VizWorld.com

NOAA has been busy today predicting and charting the results of the 8.8 Earthquake off the coast of Chile and the resulting tsunami waves.

The Chile tsunami was generated by a Mw 8.8 earthquake (35.846°S, 72.719°W ), at 06:34 UTC, 115 km (60 miles) NNE of Concepcion, Chile (according to the USGS). In approximately 3 hours, the tsunami was first recorded at DART® buoy 32412. Forecast results shown below were created with the NOAA forecast method using MOST model with the tsunami source inferred from DART® data. The tsunami waves first arrived at Valparaiso, Chile (approximately 330 km northeast from earthquake epicenter ) earlier than other tide gages, at 0708UTC, about 34 minutes after the earthquake.

On their website you can see the massive visualizations of the wave height, earthquake, propagation animations, offshore forecast amplitudes, and more.

What do you think of the visualizations?

via NOAA Center for Tsunami Research – Tsunami Event – February 27, 2010 Chile.

Science noaa, tsunami

Computational Engineering International (CEI) has announced that EnSight CFD 2.0 is now available with volume rendering. EnSight CFD is specifically designed for the CFD user, and sports a new graphical user interface when compared to EnSight Gold. They have also announced a version for Mac users using Apple’s Cocoa framework. Better yet, they have announced the following:

But perhaps the most interesting addition to EnSight CFD 2.0 is a free version. The free version has some limits in file size (number of elements), doesn’t read all the same data formats, and has a small watermark on the screen. But other than that, and lack of access to personal support, seems to be comparable to the paid version.

via EnSight CFD 2.0 has been released.

Science ensight

Here are today’s pixels:

• LightWorks Design names the victor in their latest competition (shown right)
• Exclusive: Michele Bousquet responds to complaints & criticisms about TurboSquid’s changes & SquidGuild
• Ray drops the price of the Ray Projector to $199
• Trinigy Vision Engine 8 demo video
• Redsdk 2.2 Global illumination tools

Graphics contest, lightworks, pixels, redsdk, trinity

Crytek has published a new paper & presentation on their website of some new technology they are working on for CryEngine3: Real time computation of indirect illumination.  From the description:

This I3D 2010 paper is a result of collaborative research with Carsten Dachsbacher. The LPV technique was extended to support secondary occlusion and multiple bounces. The propagation scheme is improved and compared to similar Discrete Ordinate Methods. Also this paper describes many additional application and implementation details.

They’ve published the Paper & Powerpoint slides online:

• Paper (Download / View Online)
• PowerPoint Slides (Download / View Online)
• Movie

And published this video on YouTube.

Simply Amazing.

via Crytek GmbH: Presentations.

Science cryengine, crytek, realtime

Neil Patel over at Quicksprout.com has published an infographic on the complexity of the U.S. tax system. Did you know that 16.3% of Americans evade their taxes every year? That costs the U.S. some $345 billion dollars. That is less than half of what the U.S. government spent on TARP. That would also fund our government for about a month.

As you already know the U.S. tax system is complicated. So complicated that in 1913 the tax code was 400 pages and today it’s 70,320 pages long.

via The Complexity of the U.S. Tax System.

Read more…

Graphics infographic, tax

SemiAccurate (just gotta love that name) is reporting that XFX will be releasing a custom chip based on NVidia’s Fermi core. Now you have to color me very skeptical on this one. Think about how much it would cost to run a special batch of chips just for XFX. Why would NVidia do it? Could XFX afford it, and make a profit? Next, take a look at the card itself. As SemiAccurate points out, this will not fit in a regular ATX case, so it must be made to run on an open system. From the article:

The so far unspecified GPU is clocked at what appears to be a fairly slow 666MHz, but this custom chip from Nvidia has no less than 666 stream processors (also known as shaders) which should allow it to beat just about any card on the market when it comes to GPGPU performance, although with that many shaders we’d expect the card to perform extremely well in most games. The GPU has been paired up with 4GB of GDDR5 memory using a 666-bit bus and the memory operates on a 666MHz quad pumped bus which results in the equivalent data rate of 2,664MHz, which blows the competition away.

