Home » Archives for January 2010
WeatherSealed has an impressive chart showing the evolution of the Crayola Collection of Colors from 1903 to today,as it gre from the original 8 colors to the present 120.
Crayola’s crayon chronology tracks their standard box, from its humble eight color beginnings in 1903 to the present day’s 120-count lineup. According to Crayola, of the precious crayons of my childhood – the seventy-two colors from the official 1975 set – sixty-one survive.
The dialog on his site is hard to follow, but the colors themselves come from both Wikipedia and the Crayola Crayon Chronology.
Color Me A Dinosaur « Weather Sealed. via ChartPorn
Graphics color, crayola, infographic, timeline
Chinese scientists have demonstrated what may be the world’s largest full-color holographic screen, built using 64 digital cameras and 64 digital projectors to capture, communicate, and display the image.
“Our method encounters no difficulties in achieving any size of high quality 3D display,” commented the authors. “The quality of the final display depends on the quality of each camera-projector pair, while the 3D space recovering fidelity depends on its quantity to make 3D scene sampling.”
They’re still working to optimize the system before commercializing it, but you can read about it in Optics Letters 34 3803.
via Practical 3D holographic screen debuts – optics.org.
Hardware display, holographic
Randy Krum’s fantastic “Caffiene Poster” began back in June 2009, and was just released this week. If you’ve ever wondered what goes into creation of such an infographic, he has begin a multi-part series detailing the effort spent in not only designing the poster, but coming up with the original idea and visualization strategy.
You may say, “This is such a simple graphic, why did it take 6 months? It looks like it should be pretty easy.” First, I would say that I wasn’t working on it full time, but I think the exercise also highlights how much work really goes into infographic designs. It’s not a new sentiment, but let me say that designers don’t get enough credit.
via Cool Infographics – Cool Infographics – Making-Of The Caffeine Poster – Part 1.
Graphics infographic, makingof
Dr. Micheal J. Gourlay has published a 5-part series on the Intel Software Network about Fluid Simulation for Video Games. From his own description:
This article, the fifth in a series, describes the profiling and optimization of a fluid simulation, presented in the third and fourth articles. The first article summarized fluid dynamics; the second surveyed fluid simulation techniques; and the third and fourth presented a vortex-particle fluid simulation with two-way fluid-body interactions, which runs in real time. This article exploits yet another feature of Intel® Threading Building Blocks (Intel® TBB) to spread more work across multiple threads. This article describes a process for profiling CPU usage and uses that information to optimize and further parallelize the code so that it runs faster.
A great read covering simulation and animation, along with some complex CFD and parallelization strategies. Read all five parts:
Science cfd, intel
The “Video Game Statistics” infographic from OnlineSchools.org shows details about video games, including duration, gender, console of choice, and more. It compiled data from the ESA, various console manufacturers, and online surveys into a fun chart. Some numbers:
- 2 out of 5 gamers are female
- 80% of female gamers use the Wii, but only 41% of Male Gamers
- XBox360 has the highest failure rate, at 23.7% within 2 years
- The Mario Franchise is the most successful video game series of all time
See the full chart after the break.
via onlineschools.org
Read more…
Graphics infographic, video game
A Google Earth KML overlay is available which contains GeoEye-1 satellite imagery captured on January 13th, the day after the magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit and caused severe destruction to Port-Au-Prince, Haiti and surrounding areas. The New York Times has created a very useful interactive map from this data, allowing the user to move a slider between before and after images of the capital city. Jonathon Crowe of The Map Room blog says that he has “never seen such innovative uses of a slider control outside [the New York Times's] online maps.” The Map Room is also a great place to get geospatial updates on this awful earthquake, apart from the interesting, unique maps showcased there almost daily.
This is a technology blog and we live in tough economic times, but I encourage our readers to donate what they can to Haiti. To maximize your money’s benefit to people on the ground, please check your chosen charity’s financial health using Charity Navigator before you give. Vive Haiti.
Science geospatial, google earth, haiti, maps
ChartPorn has begun a collection of infographics and data visualization tools focused on the recent disaster in Haiti. So far he’s found visualizations of damage, tectonic plate locations, satellite imagery, and diagrams of various logistical challenges.
Hit his site for the (Regularly updated) list.
Haiti – Chart Porn.
Science haiti, infographic
Owners of the popular RED ONE have a chance to get an upgrade to the newer Mysterium-X sensor, which brings with it improved low-light performance and better codecs, for the low low price of $5,750 starting next week.
While the versions of Mysterium-X that will reach RED’s other cameras should be higher resolution, the primary advantage of the new sensor will be low-light performance, which the company tested earlier in the year. The ONE has often been complimented for bringing 4K down to regular prices but has also been criticized for its relatively noisy output at high ISO levels.
You can get a discount of $1,250 (bringing the upgrade cost down to $4,500) if you join the EPIC-X Beta program.
via RED to start Mysterium-X sensor upgrades next week | Electronista.
Hardware red
Illuminate Labs has just released a new version of their precomputing lighting texture baking tool Turtle for Autodesk’s Maya 2010, and updated their gallery to show its use in several new games.
Based on the same core lighting technology, LiquidLight®, as the world’s leading game lighting middleware, Beast™, the brand new Turtle 5.1 includes several new features boosting productivity as well as visual quality.
“Titles like Dante’s Inferno, Dragon Age: Origins, EVE Online and God of War III prove Turtle to be a lighting tool that any Maya game studio should consider.” says Magnus Wennerholm, CEO.
Be sure to hit their Gallery and see the screenshots for EVE Online, Army of Two: 40th Day, and WET.
via Turtle now supports Autodesk Maya 2010 — Illuminate Labs.
Graphics maya, software, texture, turtle
RandomControl has released a tool called ‘Arion’, which uses CPUs, GPUs, and network resources for a new physically based light simulator.
Arion’s uses all the GPUs -and- all the CPUs in your system simultaneously, not wasting a single flop available. Additionally, Arion can use all the GPUs and all the CPUs in all the other computers in your network forming a cluster for massive computation.
In that regard, Arion is a grid-computing solution to the problem of light physics simulation. Simultaneous GPU+CPU+LAN, combined with our exhaustively optimized code, is what we call hybrid acceleration.
The software looks impressive, boasting a real-time final quality viewport, fully unbiased rendering, and 20x-100x speedup per machine.
Currently windows-only with Mac & Linux on the horizon, but sadly not for sale yet.
via Arion.
Graphics, Science arion, gpgpu, light, randomcontrol, software
WeatherSealed has an impressive chart showing the evolution of the Crayola Collection of Colors from 1903 to today,as it gre from the original 8 colors to the present 120.
VizWorld.com 
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