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A rumor circling around CES says that NVidia and XFX  have decided to part ways, locking XFX out of future NVidia hardware and support.

Rumor has it that this week NVIDIA will let it officially be known that XFX’s European operations will cease to be an NVIDIA Approved Partner. This means that XFX will lose all underlying NVIDIA support on GPU allocation and new product launches…including Fermi.

If this is true and if Fermi goes big-time, then this could be bad for XFX.  Although, it’s all just rumor at this point, nothing confirmed from either side.

Update: Debunked.

via [H]ard|OCP, MaximumPC, and ExPreview

Hardware nvidia, xfx

Was the housing bubble and its collapse an event that occurred just in the United States? Or did the bubble occur in other countries as well. If so, which countries had this problem? The Economist answers this question by using an interactive graphic. You can select from 20 different countries, whether you want to use a housing price index, housing prices in real terms, housing prices against the average income, or the percentage change. You can also select the starting and ending period of time.

It looks like Spain, the United States, and the U.K. did have housing bubbles, while Canada seems to have held up better. Just remember the main drawback with interactive charts like this. When it comes to housing, the old adage of location, location, location can change your answers.

via: The Economist: Safe as houses

Graphics infographic

Here’s the pixels to today:

• 50 Free High-Quality Free Fonts
• 200+ Icon Sets
• 25 Colors Tools for Designers and WebMasters
• Audio Modcast with David Stripinis, Virtual Camera Operator for Avatar
• Maya into AfterEffects Workflow
• Irradiance Cache Settings in Cinema4D

Thanks to @nicholaspatten for several of these. If you’re not following him already, then you should start!  Or just keep checking VizWorld for the Pixels.

Graphics pixels

Back in the 18th century, Charles Messier was hunting comets. He was frustrated by objects that resembled the comets he was hunting, but were obviously something else. He then catalogued these objects so that they would not be confused with comets. M81 is the 81st object in his list, and was originally discovered by Johann Elert Bode in 1774. M81 is a beautiful spiral galaxy that is about 12 million light years distant from Earth. It is located in the constellation Ursa Major. Today, the Hubble Space Telescope released the best image of this galaxy ever taken. The image is so sharp, that you can even see the individual stars in the galaxy.

The sharpest image ever taken of the large “grand design” spiral galaxy M81 is being released today at the American Astronomical Society Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii.
A spiral-shaped system of stars, dust, and gas clouds, the galaxy’s arms wind all the way down into the nucleus. Though the galaxy is located 11.6 million light-years away, the Hubble Space Telescope’s view is so sharp that it can resolve individual stars, along with open star clusters, globular star clusters, and even glowing regions of fluorescent gas. The Hubble data was taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys in 2004 through 2006. This colour composite was assembled from images taken in blue, visible, and infrared light.

Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team STScI/AURA). Acknowledgment: A. Zezas and J. Huchra (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

The massive image has a resolution of 22,620 x 15,200. That is over 343 million pixels. Just for the sake of comparison, the Texas Advanced Computing Center has a tiled display that is 307 million pixels. You can download the Tiff file, which comes in at approximately 690 MB, or the large Jpeg file at a mere 345 MB. I downloaded the Jpeg file, which took about 15 minutes.

via: Hubble photographs grand design spiral galaxy M81

Science astronomy, extreme, hubble, photography

Ten1 Design has a new piece of software that can turn the Macbook Trackpad into your own miniature Wacom Tablet for only $24.95.  Install “inklet” on one of the newest unibody Macbooks that support multitouch and OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard), and you’re good to go.  A free version is available to try it out.

Inklet Trackpad Tablet.

Graphics, Hardware inklet, mac, software

ItsArtMag has published a short list of independent short movies featured on their site over 2009.   It contains 15 videos, some of which we’ve covered before like Pidgeon Impossible & World Builder, but there are several new items in the list.  Go check it out.

Top 2009 Independent Short Movies.

Graphics animation, list, short

A new render engine is on the block, this time using GPU acceleration to bring you interactive physically-based visuals in real-time.

Octane Render is the worlds first GPU based, un-biased, physically based renderer. As opposed to the handfull of processor cores available in CPU’s, the GPU typically has hundreds of cores for parallel processing making it the best resource for rendering in your computer. Yet, to date no other software makes use of it in the way that Octane does. With even a single mid-range GPU you can typically expect to see a 1000%-1500% 10X to 15X speed increase over a typical un-biased, CPU based renderer

A limited-feature demo will be released soon, with the 1.0 version available in February for 199 €.

via Octane Render- The Interactive Physically Based Render Engine.

