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The AMV Titan

Here’s something to check out at NAB next year: All Mobile Video is building a special 3D-capable HD production truck using equipment from vendors like Sony and Fujinon that they plan to have on the floor at NAB in April.

“3D is the new technology requirement for live production,” added Alec Shapiro, SVP of sales and marketing for Sony’s Broadcast and Production Systems Division, in a statement. “We’re proud to take our relationship with AMV to a new level, developing a cutting-edge platform that will provide the ultimate in image quality, performance and flexibility, while delivering the unique 3D viewing and entertainment experiences that consumers now expect.”

Such trucks usually cost $8 to $10 Million to build, but with the extra cost involved from premium 3D equipment, it could easily exceed that.

via All Mobile Video To Build New 3D Truck With Sony – 2010-01-12 00:29:57 | Broadcasting & Cable.

Hardware 3d, nab, stereoscopic

Two days ago, NASA released a Hubble Space Telescope of Messier 81, also known as Bode’s Galaxy. The image has a resolution of 22,620 x 15,200, which is over 343 million pixels. I noted, as a point of comparison, that the Texas Advanced Computing Center has a tiled display that is 307 million pixels. Dr. Bill Barth, the director of HPC at TACC, commented on the article and placed links to Hubble images being shown on their tiled display. Below you can see in the first picture, an image of Messier 81 being shown on that display. Now that is a beautiful sight, even with the center monitor being nearly all white.

The second image shows the Carina Nebula, where new stars are being born. The Carina Nebula, also known as NGC 3372, is an Emission Nebula in the Milky Way. This nebula is four times larger than the Orion nebula. However, it is found in the night skies of the southern hemisphere. The image was taken by the Hubble space telescope, and combined with data taken from ground based observations. The image is slightly larger at 29,566 X 14,321, or about 423 million pixels.

Click on the images below to see a larger version in all its glory. We would like to thank Dr. Bill Barth and TACC for these wonderful images.

TACC’s tiled display consists of a 15×5 array of Dell 30-inch widescreen LCD monitors. For more information, your can visit their website at TACC Visualization Resources.

Science astronomy, hubble, nasa, tacc, tiled display

Labgrab.com has just released a neat visualization tool for parsing the massive volume of science news as a collection of box graphs.

Inspired by similar data visualization tools, this flash based application is the newest rich internet application (RIA) addition to hit the online science community. “We read a statistic that roughly 10,000 items of science news were published daily and thought it would be intriguing to animate that day after day” said Jed Herzog, lead developer on the project.

VizWorld.com. Doing our part to make that Science & Technology box just a little bit bigger since 2009.

BoxGraph via Science News Goes Visual with “Grab More Science” Graph from LabGrab.com.

Science boxgraph, interactive, labgrab, news

An artist known as 802.11 has posted a beautiful timeline graphic that shows the various activities of the Pink Floyd band members.  Covering 1920 to 2000, the colors and shapes make it just beautiful to look at.

I agree with CoolInfographics, this would make a great poster!

Pink Floyd Timeline via Cool Infographics – Cool Infographics – Pink Floyd Timeline of Band Members.

Science band, infographic

Information Aesthetics points out a new graphic on the New York Times that their tipster describes as “the least informative graphic of 2010″.  While I’m not sure it’s the least informative, I have to admit I can’t get much use of it.

In short, the infographic titled “A Year in Iraq and Afghanistan” (PDF, 7.5MB!) [nytimes.com] accompanies an “Op-Chart”, meaning that it was designed outside of the NYTimes Infographics Department. Based on data from icasualties.org and the Pentagon, the chart shows how the death toll in Afghanistan is up by 40 percent from last year, and that most of the deaths are occurring on the battlefield, unlike in Iraq, where half the fatalities were not related to combat. In addition, while many see the war in Afghanistan as an American effort, the colors on the chart show the extent to which the Western allies are sharing the deadly burden.

So, a synopsis of what you’re looking at (Hit the PDF for the full-resolution graphic with all the parts):

• Guns Up = American Forces, guns down = Coalition
• Color maps to country, with Black being the US
• The icon in the upper left of each block indicates means of death (bomb, fire, noncombat, etc)
• Each block has the Date of the death at the top
• Each “group” has a line back to where the death occured

There’s just way too much going on in this graph to see much other than the US is losing alot of people.  I don’t see any details on if each figure indicates 1 person, or 10 people?

via A Year in Iraq and Afghanistan – information aesthetics.

