobile

Photoshop.com Mobile Android App – Photo editor, sharing, upload.

Graphics adobe, android, mobile, photoshop

So you’ve just spent 100 hours making a fantastic model, complete with bumpmaps, lighting, environmental effects and high-resolution textures.  The next step is to present it in a fashion that accurately represents the work you put into it, and makes the best presentation possible.  A new tutorial on CGArena by Ashraf Aiad does just that.

In this series of tutorials I’ll be showcasing different ways to present your models. I start by showing an interesting way of making an object appear as if it’s being constructed from the ground up.

And in the second tutorial we will explore how to present your model on the web as a 2D image. We start by exporting our Model from Mudbox into Maya along with its associated channels such as color, displacement, AO, and normal map. In Maya we use these channels to match the original Mudbox file, and render it with mental ray. Finally we export the image components out of Maya into Photoshop for color correction and adding Depth of filed.

via CGArena : Video Tutorial: Showcasing the Model.

Graphics maya, modeling, photoshop, tutorial

headus has just released UVLayout 2.06 for UV coordinate generation.

UVLayout is a stand-alone application for the creation and editing of UV coordinates for 3D polymeshes and subdivision surfaces. Used by professionals in the games and visual effects industries, by hobbyists of all ilks and by students, UVLayout’s unique approach gives texture artists the tools they need to produce high quality low distortion UVs in significantly less time than they would by traditional methods.

It runs on Windows, OSX, and LInux, and they have a 30-day trial available for download here.  Full Versions are available for purchase for $100 to $300 with various licensing terms.

via headus UVLayout – Home.

Graphics headus, software, texture, uvlayout