Mashable has a nice infographic online, created for them by Muhammad Saleem, showing some statistics about the growth of FaceBook over the last 6 years.
Facebook was launched on February 4, 2004 and has come a long way from a Harvard-only networking site in the intervening years. In fact, Facebook has undoubtedly become the world’s largest social network, with over 400 million users worldwide and more than 900 employees. Let’s take a closer look at what kinds of numbers and user activity this growth translates to.
The following infographic explores Facebook’s growth over the past 6 years.
Information Aesthetics tips us off to a great interactive treemap visualization of the huge dataset from the Barcelona Natural Science Museum (which we discussed earlier) from design firm Bestiario.
Beginning with a broad view of all “Animalia”, you can click to zoom in through Phylum, class, and further on down until you find a single organism. Once you’ve found your one organism, they provide records with maps and links to other databases (including Flickr) for more information.
Anatoly Zenkov offers a tool (download for PC and Mac) that tracks your mouse’s movement across the screen. Turn on the utility, minimize it and go about your business on the computer. After an hour or four, pull up the Mouse Tracker screen to see scratches and splotches, i.e. mouse movement and periods of mouse inactivity, respectively.
Zenkov illustrated the utility’s use in tracking mouse movements in a program, e.g. Photoshop. What tools do you use the most, what repetitive movements do you make, where does your hand rest? I used the utility yesterday (on no program in particular) for a couple of hours and have two “Pollocks,” as Flowing Data refers to them: one for my left hand and the other for my right. Normally right-handed, I now mouse with my left hand to rest my right hand and alleviate carpal tunnel symptoms. The captures show how much less I use my left hand (fewer lines, more rest dots) than my right (lots more lines, fewer rest periods) in any given duration, but get the same amount of work done.
Mouse Tracks After Hour Of Working With Right Hand
Fast Company also features this tool and says, “You could almost use this as an ad-hoc tool for honing your site’s UI, since it allows you to see exactly how people are interacting with their screen.” I mostly disagree with this take because what the tool tracks is mouse movements on pre-made layouts. In other words, my mouse movements in GMail are going to look a certain way because GMail is designed that way, not because I choose to interact with the screen in that manner. What might be useful is assessing where people rest their hands or don’t go at all on the screen.
Before you go buy your next big editing suite or modeling workstation, consider checking out the latest version of MAXON’s benchmarking suite Cinebench 11.5. Cinebench is based on Cinema4D and pushes all aspects of a system relevant to graphics experts to measure how well it can hold up under real-world circumstances. Not only will it benchmark the CPU and GPU’s of the machine, but it will compare the results it finds against Maxon’s database so that you can compare your system against similar systems with various operating systems or other hardware configurations.
“As a leading innovator of high performance workstations and rendering systems, BOXX Technologies relies on CINEBENCH benchmarking analysis to clearly demonstrate how our solutions will perform in real-world scenarios,” said Shoaib Mohammad, Director of Marketing and Business Development at BOXX. “CINEBENCH is a tremendous asset, providing reliable and consistent data, ensuring us that our hardware is performing at its peak, and giving our customers confidence that when they choose BOXX they are making the most informed decision possible.”
Of course, even if you’re not benchmarking you might want to check it out just to see how well your machine can render AixSponza’s ‘No Keyframes‘ animation, the basis of their benchmark.
Go download Cinebench here, and read the full press release after the break.
If you’re unhappy with the built-in hair capabilities of Autodesk’s 3ds Max, then you might want to check out “Hair Farm” from CyberRadiance.
Hair Farm is not just another tool for producing hair on virtual characters. It is a completely new design that combines state-of-the-art technologies with an artist-friendly user interface and a flexible workflow.
Some of the novel technologies in Hair Farm are the following:
A whole new hair modeling pipeline combining the best ideas both the industry and the academia, including hair mesh modeling,
An artist-friendly realistic hair material that can efficiently handle complicated light behavior like multiple scattering in hair volume to produce physically-based realism,
A highly optimized high-quality ray tracer for hair that automatically handles anti-aliasing without the need to specify the number of samples,
A whole new hair simulation technique that can robustly handle complicated models and advanced physical behavior like hair-hair interaction,
Technologies in curve representations for modeling and rendering.
The results are impressive, as evidenced by their gallery. Available now for prices ranging from $70 (rendernode) to $1000 (professional).