It will be interesting if this thing actually shows up. Do not expect it to be available in large quantities, and the price is rumored to be $1,390. Again, color me skeptical, but visit the article to learn more.

via SemiAccurate :: Sweden gets world exclusive GeForce Fermin card.

Update (Randall, 2/28/2010): Ok, this one is a funny story.  Seems the online store that SemiAccurate points to in the article, www.inet.se, was running an online contest.  They placed one phony product in their store, and the first person to find it won.  Guess what the phony product was? the “GeForce Fermin”.  Visit the page now and you’ll see “Visit our FaceBook page for more contests soon!”.

I thought it seemed pretty far fetched.  Lots of convenient 666′s in the specs, and the name (“Fermin”) just didn’t mesh.

Hardware fermi, gf100, hoax, nvidia, xfx

Intuitive Surgical’s daVinci robotic surgery system is gaining traction in the market for its unique ability to combine laparascopic and minimally invasive surgical techniques with robotic and haptic systems for improved accuracy and reduced recovery time for the patient.  Unfortunately, these machines remain ridiculously expensive and hard to train on due to the current ‘apprentice’ model in use.

“Until now, surgeons have not had sufficient opportunities outside of the operating room to gain extensive training in robotic techniques,” said Guru, whose own surgical expertise has made RPCI’s robotics program a Center of Excellence and a world leader in physician training in robotics. Instead, he explains, surgeons usually start by “shadowing” a colleague who is more experienced with robotics in the operating room; once they are seen as having developed some proficiency, they start doing robotic surgeries on their own patients.

A new project from the University of Buffalo aims to change this with a tool called ‘RoSS’, the ‘Robotic Surgical Simulator’.  For a fraction of the cost,time, and prep of the real daVinci and a patient, surgeons can train and practice in virtual reality on simulated patients.

“Hospitals don’t invest in these multi-million-dollar robotic surgery systems so that people can train on them,” says John Burgess, Simulated Surgical Systems, LLC, chief executive officer. “Their most pressing need has been a good training environment for robotic surgery.”

Hopefully this will result in a more rapid deployment of DaVinci’s in hospitals across the world.

via Introducing RoSS, a “Flight Simulator” for Robotic Surgery – UB NewsCenter. via PhysOrg

Science biomed, davinci, virtual reality

Over at the New York Times they have posted a video on the history of the Olympic pictograms. What is a pictogram? Why it is a tiny symbol meant to encapsulate the essence of a sport (or use of a very important facility).

Designer Steven Heller traces the evolution of the tiny symbols for each Olympic sport since their appearance in 1936.

via Olympic Pictograms Through the Ages – Video Feature – NYTimes.com.

Science infographic, video

I found this a few days ago and it didn’t seem very “Viz”-like, so I sent it on to my buddy John West at InsideHPC who wrote it up.  Pixar presented a short 3-minute case study on their recent datacenter redesign at the recent Data Center Energy Efficienty Summit. I link to it here just so that all of you lonely animators/admins running Render Farms and constantly struggling with datacenter issues.

Pixar saved $30,000 over conventional cooling, on an $18,700 implementation cost, for a return on investment of 3.7 months (including PG&E rebates). And the figures are indepently audited.

Pixar’s short video is below.

If you work in this type of industry, then I highly recommend adding InsideHPC to your daily reading.

via Pixar’s cold aisle containment study, ROI in 3.7 months | insideHPC.com.

Hardware datacenter, hpc, pixar

Mint is back at it again, this time publishing an infographic on the income disparity between the sexes and across the races. The graphic is good, but I am left puzzling over one aspect of it. In 2002 the Census Bureau starting reporting the incomes for Asian males and females. Why did they not collect that data in earlier years? I remember when the Japanese machine was rolling in the 1980s and they were going to buy up the world. It seems to me that they would have been collecting that data for the past several decades, not just the last eight years.

Though the income gap in the United States has slowly decreased over the last few decades, there still remains a significant disparity in income between genders and across races. The earnings of Black women are much closer to the US average than those of their male counterparts, and the trend is similar for those of Hispanic descent.

via The US Income Gap .

Graphics infographic