Graphics octanerender, renderer, software

MaxUnderground has a review of Allan McKay’s new tutorial DVD, Creature FX Volume 1, aimed at Particle Flow, FumeFX, and 3dsMax.

The end result is professional and good looking for a tutorial. If you are interested in learning how to create procedural texture animations for creatures and how to use Particle Flow with animated characters together with FumeFX, you most likely will find this tutorial informative.

The amount of content offered in the tutorial compared to the price is good and worth the purchase. As this is ”Volume 1”, most likely more ”Creature FX” tutorials will follow.

via Creature FX Volume 1 DVD review – Max Underground.

Graphics 3dsmax, dvd, fumefx, particleflow, review, tutorial

Ever since I first read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, I’ve been fascinated by the idea of the Metaverse.  A virtual world that completely destroys physical boundaries, allowing us to interact and mingle in a virtual space across vast distances with similar realism as being physically there.  I’ve seen several virtual worlds rise and crumble, but none as persistent as Second Life.  I first tried Second Life back in February of 2006, and after a single day I never returned.  It was interesting, but almost overwhelming in its potential so I left it for a “later date”, which never arose.

Recently, there has been a lot of press about how Second Life is dying.  Reports from the BBC ask “What happened to Second Life?” call it a “lackluster experience” and claim it’s dying as Mobile applications grow.  Gotham Media says Second Life is on “Life Support”, still alive and kicking but “marginalized” in today’s internet experience.  Most recently, a report from PCPro proclaimed the death of the premier virtual sandbox once again.

We at VizWorld, doing our usual duty, pointed to the article as something worth checking out.  Little did we know the uproar it would cause!  That article quickly rose to the #1 article on VizWorld, and currently hosts 11 comments, all decrying the original author’s poor investigative skills.  Seeing an opportunity, I decided that the “later date” had finally come, and decided to re-enter Second Life and see first-hand what’s really going on in the virtual world.  That PCPro article was quickly usurped by our own Call to Action (currently playing host to an impressive 31 comments and suggestions), showing that someone out there is definitely using Second Life.

Matthew Perreault Concert in SL

And so began what was originally intended to be a single 2-3 page article on either a) PCPro is Right, or b) (my personal hope) that Second Life is alive, but just misunderstood.  Well, I’m both happy and sad to report that won’t be the case.  What I’ve found in Second Life is so huge and diverse that I don’t feel I can do it proper justice in a single article. Over the next few weeks, look for a series of articles on Second Life, where I plan to cover the exciting ventures into online interactive entertainment, online media production, commercial enterprises, scientific research, education, and much more.

To those of you that say Second Life is dead, I suggest that perhaps you haven’t looked hard enough to see what’s there. And that is what our first report is one:  Common Misconceptions of Second Life.

Read more…

Science feature, secondlife

Buzz is growing (thanks to Mashable) about TVGuide debuting a new toy called the “Hologram Glam Cam” during the upcoming Golden Globe Awards, to show the celebrities in 3D.  However, I think people are overestimating it a bit.  From the Press Release:

As celebrities are being interviewed live on the Red Carpet, TV Guide Network will also debut a revolutionary “Hologram Glam Cam” which generates a virtual three-dimensional image of the star and what they wore previously on the Red Carpet – allowing fans to enjoy both past and present Red Carpet fashions of their favorite stars. TV Guide Network’s “Hologram Glam Cam” was developed in partnership with Sportvision, Inc., creator of the famous Yellow 1st and Ten Line that has become a staple of all NFL and NCAA football telecasts. TV Guide Network’s signature live Red Carpet coverage will include celebrity interviews conducted by hosts Carrie Ann Inaba (“Dancing with the Stars”) and Chris Harrison (“The Bachelor,” “The Bachelorette”) at the Golden Globe® Awards, Grammy® Awards and Academy Awards®. For a complete list of Award Season programming premiere dates and times, visit www.tvguidenetworkpr.com/redcarpet.

This is not 3D Television, this is 3D reconstruction.  You won’t be wearing 3D glasses and watching this at home in 3D, they’re simply generating 3D models of the actors/actresses and displaying their previous wardrobes on them, fashion-doll style.  My guess is that they’ll show the actor on the side of the screen, then show the 3D “dolls” as flyarounds next to him for comparison.

It’s neat, yes. But not really revolutionary.

TV Guide Network to Debut 3-D Hologram Glam Cam on Golden Globes Red Carpet – Today’s News: Our Take | TVGuide.com.

Graphics 3d, awards, television