NVIDIA PhysX Lab is used to generate a partially destructible brick wall with an indestructible back so that game play doesnt change. The front of the brick wall is fully destructible. PhysX Lab is used to simulate the destruction in the playground. This is followed by an in-game example using the partially destructible brick wall to show the enhanced gaming experience.
The Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) is part of the the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) that is orbiting the moon. The mission of LOLA is to create a high-resolution global topographic model of the moon.
Recently NASA has started to release data from LOLA, including this image of the Marius Hills, a volcanic region on the moon. Also found in the Marius Hills is a possible lava tube.
The following comes from the article that accompanies this image:
This LOLA image shows the Marius Hills located in Oceanus Procellarum. Marius Hills is the largest volcanic dome field on the Moon. The region is an area of high interest because it contains approximately half of the Moon’s known volcanic domes. These domes range from 200-500 m in height. In comparison, the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Loa, which is the largest shield volcano on Earth, is 17,170 m tall. This image covers the area of the Moon from 9.5 – 17N, and 303.5 – 311 E
via : The Marius Hills @ NASA
Physically simulated clothing and hair by CCP. The cloth train interacts with the environment and doesn’t become tangled while moving 360 degrees. In addition, the hair is also simulated using APEX Clothing and interacts with hand movements and shows secondary motion while walking.
The demo uses PhysX 2.8.3 and a beta release of APEX Clothing.
via YouTube – Physically simulated clothing by CCP using NVIDIA APEX.
SlashFilm has a great colleciton of 41 high-resolution stills from the upcoming “Clash Of The Titans” movie, with a several page story detailing the story of the film, how it relates to the original, and how the CGI monsters were brought to life. The biggest CGI creation is the biggest and baddest monster in all of Argos, the Kraken, and features the work of several companies and designers including MPC.
The design phase for the Kraken–the most feared beast in all of Argos–took a period of approximately five months. Davis relates, “Aaron Sims, our character designer, worked with Louis and me and the art team until we had something everyone was happy with, and then the people at MPC (Moving Picture Company) took over to work through the texture, and so on. The water was also a huge element. The Kraken rises out of the sea, so it’s got water cascading off of it on a massive scale, but part of it is always in the water, thrashing around. It was quite a challenge.”
“Clash of the Titans” comes to theaters April 2nd.
via 41 High Resolution Photos from Clash of the Titans | /Film.
The New York Times has an interactive inforgraphic on the historic health care vote. Click on the link below to see how your representative voted.
via House Vote 165 – H.R.3590: On Motion to Concur in Senate Amendments – NYTimes.com.
El Niño is still sticking around, and I am sure that it is the cause of the strange weather we had yesterday. Never mind that it is spring. Never mind that I live in the Southern United States where it rarely snows. Never mind that the temperature was above freezing yesterday. It was snowing! It was too warm for it to stick, but it was a surreal sight. Personally, I blame El Niño.
The climate pattern known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or “ENSO” for short, is the biggest cause of large-scale climate variability in the tropics. During an El Niño episode, the central and eastern Pacific Ocean are warmer than normal. The above-normal sea surface temperatures are maintained by gentle but giant waves of warm water that slosh across the Pacific from Indonesia toward South America.
This series of globes shows the eastward progression of one of these deep Kelvin waves in February 2010. The globes show sea surface height anomalies, which means places where the water surface is higher (red) or lower (blue) than average. A higher-than-average sea surface height at a given location indicates that there is a deeper-than-normal layer of warm water. Lower-than-average sea surface height indicates a shallower layer of warm water. The globes are based on 10 days of data centered on January 15, January 30, and February 15.
CEI announced on Friday that it has released 9.1.1b. This appears to be mainly a bug-fix for the EnSight Client, the EnSight Server, EnSight SoS, EnSight DR, and EnLiten. If you are an EnSight user, you can check the website below to see what the updates are.
Following on the successful launch of EnSight 9.1, which we blogged about here, There is a bug fix version, 9.1.1b, now available for download from our website.
