Home » Archives for December 2009
Infosthetics has found a fun website called “PlayaroundNYC”, which uses the power of social visualization to see where playgrounds are located around New York city, in the hopes of finding locations in need of more.
The neighborhood playground support map is the result of combining several different types of data sets. First, each playground was assigned a quality rating. Currently quality is mainly determined by nearness to major and minor truck routes. A grid of points were then sampled on the map, by determining the nearest playgrounds, walking distance to these playgrounds, and the quality of these playgrounds. These factors are combined to assign each point an overall rating which estimates how well that area is supported by playgrounds. Lastly, the various support ratings are interpolated to generate the heatmap visual effect.
via PlayaroundNYC: Exploring the Distribution of Playgrounds in NY – information aesthetics.
Science interactive, newyork
Agilent has released an update for their popular circuit and electric simulation package that allows users to visualize electromagnetic fields in 3D thanks to NVidia’s 3D Vision system.
“You really have to see this new stereo viewer capability to believe it,” says Colin Warwick, signal integrity product manager in Agilent’s EEsof EDA organization. “Once you do, its benefits are obvious. Our tools are for engineering a 3D structure, so showing its fields and currents in 3D gives our customers insights that previously weren’t possible.”
ADS users can just download ADS2009 Update 1 and try it out, if they have the necessary hardware. Read the full release after the break.
Read more…
Science 3d, agilent, nvidia, stereoscopic
Adobe has roled out a new playback engine in their new Premiere Pro CS5 product called “Mercury” that offers astounding performance by pushing most of the work onto the GPU. Adobe’s video guru Mr Dennis Radeke explains:
In the post, Dennis went on to explain “What is the Mercury Playback engine about? In a word, performance! It makes Premiere Pro do cartwheels and flips and barely breaks a sweat. It's like rocket fuel for your car. It's flat out incredible…” while we might say that this statement might be over-enthusiastic, read on: “In my first test of Mercury, I dropped several P2 clips on a timeline, made them picture-in-picture and looked to see if there were any dropped frames during playback…nada. I added more clips, bringing it up to eight or nine on my HP XW9400 with 12 cores of AMD goodness… Think it's the CPU? No! It's only being used at about 20-30%. It's GPU! I keep going and there is no hesitation in Premiere Pro. Okay, lets add some color correction to each one and while we're at it, lets drop in some blurs [that will stop it right?] Still playin' like buttah!”
What’s particularly interesting is that the technology that they are using is exclusive to NVidia, using CUDA technology. Of course it may not remain that way, but with AMD having difficulty with their OpenCL driver, CUDA is probably the best option available right now. As BSN suggests:
Thus, it isn’t surprising to see Adobe going to CUDA first. The plan is probably equal to all plans that we heard so far: go to CUDA in order to completely unlock the GPU potential and only then port to OpenCL, as Apple’s and AMD’s OpenCL toolkits mature, sometime in 2011.
via Adobe’s Mercury Playback Engine for CS5 is CUDA-only! – Bright Side Of News*.
Graphics adobe, cuda, gpgpu, nvidia, premiere
Google has rolled out a new toy in their “Labs” called “Google Fusion Tables”. From the brief description on their site:
Upload small or large data sets from spreadsheets or CSV files.
Visualize your data on maps, timelines and charts.
Pick who can access your data; hide parts of your data if needed.
Merge data from multiple tables.
Discuss your data with others. Track changes and discussions.
Basically it’s an impressive combination of graphing and spreadsheet technology, so that you can pull data from multiple sources, easily graph and visualize it, and share the data interactively and collaborate with colleagues. It’s a very powerful tool that puts Google directly in competition with the many other web-based visualization tools like ManyEyes.
See their video demonstrations after the break.
via Google Fusion Tables (Beta).
Read more…
Science google, interactive, visualization
In a victory for software patent haters everywhere, a patent on “improving 3D computer graphics through provision of an improved method for performing visibility calculations” was recently overturned because it was considered related to calculations and algorithms, and therefore not patentable.
Patents “directed to improving 3D computer graphics through provision of an improved method for performing visibility calculations” were invalid under In re Bilski, 545 F.3d 943 (Fed. Cir. 2008) (en banc), cert. granted, — U.S. —, 129 S.Ct. 2735 (2009) because they failed to claim patentable subject matter. “[Plaintiff] concedes that its patent claims are not transformative, but nevertheless argues that they are tied to a particular machine; to wit, a computer. . . . The claim language clearly states that these claims are drawn to mathematical calculations and algorithms for calculating whether certain surfaces are visible or invisible in 3D computer graphics. This is exemplified by the language of the claims, which specify a sequence of calculations that involve identifying,comparing,determining, and ignoring; data. Though the calculations may be performed on a computer, they are not tied to any particular computer. For these reasons, the claims of the [patents-in-suit] fail to pass muster under the Bilski machine implementation test for patentability under 35 U.S.C. § 101.”
