Home » Archives for January 2010
Time for another in our ongoing Second Life series, and this time I’m going to tackle Education in Virtual Worlds. Again, not a particularly new advance. Several universities have begun to embrace “online courses”, coupling traditional education tools with web-based systems like Blackboard to increase revenue with a minimum of expense. It allows teachers to very easily re-use class materials (doesn’t get much easier than cut-n-paste, or simply clicking a “publish” button from their library of assets), and enables the university to open classes to students around the world.
Virtual Worlds are becoming the “next generation” of these online courses, and Second Life is on the forefront of the wave.
Read more…
Graphics, Science education, feature, secondlife, virtual worlds
The Foundry has just announced the availability of Nuke 6.0. The list of new features is huge, but a quick cliff-notes:
- RotoPaint – non-destructive layer-based drawing tool that supports shapes & bezier curves
- KeyLight – new Blue/Green screen keyer
- NukeX – A whole new Nuke with several new features
- New Python Bindings
- and several bugfixes
You can read the entire release notes here.
The Foundry – Downloads.
Graphics foundry, nuke, software
Tactus Technologies has released a new modeling tool they describe as a ‘tool based free-form modeler’.
Protean is a new software program developed to address the need for creating true 3D free form objects in a single, easy to use package. It uses a physical clay paradigm and is exceptionally suited for designing organic as well as inorganic models, from toys to knee joints. It is not a mechanical CAD system, yet you can make exceptional 3D prints for rapid viewing your design using Protean’s export facilities.
They have a free demo online so that you can try it out.
Tactus Technologies, Inc..
Graphics protean, software
The United States has 53 separate unemployment insurance systems. How can that be when there are only 50 states? The remaining three unemployment insurance systems are found in Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Each system is separate from one another; each system pays different benefits; each system has been funded separately. What that means is that some workers in low-benefit states can get half what the same type of worker gets in a high-benefit state. If that sounds unfair, consider this: some states have built up sufficient reserves to make it through this recession. Other states have seen their funds run dry.
ProPublica has an article and interactive infographic showing which states are in trouble, which states are not, and which states will be in trouble in six months. From their article:
The unemployment insurance system is in crisis. A record 20 million Americans collected unemployment benefits last year, and so far twenty-five states have run out of funds and been forced to borrow from federal government, raise taxes, or cut benefits. In many other states the situation is deteriorating fast. Using near real-time data on state revenues and the benefits they pay out, we estimate how long state trust funds will hold up.
Be sure to click on your state, district, or territory on the right side of their interactive infographic to see how it is doing.
via ProPublica : Unemployment Insurance Tracker
Science infographic, interactive
An interesting project called the “Anti Grain Geometry Project”, or AGG Project, aims to develop a library for detailed development of graphics algorithms, without any of the constraints of libraries like OpenGL.
Anti-Grain Geometry is designed as a set of loosely coupled algorithms and class templates united with a common idea, so that all the components can be easily combined. Also, the template based design allows you to replace any part of the library without the necessity to modify a single byte in the existing code.
Also AGG is designed keeping in mind extensibility and flexibility. Basically I just wanted to create a toolkit that would allow me (and anyone else) to add new fancy algorithms very easily.
Aimed primarily at development of algorithms, the author concedes that working with it can be a bit difficult. However, the results he shows in just basic antialiasing work show some great promise.
via Anti-Grain Geometry – Introduction.
Graphics, Science agg, library, sdk
The United Nations Development Programme (UNPD) publishes yearly statistical reports. We Aint Plastic has taken the data from those reports and has developed an interactive Flash visualization. The visualization focuses on The Human’s Development. That is, those characteristics that they think make a successful human development. These three markers are a health index, living standard, and education. You can launch the visualization by choosing the United States as the default country to view, or for our foreign readers, you can choose your own country to view. For the record, Japan ranks as number one, with Iceland following at number two.
