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A new press release from Sony announced an agreement that will bring their 4K Digital Cinema projectors into AMC and Regal Entertainment cinemas across the US.

“We believe digital cinema enables the future for our industry, as it provides us versatility and delivers our guests a better entertainment experience,” said Gerry Lopez, president and CEO of AMC. “Sony’s 4K digital systems take the customer experience to the next level. We are proud to install their systems in our circuit.”

These 4K projectors will help to continue the rollout of the growing 3D cinema fad powered by RealD technology.  With both a Regal and an AMC theater near me, I know I’m excited to see them after the upgrade!

via Sony Electronics Signs Purchasing Agreements with Digital Cinema Implementation Partners.

Hardware amc, projector, regal, sony, theater

SemiAccurate is reporting that Nintendo is set to announce the Nintendo 3DS at Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) which runs from June 15-17. Unlike the picture to the right, this handheld will not require the use of glasses. Engadget says that the new handheld may use a parallax barrier LCD from Sharp, and may include 3-D game controller sticks. Gizmodo says that the screen might be 720p, and that a Tegra graphics chip might be behind it all. Finally, Mashable has the press release as a PDF, which says:

Nintendo Co., Ltd.(Minami-ward of Kyoto-city, President Satoru Iwata) will launch “Nintendo 3DS”(temp) during the fiscal year ending March 2011, on which games can be enjoyed with 3D effects without the need for any special glasses.

“Nintendo 3DS”(temp) is going to be the new portable game machine to succeed “Nintendo DS series”, whose cumulative consolidated sales from Nintendo amounted to 125million units as of the endo of December 2009, and will include backward compatibility so that the software for Nintendo DS series, including the ones for Nintendo DSi, can also be enjoyed.

We are planning to announce additional details at E3 show, which is scheduled to be held from June 15, 2010 at Los Angeles in the U.S.

This makes for some juicy rumors, but we will have to wait and see what they announce.

via : Nintendo to announce 3D handheld at E3

via : Nintendo 3DS to come with ’3D control stick,’ vibration, and Sharp’s parallax barrier 3D LCD? @ Engadget

via : Nintendo 3DS: The Details @ Gizmodo

via : Nintendo 3DS is Coming: 3D Gaming Without the Glasses

Hardware 3d, nintendo

Gigapixel images are great, but navigating them on a regular sized display through a slow web browser isn’t such a great experience. This video shows how we navigate a 13.3 gigapixel image of Tromsø, Norway on a 22 megapixel display wall, using a custom, camera-based multi-touch interface and a custom system for high-performance navigation and visualization of high-resolution datasets.

via YouTube – Navigating a 13.3 gigapixel image on a 22 megapixel display wall.

Hardware displaywall, tiled display

Women’s magazine ‘Grazia‘ is the latest entry in the Augmented Reality publishing game, bringing a musical performance from Florence and the Machine to those willing to hold the magazine up to their computer, or in a new twist, Grazia’s iPhone App .

The AR codes are on the cover and throughout the magazine, and can be activated by holding it up to a webcam or Grazia’s iPhone app. Then, Florence Welch from musical act Florence and the Machine will dance and sing along to single You’ve Got The Love, and the latest fashions will be modeled in 360-degree views.

Check out the short teaser video, which sadly contains almost nothing of the AR experience, below.

The Guardian via Now Women’s Mags Are Doing Augmented Reality – Grazia 3d issue – Gizmodo.

Science augmented reality, magazine

Stefanie Posavec is a London-based data artist. She is perhaps best known for her Left vs Right concept map. Today, the website Information Is Beautiful brings us more of her work, and it is truly amazing.

Stefanie’s personal work verges more into data art and is concerned with the unveiling of things unseen. ‘Literary Organism’ is an amazing visualisation of the structure of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road.

Here the lines divide into chapters, bloom into paragraphs, sprout sentences, and spread out into words. All are colour-coded according to the key themes.

via Information Is Beautiful | Ideas, issues, concepts, subjects – visualized!.

Graphics infographic

Back in February, Data Flow 2 was the Resource Of The Week. Containing several high-resolution infographics and charts combined with pages of beautiful text, the first book was a must-have for anyone working in the field.  The sequel is no different, improving on the first in several ways, and is the subject of an in-depth review over at Infosthetics.

With its abundance of visually attractive and high-resolution depictions that literally jump of the page, the book is a joy to explore. Alternatively, you can have it just laying around for those moments of when your information addiction pushes you to once again get high on seductive ways of data expression. The physical format lends itself to casual browsing, while the short descriptions provide a glimpse into some of the insights offered.

via Data Flow 2: The Book Review – information aesthetics.

Science book, review

I love the website floating sheep, and the infographics that they create. I realize that there are some drawbacks with their approach. One of the drawbacks is that they are searching for English terms. Another drawback is that they rely on people to create placemarks, which may make any conclusions they draw invalid. A third problem is the density of placemarks across the globe. They tackle this subject in their latest post.

We conducted a wildcard search at approximately 260,000 points on the Earth’s surface and collected the total number of placemarks indexed there. As always, a direct observation is preferable to a proxy measure so we’re quite excited by these maps.

One sees that the United States contains the most placemarks (77 million) with almost twice as many as China which has 43 million. The only other countries that also have over ten million placemarks are the usual suspects when it comes to technology use: Germany, Japan, the UK, France and Italy. However, looking at the raw number of placemarks per country only tells part of the story. So, we decided to normalize these data by population and area. In doing so, some interesting patterns emerge.

via floatingsheep.

Graphics floating sheep, infographic

Dick Kusleika from the “Daily Dose of Excel” blog is a big fan of popular medical drama/Sci-Fi show House (as am I), and recently analyzed the commercial content of a DVR-recorded episode and charted it quickly with Excel.  No surprise, an hour-long program is actually only about 40 minutes of real content.

Jon Peltier found his analysis, and saw an opportunity to analyze his chosen visualization (Stacked bars) in closer detail to see if there was a better way.  Along the way, he and his commenters tried several different charts including pie charts, scatter graphs, bars, timelines, and segment analysis graphs to see what worked best.  All of the discussion and examples are on his site.

Which do you think is best?

via Commercial Time in an Episode of House – Chart Porn.

Science house, television, visualization

Guru3d has been playing around with the new, and still unreleased, Eyefinity⁶ cards from AMD. Eyefinity⁶ graphics cards are slated to be released on March 29.

Currently we are testing ATI’s Radeon 5870 Eyefinity6 – in CrossfireX actually. Early next week we’ll have a nice article ready for you where we’ll show you how to build such a setup, what is needed. And then obviously we’ll have a chat about performance but most of all we like to show you little video showcases with a lot of games.

via : Hands on with Eyefinity6 – Preview Video

Hardware amd, ati, eyefinity, radeon

Last Friday I took my family to an observatory and we were able to view Saturn through a 14-inch diameter telescope. It was a beautiful sight, but no telescope can match the views from Cassini which is orbiting Saturn.

This natural color view from the Cassini spacecraft highlights the myriad gradations in the transparency of Saturn’s inner rings.

The dark shadows of the rings separate Saturn’s southern hemisphere in the bottom of the image from the north. The innermost D ring is invisible, laid over the planet’s northern hemisphere. The translucent C ring runs through the middle of the image. The denser B ring stretches across the top of the image.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 48 degrees below the ringplane. Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were acquired with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Feb. 28, 2009 at a distance of approximately 1 million kilometers (620,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 59 kilometers (37 miles) per pixel.

via NASA – Pastel Rings.

Science astronomy, nasa