Graphics bad, infographic, nytimes

You’ve heard of Plasma TV’s.  You’ve heard of LCD displays.  You may have even heard of OLED displays.  Have you ever heard of LDP?

Prysm Launches Groundbreaking Laser Phosphor Displays (LPD) for Large Format Display Applications  Laser Phosphor Display (LPD) technology has unsurpassed image quality and lowest power consumption of all large format displays in its class.

The end result is a display of any shape, size, or resolution that consumes 75% less power than other technologies, and built with non-toxic materials for a more “Green” manufacturing process.

Wonder when I can get one at Best Buy.

Prysm Laser Phosphor Displays HDTVs promises 75% Less Power than LCD, plasma, DLP and OLED.

Hardware display, lpd

NordicHardware is reporting that yesterday’s rumor that NVidia & XFX had parted ways was just that, an unfounded rumor.

After digging some more, we have received information from sources close to XFX that it is not only still one of NVIDIA's partners, it is also working on Fermi-based graphics cards.

The information comes from a very reliable source and they have informed us that the longterm cooperation between the two giants is nowhere near to end. With thirty or so NVIDIA-based graphics cards in its offering XFX is a very important partner to NVIDIA.

So if you’re looking for a Fermi card, you know one vendor to talk to.

via XFX still a close partner to NVIDIA | NordicHardware.

Hardware nvidia, xfx

NVidia has just released a new version of the PhysX physics simulation plugin for Autodesk 3dsMax with support for the newest versions of the product, and much tighter integration into the system.  This new plug-in has been rewritten from the ground up. A few highlights of the new release:

• Support for Max 2008, 2009, 2010, 32-bit and 64-bit.
• A first-class toolbar and menu for creating and controlling the simulation.
• A modifier-based approach to match workflow in 3ds Max, with greatly improved artist interface to the options.
• A physical material system for using and adjusting physics properties on many objects at once.
• Convenient constraint presets for common workflows.
• Improved constraint visualization and performance.
• Convenient ragdolls, deriving collision volumes from a skinned mesh.
• Bake simulation results to keyframes for offline rendering.
• Super simple samples

Sadly, tho, not all is rosy in the new version:

This great progress comes at a slight cost, however. Some PhysX features available in the previous plug-in are not (yet) exposed on the new version. Fluids, cloth, force fields, and soft bodies are not supported with this release. As demanded and deemed important, we will be adding features and improving the plug-in for the next releases. (Look in particular for the inclusion of awesome APEX Clothing in an upcoming release.)

So if you were using CUDA-accelerated fluid and cloth simulations, you might want to wait before upgrading.

via [ANN] PhysX Plug-in for 3ds Max v2.01 now available! – NVIDIA Developer Forums.

Graphics 3dsmax, autodesk, nvidia, physx

No doubt one of the best features in Avatar was the planet Pandora itself, with the lush terrain and beautiful junglescapes.  Weta talks on CGSociety about how they created the forest, and reveals that it was a largely procedural design using simulated plant and forest growth algorithms with the popular large-scale asset management tool Massive.

Allitt wrote a system that allowed Weta’s artists to plant (programming) seeds in Massive that accomplished this, as explained by VFX Supervisor Eric Saindon. “It was very interesting. You could actually watch a forest grow in real time with this solution, and any TD could grow just by painting colors on the terrain.” With this elegant solution, the big trees would grow first, then the smaller trees would die off as the big trees took away the light, the smaller trees would fight for position, the ground cover would fill in where it could get light.” This offered the ability to have variants built in easily by simply changing the random number seed, a programming term that means when you do a random call, there is a number you can pass through to offset the results.

And the individual plants, once the simulations were complete, were of startling detail:

The plants also had to have the resolution to hold up at any distance and all plants had to hold up in the foreground. The simplest plant had on the order of 1,000 to 5,000 polygons, relatively low resolution. The average plant was closer to 20 to 100,000 poly range, but some of the high resolutions plants, one called “fernRekA” that looked like a fern whose leaves hadn’t unfurled yet, had 1.2 million polygons. Each leaf was modeled.

via CGSociety – Avatar.

Graphics avatar, makingof, movie, vfx, weta

So, if you’re looking for something to do tonight and feel like a good laugh, then go ahead and fire up Second Life and come watch “The 1st Question” live tonight at 7pm Pacific (9pm Central) where I’ll be one of the 4 panelists answering questions on science and gadgets.

I have a suspicion that CES will be a popular topic.  From watching some of the previous episodes, however, I’m gonna need all the help I can get!

The 1st Question.

Graphics secondlife