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A pair of interesting legal turns have lead to a pair of interesting financial turns for the two giants of the computer graphics industry.  First off, AMD published the quarterly report to wrap up 2009, and found themselves a surprise, they’re in the black for the first time in 13 quarters?  How did this miracle happen?  They got a big $1.25Billion from Intel for that legal settlement.  But that’s not all:

To put things in perspective, last year AMD lost $1.4 billion just on Q4’08, and $3.1B for all of 2008, so this is a massive turnaround for the company. At this point both of their core divisions are turning a small profit, and the company’s reduced exposure to the foundry business has greatly improved their bottom line. AMD took a loss of $99M in Q4 from their share of Global Foundries – so if they were able to drop the foundry business entirely, they would have likely turned a true GAAP profit. Although AMD has several problems, at the moment it’s the foundry business that continues to be doing the most harm to them.

So while AMD is reveling in what will probably be a short-term gain (the Intel payment was a one-time event, afterall), NVidia is getting hammered on the other end of the legal spectrum.  Just yesterday, a judge ruled that NVidia is in violation of some of those Rambus patents that have been haunting them for the last few years.

A judge with the U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington said today that Nvidia is violating three patents owned by Rambus. Two other patents are invalid, said Judge Theodore Essex. His decision, which is subject to review by the full commission, may result in a ban on imports of Nvidia chips and products that use them, including some computers made by Hewlett-Packard Co.

No doubt NVidia will settle or pay a fine to keep availability of product here in the States, which will lead to a huge hit on their financials for Q1 of 2010.  Hopefully the Fermi and 3D Gaming will be big enough to offset the payout.

via AnandTech: AMD’s Financials.

via Businessweek: NVidia and Rambus

Hardware amd, ati, financial, intel, legal, nvidia, rambus

The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has signed a deal to work with Google to jointly develop tools to visualize the various scientific datasets they have.

Under the agreement, the agency and Google plan to work together on research and development to join NOAA’s oceanographic, meteorological, biological and climatological data with Google’s software.

NOAA officials hope the wide availability of Google’s Internet tools will deliver visualizations of NOAA data to new audiences around the world. The agreement lists six topic areas in which the agency and Google may pursue cooperative research projects: (…)

NOAA and Google have worked together before, bringing a Great Lakes feature and various Oceanographic data to Google Earth, and other US government labs for projects like the Live Cloud Layer with the Naval Research Labs.  Another win for Online Public Content!

via NOAA, Google partner on data visualization project — Federal Computer Week.

Science gis, google, maps, noaa

The Human Media Lab has put out a new concept video showing “Electronic board games”, basing several of their ideas on the popular Settlers of Catan game.

This video shows how future boardgames like Settlers of Catan will be electronic. It features a real-time strategy game played on interactive e-paper tiles, tracked by computer vision and operated through projection

While their demonstration works via computer vision and an overhead projector to project the visuals onto the blank white tiles, they do mention that possibly this could be replaced with something more portable like OLED or ePaper.

See the video below.

Hardware, Science game, projector, research

Ronen Bekerman has updated his blog with a clever trick for adding fake fog to a fast render in such a way that it’s easily editable in Photoshop, eliminating lengthy re-render times.

I recently used this technique in the visualization of the Agami House in Yaffo. It’s true it might not look real enough but for most cases this really looks good enough and you have the added bonus of fast render and flexible edit inside Photoshop if the client ask for tweaks.

It’s accomplished with a VRayZDepth render pass, but I suspect any renderer that can export a Z-Depth layer would work similarly.  A quick composite of the Z-Depth with a gradient opacity shift and the background, and voila.  See the full details at his site.

via Adding Fog Using VRayZDepth Render Pass – Ronen Bekerman – 3D Architectural Visualization Blog.

Graphics photoshop, vfx, vray

Autodesk has put out the Call for Submissions for their NAB 2010 “Best of the Best” Show Reel.

