ProjectionDesign will be at the European Congress of Radiology (ECR) in Vienna demonstrating their new FL32 wuxga medical projector, the first solid-state projector tailored specifically to the medical market.
Making its worldwide debut at ECR will be projectiondesign’s new FL32 wuxga medical, the company’s first solid-state light-source projector to be tailored specifically to the requirements of the medical market. Fully compliant with DICOM clinical review standards, the new projector offers all the expected benefits of projectiondesign’s RealLED™ technology – including ultra-low power consumption, low cost of ownership, and up to 100,000 hours of operational life, making the projector virtually maintenance free!
But that’s not all, in addition (and perhaps even more interestingly) they will be showing off their new ProNet asset-management software system. ProNet enables remote monitoring and control (including automatic calibration!) of any number of displays.
The Harvard Business Review has posted an interview with data visualization scientist Jeff Clark, who is gathering data from Twitter and then visualizing it using different methods. To the right you can see a Venn Diagram of three search terms. The terms in this case are Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Apple obviously dominates in the diagram with nearly 50,000 tweets per day. Microsoft is not far behind, but Google trails badly. Jeff Clark has created three other graphs of Twitter traffic including a spectrum map, an arc map, and a StreamGraph. Visit the article to see more examples of visualizing Twitter.
Nooka, the high-end watch company, has released a new tool on their website called the “Nooka Augmented Reality Accessorizer”. Using the dummy watch (included in various print-ads or downloaded from their website), you can virtually try on several of their models to find the one you like.
This is very similar to the product demonstrations previously shown by Lego and Shiseido. Looks like Augmented Reality may find a clever way into our lives through product marketing.
Acknowledging the power of Virtual Worlds, the US Agriculture Department has issued a request for offers to build a virtual world for collaboration, training, simulation, and analysis. In particular, I like this statement:
The virtual world’s features would need to be at least as good as or better than what’s offered publicly by Second Life or World of Warcraft, according to the statement of work for the project.
The pinnacle of openness and the pinnacle of graphics beauty in MMO’s, combined. They are looking for COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) solutions, so I suspect something like SecondLife Enterprise will be the victor. Proposals are due later this month, and contract is to be awarded later this year with three possible extension years.
On Monday, President Obama released a new budget for the space agency. While his budget request includes a yearly increase, some of their favorite programs were axed. In particular, there is no money in the budget for a return to the moon. Good has published an infographic which focuses on Nasa’s space budget. The infographic looks at how much NASA has received each year since the 1960′s, and places that into context with the total federal budget. For the last several years, NASA has been averaging about 0.5% of the federal budget. The graphic then looks at what missions have occurred over that time period.
Personally, I think that this is another great example of what not to do in an infographic. First, the image is too large to view even on a 30″ monitor. Secondly, it blinks. Yes, you read that right, it has elements in the infographic that blink. Thirdly, someone needs to spend some time making sure that the color scheme is chosen so that you can read it. Fourthly, someone needs to realize that an 8-bit Hubble telescope picture in the background looks horrible, especially when combined with the poor colors for the text. Finally, please spend some time making sure that you spell correctly.
The r|shaders pack from Core Zero brings some beautiful procedural shaders to 3ds Max, and has just enetered Beta 1.5. In addition to this milestone, they are running a promotional 50% discount sale through February and March in preparation for release soon afterwards.
Currently 7 shaders are operational (ice, ocean, deep ocean, sand, snow, ice land, and snow land) with 2 more to come prior to release (magma and ground). The results are amazing, and their website has detailed examples of both the UI and results for each shader.
Last month, the US bobsled team, “Team Night Train” won the 2010 World Cup Championship – the first time a US team has won that title in 17 years. While much credit goes to the sledders, PCWorld has some sample imagse from the designers of the sled who used cutting-edge computational fluid dynamics simulations and visualizations to design the winning sled.
In this image, the PowerFlow software shows sled designers a computer-generated visualization of complex, turbulent airflow that travels over the centerline of the sled and the four-man crew on a run. The designers with the Bo-Dyn Bobsled Project, which built Night Train’s sled, can then change the design based on the simulations and make adjustments on the fly–much faster than before–to help cut turbulence and make the sled slip through the air more quickly.
Superfish has developed a new image search algorithm and deployed it via a browser addon for Internet Explorer and FireFox that allows you to find a product on any of several popular online stores and automatically see similar items from around the internet. Unlike systems like Amazon, the similar items are based upon image processing algorithms that analyze the item on the page to present similar looking items, so you see similar shoes, purses or other items with the same properties as what you see. In a recent blog post they discuss some of their technology:
Visual search for flat objects already exists, and it is not bad at all. For example, there are pretty good optical character recognition (OCR) and bar-code readers in use today. But we live in a three-dimensional world where objects take on dissimilar visual forms when viewed from different viewing angles. The same shoe looks completely different from the front, back, side, top and bottom. While even a young child can abstract a real-world object from its myriad appearances, computers can only compare images by their apparent features. Superfish employs algorithms that handle complex geometries to recognize an object regardless of the angle the image was captured.
The addon works for Windows & Mac, Internet Explorer & Firefox (no Safari, Chrome, or Opera support it seems) and is currently available in a “Beta” state but pretty functional. Hit their site for a demonstration video and to download it.
CGSociety has a great writeup of the VFX of “The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus” including discussions with Peerless Camera Company’s Paul Docherty.
Every practical effect was heavily augmented with CG, particle systems, Houdini fluid motion, etc, using the miniature work as a core, “partially because we wanted the look, and because to do some of that stuff digitally just cost too much. To build the temple digitally would have probably bankrupted us in one sequence. Also, Terry has a huge miniature experience and understands them inside and out. The trick for us was putting it together with all the digital bits.”
On December 14, 2009, NASA launched the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope. This space-born telescope has a 16 inch diameter and surveys light in the infrared wavelengths. The telescope’s focal planes and optics are cooled with a two-stage solid-hydrogen cryostat. This gives the mission an expected lifetime of 10 months. Over that time, it will take one image about every 11 seconds for about 1.5 million images in total.
Now NASA is releasing the first images from the telescope. The image to the right shows dust that is contained in the spiral arms of the Andromeda galaxy. Newborn stars within the Andromeda galaxy are heating the dust so that it glows. The Andromeda galaxy is 2.5 million light-years away and is the nearest galaxy to our own Milky Way.
Head on over to the site to see more images of Andromeda, as well as to see infrared images of a comet and a star cluster.
ProjectionDesign will be at the European Congress of Radiology (ECR) in Vienna demonstrating their new FL32 wuxga medical projector, the first solid-state projector tailored specifically to the medical market.
Acknowledging the power of Virtual Worlds, the US Agriculture Department has issued a request for offers to build a virtual world for collaboration, training, simulation, and analysis. In particular, I like this statement:
The r|shaders pack from Core Zero brings some beautiful procedural shaders to 3ds Max, and has just enetered Beta 1.5. In addition to this milestone, they are running a promotional 50% discount sale through February and March in preparation for release soon afterwards.
Last month, the US bobsled team, “Team Night Train” won the 2010 World Cup Championship – the first time a US team has won that title in 17 years. While much credit goes to the sledders, PCWorld has some sample imagse from the designers of the sled who used cutting-edge computational fluid dynamics simulations and visualizations to design the winning sled.
CGSociety has a great writeup of the VFX of “The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus” including discussions with Peerless Camera Company’s Paul Docherty.
VizWorld.com 
Comments