VizWorld.com

After Avatar, did you find yourself depressed and wishing that Pandora, in all its beauty and splendor, was a real planet?  Well, while we haven’t found the actual planet, dedicated fans and talented artists have reconstructed it inside SecondLife as an island entitled ‘Pandora Magic’.

Pandora Magic seems to be another example of a general rule with user-generated content: “If you don’t build it, your fans will build it themselves.” Especially if many people are pining for the planet.

Complete with Na’vi inhabitants and a role-playing combat system, it has absolutely no official connection to the movie.  User created content FTW. At least until legal gets to it.

via New World Notes: Depressed After Watching *Avatar*? Pandora Awaits in Second Life! (Unofficially, at Least).

Graphics avatar, secondlife, virtual worlds

At the upcoming PureShare User Group 2010 at The Mirage in March, the keynote address will come from visualization guru Stephen Few.

Christopher Dean, PureShare CEO, said: “We are thrilled to provide our customers with the opportunity to learn from Stephen Few, whose data visualization concepts are guiding the way that PureShare products enable customers to deliver proactive metrics in place of traditional reports.”

We’ve included several of Stephen Few’s books in our Resource Of The Week, such as “Now You See It“.

via Stephen Few to Headline at PureShare User Group 2010.

Science conference, pureshare, stephen few

Taiwan’s Innovision was at CES demonstrating their HoloAD technology which is 3D the way it’s meant to be done, projected via a hologram for 180-degrees of viewing.

As is the case with all 3D tech, HoloADs work by fooling the brain into thinking it’s seeing something that doesn’t really exist. HoloAD displays work by using a set of three independent images, projected onto the trapezoidal sides of a see-through glass pyramid (the back side is flat), so you can walk 180-degrees around the projection. The result is an image that looks like an animated, full-color hologram. In addition, the display units can hold an actual object under the glass, and can be made to look like that object is the originating source of the 3D projection. Just load up the properly prepared FLV video footage onto a USB flash disk, and the HoloAD unit does the rest.

See some youtube videos of it in action after the break.

Read more…

Hardware, Science 3d, ces, hoload, hologram, innovision

A new web-based geospatial data visualization platform is coming online, currently in beta, from Digital Map Products called SpatialStream.

SpatialStream™, from Digital Map Products, is a SaaS Geospatial platform that offers a new and better means to develop robust spatial applications on top of common mapping platforms. SpatialStream™ was designed to offer access to sophisticated, yet easy-to-use spatial technology and spatial data sets to facilitate the rapid development of embedded GIS and consumer mapping applications.

From the few images and videos on the website, it looks like a more polished version of Google’s Fusion Tables.  Hopefully, they’ll have more luck overcoming some of the obscure limitations Google imposed.

via SpatialStream™ by Digital Map Products.

Science digital map products, geospatial, spatialstream, Website

Hurry up and head on over to the Mattel Barbie.com Website where you can vote for Barbie’s next career.  With an illustrious resume of over 120 careers in her history, what’s next for the original working woman?

• Environmentalist?
• Surgeon?
• Architect?
• News Anchor?
• Computer Engineer?

That’s right ladies and gents, we now have the opportunity to rebuild Barbie as the geek we all know she is (She was an astronaut afterall).  So head on over and cast your vote now!

Voting runs for 1 month, ending on February 12th.

Barbie.com – I Can Be.

Graphics, Science barbie, humor

Robert Kosara returns with a great writeup on the pro’s and con’s of Pie charts, including some great science in human perception on how we analyze and understand them, as well as a great short-list of reasons why to use and to avoid them.

There are two features that let us read the values on a pie chart: the angle a slice covers (compared to the full circle), and the area of a slice (compared to the entire disk). Research suggests that we look at the angle in the center, essentially reducing the chart to just the crossing lines there. We are not very good at measuring angles, but we recognize 90º and 180º angles with very high precision. Slices that cover half or a quarter of the circle will therefore stand out. Others can be compared with some success, but reading actual numbers from a pie chart is next to impossible.

via Understanding Pie Charts | EagerEyes.org.

Science piechart, visualization

A new patent from the brains at Google discusses the possibility of embedding real-time ads, similar to the currently popular Google Adsense system, into images from Google Street View, bringing outdated billboards and signage back to life with hyperlinked glory.