Looking to show off your company’s talent? Be part of the Autodesk 2010 Best of the Best Show Reel. Submit your latest film, commercial, broadcast, music video and episodic projects created using Autodesk software, such as Autodesk® Inferno®, Autodesk® Flame®, Autodesk® Flint®, Autodesk® Flare™, Autodesk® Smoke®, Autodesk® Lustre®, Autodesk® Maya®, Autodesk® 3ds Max®, Autodesk® Mudbox™, Autodesk® MotionBuilder®, and Softimage® tools.

Videos have to be in by February 22nd, and Stills have to be in by February 7th.  Full submission guidelines are on their site.

via Autodesk – Television – NAB 2010 Call for Submissions.

Graphics autodesk, nab, reel

Adidas has announced a new show coming soon called the ‘Originals AR Game Pack’ which, as far as I can see, it just a regular shoe with a special Augmented Reality marker on the tongue (As shown in the picture).  Put the shoe in front of your webcam and be granted access to a collection of online games exclusive to shoe owners.

Or, get a picture of someone else’s marker and some scotch tape and you can literally “make your own”.  In fact, you probably don’t even need the shoe.  Not real sure what Adidas is thinking with this one.

adidas Originals | Lifestyle | AUGMENTED REALITY SHOES – COMING SOON.

Hardware adidas, augmented reality, marketing

Here’s today’s pixels:

• 30-day free trials of HyperMove
• PhotoSculpt (coming in 2010) - Create 3d Models & Textures from 2 photographs
• VizWorld Newsletter #6 .. What? You’re not on our Mailing List?
• Video: Time-Lapse Footage of the raising of Flight 1549 from the Hudson
• Free Modo Training from Pixel Corps , bi-weekly podcast hosted by Pixel Corps founder and Chief Architect, Alex Lindsay

Graphics pixels

2009 has come to a close, and Nicholas Feltron has published another fantastic infographic report of how he spent the year.  This year, he handed out individualized survey cards to everyone he met over the year, asking them to fill out a short survey about the experience.  The result was a chaotic mess of a dataset that he turned into some beautiful graphics.

The data set itself was messy and overwhelming, and filled with enough information for several more reports. There are inherent shortcomings (like the unrepresentative amount of water recorded), and endearing strong suits (like the exploration of mood). I used several tools to make this task a more manageable, including Processing, which allowed me to map and explore alternate layouts much more quickly than previously, and Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

His site is, understandably, under a lot of strain right now.  I’ve included the first two graphics in medium-resolution after the break, hit his site for the rest.

via Nicholas Felton | Feltron.com.

Read more…

Graphics 2009, annual, infographic

Did you know that there is less than 950 days (2.6 years) until regional registry IPv4 address exhaustion? There are 4,294,967,296 addresses (or about 28.8 adresses per square kilometer of land) for IPv4. Thus we need to moving towards IPv6 which gives us 2¹²⁸ addresses (or about 2.2 x 10²⁴ adresses per square meter of land). The TechRepublic has published an article and visualizaiton of the 2006 status of the blocks of addresses and their utilization. They even link to a XKCD map of the internet. From the article:

The IPv4 over-allocation comes up frequently in discussing the eventual exhaustion of available IPv4 addresses; in fact, Michael Kassner’s recent post explains how available addresses are almost exhausted and that the days are limited for IPv4. The current situation of the IPv4 address space can be visualized to show who has what addresses, what is full, and what is available.

via : Visualizing IPv4 addresses on the Internet

via : XKCD map of the Internet

Science infovis

Over at the University of Bath, Dr Peter Hall and Chris Li have developed new algorithms that can analyze video footage of trees swaying in the wind and recreate it in 3D models suitable for movies and videogames.

Dr Hall explained: “Trees move in irregular ways and it’s very hard to achieve natural-looking movement.

“It is so expensive that traditional animation often uses static trees – except in big-budget films. In computer graphics, tree models are just as hard to produce.

Several players in the animation industry are already looking at it, so hopefully we’ll see it somewhere mainstream in the near future.  See some videos of the project in action at the University of Bath website.

via BBC – Bath University makes animated trees more life-like.

Science algorithm, animation