Brian Burke of Nvidia tipped me off to the Asus N61JV-X2 16-inch laptop that comes with the NVidia Optimus graphics systems which is now available for pre-order on Amazon. The specs:
2.53GHz Intel Core i5-430M Processor
4GB of DDR3 1066MHz SDRAM, 2 slots, 8GB Max
500GB Hard Drive (7200 RPM); Super Multi Optical Disk Drive; Wi-Fi 802.11 bgn
16-Inch HD LED LCD Display; 2.0MP Webcam; HDMI Port; NVidia GT325M Graphics Engine with 1GB DDR3 Dedicated VRAM
At the recent Autodesk University 2009, Zebra Imaging was on hand demonstrating their plastic hologram technology that can, supposedly, take any 3D model and render it as a 3D hologram onto a simple piece of plastic. Their website gives some basic information on how they do it:
Patented advances in lasers, optics and image processing are incorporated into Zebra’s innovative process to produce holographic imagery from 3D data sets. Raw data sources of any kind, such as CAD models, laser scans and satellite imagery are used to product the final holographic image. Each hardcopy digital hologram is composed of thousands of high fidelity rendered still images. The images are encoded into a “hogel” (the equivalent of a holographic pixel) on photopolymer film with a proprietary optical process. The result is a portable film based hologram that can be viewed in direct sunlight or with a simple halogen or LED light source.
Sounds too good to be true, but the video taken from the conference floor shows amazing results. While they are not animated, you easily see multiple viewpoints from multiple angles without the need for any special glasses.
A busy day for Lightworks Design as they’ve also just released Lightworks Author 8.2 with new support for Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, real-time ray tracing, and reflection catcher. They’ve also improved the CgFX support, enabling support for multiple lights.
Joan Hirsch, vice president of Product Design Solutions at Siemens PLM commented, “With this release, Lightworks has once again listened to its customers and delivered functionality that will further enhance the high end visualisation delivered with our NX™ software.”
Already available for both Mac and Windows on their site.
Everyone knows how the United States is geographically divided into states, counties, and cities. But how is the United States connected socially? Pete Warden has taken data from Facebook, the popular social network site, and has visualized the results. He divides the country into seven regions which he christens as Stayathomia, Dixie, Greater Texas, Nomadic West, Mormonia, Socalistan, and Pacifica. I particularly like the name “Stay At Home”. That fits for a region that is blanketed by snow right now. One thing that he lacks is some understanding of the culture that he has defined. He does not understand why Dixie loves the name Ashley or why Mormonia loves the Twilight series. From his article:
Orbiting around Dallas, the ties of the Gulf Coast towns and Oklahoma and Arkansas make them look more Texan than Southern. Unlike Stayathomia, there’s a definite central city to this cluster, otherwise most towns just connect to their immediate neighbors.
God shows up, but always comes in below the Dallas Cowboys for Texas proper, and other local sports teams outside the state.
Mashable has a nice infographic online, created for them by Muhammad Saleem, showing some statistics about the growth of FaceBook over the last 6 years.
Information Aesthetics tips us off to a great interactive treemap visualization of the huge dataset from the Barcelona Natural Science Museum (which we 
Before you go buy your next big editing suite or modeling workstation, consider checking out the latest version of MAXON’s benchmarking suite Cinebench 11.5. Cinebench is based on Cinema4D and pushes all aspects of a system relevant to graphics experts to measure how well it can hold up under real-world circumstances. Not only will it benchmark the CPU and GPU’s of the machine, but it will compare the results it finds against Maxon’s database so that you can compare your system against similar systems with various operating systems or other hardware configurations.
If you’re unhappy with the built-in hair capabilities of Autodesk’s 3ds Max, then you might want to check out “Hair Farm” from CyberRadiance.
Here’s today’s Pixels:
At the recent Autodesk University 2009, Zebra Imaging was on hand demonstrating their plastic hologram technology that can, supposedly, take any 3D model and render it as a 3D hologram onto a simple piece of plastic. Their website gives some basic information on how they do it:
A busy day for Lightworks Design as they’ve also just released Lightworks Author 8.2 with new support for Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, real-time ray tracing, and reflection catcher. They’ve also improved the CgFX support, enabling support for multiple lights.
VizWorld.com 
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