Considering the debt these two countries have, it makes me wonder. Yes, I know, just because there is a corellation between successful human development and debt does not mean that debt causes a long, healthy, well-educated life with a high quality of living.
via : We Aint Plastic
Science infographic
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is an anxiety disorder that can develop after a person has been exposed to a traumatic event. In the past it has gone by such names as shell shock, and battle fatigue because many times it affects soldiers that have undergone physical and psychological trauma on the battlefield. It is not limited to just soldiers, as civilians may also experience PTSD.
Apostolos Georgopoulos, at the University of Minnesota in the United States, has developed a one minute test that can diagnose PTSD with an accuracy of 90%. The test involves magnetoencephalographic (MEG) recordings. MEG measures the magnetic fields produced by electrical activity in the brain, and then visualizes it. From the BBC article:
The test measures the tiny magnetic fluctuations that occur as groups of neurons fire in synchrony, even when subjects are not thinking of anything.
These “synchronous neural interactions” have already been shown to distinguish signals from subjects with a range of disorders including Alzheimer’s.
Subjects who underwent the study were placed within an electromagnetically shielded chamber. They then fixed their vision on a spot 65 cm in from of them for one minute. This allowed researchers to monitor the subjects brain while at rest. Seventy-four of the subjects were military veterans who had PTSD, while 250 of the subjects were civilians. Researchers noted that PTSD patients had a different brain patterns than the healthy volunteers.
The paper may be found on-line for free for the next 30 days at the Journal of Neural Engineering. You will need to create a free account to access the paper.
via BBC : Magnetic activity in brain ‘diagnoses stress disorder’
Science biomed, brain, mri
The movie Legion opened in theaters today and shows an apocalyptic world where God sends angels down to eradicate mankind. Creating these angels proved tricky for VFX supervisor Joe Bauer (not to be confused with Jack Bauer) and his team who initially began with heavy prosthetic wings, but quickly transitioned into CG wings. Popular Mechanics discusses how they integrated LED trackers, principal photography, and the incredibly detailed 3D models of the wings.
Animators began by studying high-speed footage of owls and hawks in flight and swooping down on prey, which was essential in determining how wings and feathers move. “You can really tell how the air moves through the wings,” Bauer says. “They’re not rigid at all. The wings are always adjusting subtly and the feathers are always reacting to the wind.” Animators combined the coolest characteristics of owl and hawk wings to create the angels’ wings; the end result were hawk-shaped wings that behaved like an owl’s, Animators built them from the inside out—Bauer says there are over 20 layers to the wings, including bones, musculature, feathers, black densities, saturation and lighting, among others. “When you don't have those layers … that’s what makes the difference between wings that look very plastic and cartoony versus ones that look as though they were in the room with the actor on the day of photography,” Bauer says.
via How Legion Movie Wing Animation Works – Popular Mechanics.
Graphics movie, vfx
Lenovo, chinese computer manufacturer that bought the Thinkpad line from IBM several years ago, has announced a new line of ThinkPad workstations that come with NVidia Quadro FX video cards for GPU acceleration, and the Elemental Accelerator software from Elemental Technologies, to make a great video processing workstation.
“Digital content creators require the highest level of encoding performance to produce cutting-edge products,” said Peter Schrady, vice president, Software and Peripherals, Lenovo. “By pairing ThinkStation workstations with Elemental Accelerator and NVIDIA Quadro FX GPUs, we are building computing solutions that deliver the fastest and highest quality video encoding experience available for Adobe Creative Suite 4 users.”
The workstations can be configured online now at www.lenovo.com/thinkstation and start as low at $799 (but the Elemental Accelerator software adds an extra $200).
via Lenovo Accelerates Video Performance for ThinkPad Workstations | Business Wire.
Hardware elemental accelerator, lenovo, nvidia
Time for another in our ongoing Second Life series, and this time I’m going to tackle Education in Virtual Worlds. Again, not a particularly new advance. Several universities have begun to embrace “online courses”, coupling traditional education tools with web-based systems like Blackboard to increase revenue with a minimum of expense. It allows teachers to very easily re-use class materials (doesn’t get much easier than cut-n-paste, or simply clicking a “publish” button from their library of assets), and enables the university to open classes to students around the world.
Here’s today’s pixels:
VizWorld.com 
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