Fuzzysharp Technologies Inc. v. 3DLabs Inc. Ltd., 4-07-cv-05948 (CAND December 11, 2009, Order) (Armstrong, J.)
See some of the legal documents here.
via 3D Computer Graphics Patents Deemed Invalid Under In re Bilski | Patent Infringement Blog.
Science algorithm, legal, patent
Ars Technica’s Dave Girard is publishing a 2-part introduction to 3D on the Mac. Such introductions are all over the internet and magazines, but he’s taking a big different direction than you may see elsewhere:
3D magazines provide helpful tutorials, but since every application is also a potential advertiser, they tend to avoid saying that one package is best for a particular task, or that program X really sucks at particle animation, and so on. This two-part series will cover these differences while discussing specific workflows where these packages are used in areas like character modeling, motion graphics for TV or photorealistic rendering for architectural visualization.
Of course, ArsTechnica also advertises but hopefully they’ll be a little less biased than others. The first part (models & textures) is online now, with the second part coming soon.
via An introduction to 3D on the Mac, Part I: models & textures.
Graphics mac, osx, software, tutorial
The first public WebGL specification draft has just been released by Khronos, and they’re actively seeking community involvement to see what they got right and what they got wrong. So far, it’s heavily influenced by the OpenGL ES 2.0 standard and exposes basic OpenGL API’s to JavaScript, working with the current HTML5 Canvas element.
Model loading and other high-level functionality will be implemented in third-party libraries on top of WebGL. Modern high-performance JavaScript engines are finally fast enough to be able to handle that kind of computationally intensive work. The major WebGL implementations support hardware-accelerated rendering, which means that the user’s graphics hardware is responsible for the heavy lifting. Mozilla also has a software-based backend for computers that don’t have sufficient graphics hardware.
You can view the current draft here, where it’s curiously housed in a SVN repository, so it might change. So far I see support for ArrayBuffer’s, Textures and VBO’s, stencil/alpha/depth buffers, all the usual functions and data types of OpenGL. The supported rendering types are a bit limited, I only see points, lines, and triangles (Regular, Strips, and Fans), no Quads or Polygons. That’s probably not a big deal, not many people use them anyway and several systems just devolve them into triangles anyway.
See anything particularly interesting?
via WebGL draft published, Khronos seeks community involvement.
Science khronos, webgl
Visual Dynamics ASGVIS has finally brought a native VRay renderer to the SketchUp Mac system, available for $599 for a limited time!
SketchUp is one of the most widely used and easy to learn 3D Modeling software on the market today. With V-Ray for SketchUp, users now have one of the most powerful rendering tools available to visualize their models with the upmost quality and realism. V-Ray works within the SketchUp environment allowing users to be able to efficiently incorporate the task of rendering within their current workflows.
V-Ray for SketchUp Mac Edition offers the world renowned V-Ray rendering system for SketchUp natively on the Mac. Mac users will no longer need to emulate a Windows environment and can now take their SketchUp renders to the next level with V-Ray!
After December 18th the price will return to it’s normal $799. If you want to see it in action, there will be a webinar tomorrow discussing the product but registration is required!
via Buy VRay for SketchUp Mac Edition – VRay.com.
Graphics mac, sketchup, software, vray
Kapersky Labs, developer of several secure content management systems and antivirus solutions, has found a new use for NVidia’s CUDA libraries in processing files against antivirus databases.
The use of Tesla S1070 by the similarity-defining services has significantly boosted the rate of identification of unknown files, thus making for a quicker response to new threats and providing users with even faster and more complete protection. During internal testing, the Tesla S1070 demonstrated a 360-fold increase in the speed of the similarity-defining algorithm when compared to the popular Intel Core 2 Duo central processor running at a clock speed of 2.6 GHz.
I have to admit, I didn’t except expect to see CUDA used in Antivirus, but I suppose it makes sense: It’s a massive correlation operation, typical of several parallel algorithms.
Read more…
Science algorithm, cuda, kapersky, nvidia
Here’s the links for today:
VizWorld.com 
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