The primary changes were in HPC functionality found in server-of-servers (S.O.S) and Distributed Rendering (DR).
via Viz Worth Watching: EnSight 9.1.1b now available – the DR is in..
I hate it when my friends call me to fix the problems that Geek Squad created. I really hate it when stores offer bogus services like this. HD Guru tells the story like this:
HD Guru called three Best Buy stores. After confirming each employee received training on 3D TVs and installation services, we asked them to explain the process of “syncing” the 3D glasses. We received three different but oddly similar responses.
Blue shirt one said the glasses need to be synced with the Blu-ray player. The second geek referred to the 3D glasses needing to sync to the player via the USB port within the glasses, an impossible feat as there is no USB port on the glasses. The third stated the need to acquire the glasses’ IP address to sync with the Blu-ray player. There is no IP address for 3D glasses; they have no connectivity to the Internet or network. The Samsung battery powered glasses “sync” to the 3D content wirelessly via an infra-red pulse emitted by the TV.
We contacted Best Buy’s media relations department and asked why the company offers a fictional service. We are still awaiting a response.
via HDGURU.Com » Best Buy Offers Bogus 3D Sync Service.
Update: 3/23/2010: Best Buy has responded with what exactly this “3D Sync” service is:
We have some customers who aren’t quite sure how the 3D glasses work, or that the glasses automatically sync with their new 3D TVs. So we wanted to convey that they can depend on Geek Squad to answer their questions during installation and set-up. There is no additional charge for this – and the Geek Squad 3D installation and networking services are included in the total price of this offer.
So… Basically it’s a nothing service that exists merely to make the masses feel better when buying 3D TV’s and don’t know any better.
The online magazine Mint has posted a new interactive infographic called The Employment Situation in Perspective. I applaud the fact that they included information about the employed, unemployed, and those not in the labor force.
The problem begins with the use of a stacked chart. The problem with stacked charts is that it is difficult to how things are varying with time. For example, can you tell that the civilian labor force has held relatively stable at 153.17 million people? It has varied by plus or minus one percent over the last two years. Can you tell if there were more unemployed in January 2009? 2010?
You can find out more about the job losses and the unemployment rate in our articles: American Idle – Part 1, American Idle – Part 2, and American Idle – Part 3, as well as Correlation does not imply Causation.
By any measure, the unemployment rate is on the rise. But exactly how bad is the problem and what are the implications for the broader economy? To put things in perspective, we need to consider how the unemployment rate is calculated, who is considered employed and who isn’t. Many claim the official rate is flawed and presents an optimistic picture that doesn’t truly reflect reality. Other quoted statistics measuring job loss can be deceptive if selective time periods are used. In our latest infographic we have taken a broad view of the American workforce over the last five years showing the various employment conditions and how each is categorized.
via The Unemployment Situation in Perspective | MintLife Blog | Personal Finance News & Advice.
Nvidia has just announced the release of version 3.0 of the CUDA toolkit. One of the new features for this release is, of course, that it supports the new Fermi chip that is slated to be released real soon now. Other features include support for ECC memory, and optimized double precision support.
There’s been a lot of anticipation about how the Fermi architecture can help accelerate research. The release of the 3.0 toolkit means that the scientific community is a step closer to realizing some of these performance gains. We talked to Professor Richard Brower, U.S. Software Coordinator for USQCD, Boston University Physics and Electrical Engineering Departments, about what the new toolkit means for his research in quantum chromodynamics (QCD), an area of particle physics.
“QCD codes need all the compute cycles they can get and we’re really excited about the results we’re getting by using GPUs – we’ve already reduced the cost of our calculations by a factor of 5,” Professor Bower said, adding that features in the new CUDA Toolkit that are essential for high performance computing – like GPU acceleration for more complex linear algebra routines – are going to help advance his QCD research.
The new toolkit lets developers take advantage of innovations in the Fermi architecture that make these new GPUs exceptionally well suited for scientific applications.
Some of the new features include:
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