In the patent, the technology company also mentions creating an advertising auction for properties which remain ‘unclaimed’. It said: “The link can be associated with a property owner, for example the property owner which owns the physical property portrayed. The link can alternatively be associated with an advertiser who placed the highest bid on the image recognized within the region of interest (e.g., poster, billboard, banner, etc.).”

It would be an impressive combination of mechanical turk and automatic image recognition, attempting to detect then align such information.  If anyone’s got the money and horsepower to pull if off, Google does.

via Google Street View ‘to carry real-time ads’ – Telegraph. via Gizmodo

Science advertising, google, patent, street view

AMD/ATI is fighting back against the current hold NVidia has on the high-end workstation market in their Quadro line by issuing their new ‘FirePro 3D’ line.  Expreview got their hands on the FirePro V8700 and V3700 and benchmarked it against the current high-end NVidia Quadro cards, with impressive results.

We’re really impressed with the outstanding performance delivered by ATI FirePro V8700, which outperformed Quadro FX 3800 by a large margin. Even if Quadro FX 4800 steps up, we don’t think the situation would change much. But as we see, the catch is the high power consumption.

ATI FirePro V3700 also performed great enough to fight against Quadro FX 370 which is more expensive. Its greatest highlight is the affordable price.

ATI FirePro V8700 and V3700 Reviewed – Expreview.com.

Hardware amd, ati, benchmark

Mistakenly thinking that 3D alone drove Avatar to it’s $1.3B paycheck, studios are rushing out to recreate the magic by taking previous classics and converting them into 3D.  One thing we might see is a re-issue of “Lord of the Rings”:

Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings, said last spring that he wanted to reissue the trilogy in 3-D if Avatar persuaded enough cinemas to put in new 3-D projectors. Last week technicians at Weta, the production company that had worked on the trilogy, said they had experimented with 3-D battle scenes and proclaimed them to be “gob-smacking”.

The Lord of the Rings is expected to be re-released after Jackson has finished producing the two-part version of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit over the next two years. This would mean that a 3-D version of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first part of the trilogy, could be in cinemas by Christmas 2012.

That is, unless George Lucas beats them to the punch:

It may be beaten to the screen by a revamped version of Star Wars. George Lucas, the director, spent $13m filming the original in 1976, added special effects in 1997 and 2004, and will now spend another $10m to change it into a 3-D spectacular.

“George cannot leave it alone,” said an associate. “He is salivating at the opportunity to play with it again. This time the Death Star is really going to explode all over the audience and leave them gasping.”

I really wish GL would just leave his masterpieces alone. Personally, if they’re in 3D I’ll probably go see them again, I’m a sucker for both films.  However, I seriously doubt their ability to rake in Avatar-level cash with nothing but a postprocessed 3D gimmick.

via Avatar sparks 3-D makeover for action classics – Times Online.

Graphics movies, stereoscopic

A while back, popular MMO “City of Heroes” rolled out an “Architect System”, allowing players and developers alike to create missions and in-game content.  It has been a huge success, and Senior Designer Joe Morrisey sits down with MMOGamer to talk about the thoughts and philosophy that went into designing it.  One particularly interesting point is how they chose to deal with simply bad content:

To some extent you can’t. You want to give players the freedom to create stories they want to create.

So you are going to end up with some stuff that isn’t that good.

But the real thing that you need to do just like any other medium, where you have a lot of entries into, like if you look at the music industry or if you look at the movie industry, there is a lot of noise.

So how does the good stuff get to the top? It gets to the top by people saying, “Hey I really like that song,” or “I really like that book,” or “I recommend that you play this.”

With my recent Second Life kick, I find this quote particularly interesting:

Joe Morrissey: We’re kind of moving to this new area in games. I mean, everybody hypes user-generated content, and it seems like, “Oh, it’s the next big plateau,” and stuff.

As a storyteller, I’m not really as concerned about if it is the next big thing. But, what I do like is it’s giving the new people, the new blood that will eventually become the movers and shakers in the industry, the ability to have their voice in games.

via City of Heroes Senior Designer Joe Morrissey on the Conception and Philosophy Behind the Architect System : The MMO Gamer.

Graphics city of heroes, interview, video game