VizWorld.com

Earlier this week, you could have thought Britain’s Sky TV was single-handedly funding the 3D Television movement thanks to a new press release from LG touting a massive sale of 15,000 3D television sets they plan to deploy across the UK to promote their new 3D content.  You may remember the lackluster reception they got from their last attempt, and it looks like they’ve learned their lesson and will have more venues (many more) to hit a wider audience.

“LG wants to enable more customers to experience 3D TV technology in action,” said Havis Kwon, Executive Vice President and head of the LCD division of LG. “Watching live 3D sports broadcasts in public areas brings fans as close to the game as possible without having to step into the stadium. These partnerships will help consumers become more familiar with 3D TVs and that can only be a positive for the industry and innovation.”

Well, LG has backpedaled a bit on that and released a new statement saying that’s not really what is happening.

Today, however, LG said that figure was “inaccurate”. Sky, it said, isn’t buying a warehouse full of 3D TVs, after all. Instead, it is “helping support its commercial customers purchase TVs direct from a UK third party”.

In other words, it’s working with pubs to encourage them to buy 3D TVs. Not to mention the dozens of pairs of 3D glasses they’ll need to allow boozers to enjoy three-dimensional soccer action over a pint or two.

I gotta admin, that makes more sense.  I doubt many pubs will take them up on it, unless Sky offers some huge discounts or reimbursements to make it happen.  I think they’ld have more luck if they moved beyond ‘commercial customers’ and into mainstream, offering all of their customers big discounts after agreeing to a 2-year contract (think Cell-phone subsidies).

via 뉴스와이어 – LG Electronics Leads Live Sports 3D Broadcasts With Major Media Partnerships.

Hardware 3d, lg, sky, stereoscopic

Visual Economics has posted an infographic on nations with the most Olympic medals. Canada won big at the recent Olympics, taking home 14 Gold medals. In the overall medal count, the United States dominated by winning 37 medals. Over all the Winter Olympics, it is Norway that is the huge winner. They have won more Gold, Silver, Bronze, and hence more medals, than any other country.

via Nations With The Most Olympic Medals |.

Graphics infographic

Some days it seems like all we do is publish news from the green camp called Nvidia. Since today is St. Patrick’s Day, I guess that is allowed. Anyway, rumors are that the retail release date for the GTX 480 and the GTX 470 has been delayed from March 29th to April 6th. Why did Nvidia change the date? No one seems to know for sure. However, the author at the link below has the following ideas:

This morning we heard that NVIDIA had changed the strategy for sending samples; instead of partners sending them out NVIDIA are taking charge and sending out themselves. We’re not 100% sure why they’re doing this but it could be because NVIDIA doesn’t want any leaks on the results until the 26th. … Holding cards back from its partners though until launch means that it’s going to take a little longer for the cards to hit retail.

At least we will get to see benchmarks on March 26th. Meanwhile Nvidia released the following announcement:

NVIDIA and our launch partners have not released pricing or pre-order information yet. Any Web sites claiming to be taking pre-orders should not be considered legitimate.

via : GTX 400 Series; Date pushed back | shanebaxtor.com

Hardware fermi, gt100, gtx480, nvidia

Later this month at the Orlando Hilton, the giants of Military, Defense, and Video games will meet for the GameTech 2010 conference to discuss ways to combine virtual worlds and video game technology to military training and safety.

GameTech is a unique user-focused conference dealing with gaming technologies that enhance warfighter training. The conference program is final and includes experts from Government, Academia, and Industry that will discuss the current state of gaming and virtual world technologies.

Nice roster of speakers too:

• General John Mattis, Commander of Joint Forces Command
• Mr. Will Wright, Creator of The Sims, SimCity, and Spore
• Major General (Sel) Melvin Spiese, Commander, USMC Training and Education Command
• Mr. Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium

Registration ranges from $150 – $400, or attend the conference virtually in Second Life for free!

via Gametech 2010.

Science conference, gametech, government, military, video game, virtual worlds

On January 12, 2010, Haiti experienced a 7.0 earthquake that killed 230,000 people. On February 27, 2010, Chile experienced a 8.8 earthquake that killed 279 people. The number of people killed in Haiti was three orders of magnitude more than those in Chile, despite Chile having a stronger earthquake. The on-line magazine Good has published an infographic comparing the Haitian and Chile earthquakes, and looks into this question.

In the span of two months, two massive earthquakes struck in Haiti and Chile. But while the temblor in Chile registered much higher on the Richter scale, the loss of life and damage in Haiti was far more severe. Why is that?

via Transparency: The Difference Between the Chile and Haiti Earthquakes – Transparency – GOOD.

Graphics infographic

io9 just pointed me to this fantastic Periodic Table of Science Fiction ideas from Kris Straub.

Overall, I think you’ll find the table more inclusive of your faves than not. Illustrator Kris Straub of Starslip and Chainsawsuit designed this graphic which offers elements for everything from Spc(1999) to DS9 on the table. I’m just stoked that they included Chln(of Men) on the Metallcrichtonide chart, and TW(elve Monkeys) in the Cameronkubriclarkine groups. And it’s only fitting that Lgn(Logan’s Run) and Du(ne) are on the “inert” section.

Some great stuff in there ranging from the organization by “Class” (Roddenlucathine and Cameronkubriclarkine, based on the original authors, writers, and directors), type of show (the entire left column is Star Trek ranging from The Original Series to the Abrams Reboot), and time (low-numbered elements are ready shows like Buck Rogers and Star Trek original, while higher-numbered elements are new entries like Indiana Jones & the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull).  Even some of the formulas are shown such as “2Ol + Dr = Torchwood” (2 parts Outer Limits, one part Doctor Who).

What do you think, did they leave anything out?  You can buy the poster in 2 different sizes over at TopataCo.

io9 via technabob

Science infographic, periodictable

Microsoft and NVidia are making a big news splash today with the demonstration and announcement of the upcoming Internet Explorer 9, which features GPGPU acceleration in the rendering engines.

Internet Explorer 9 includes a new JavaScript engine, support for HTML5 and hardware accelerated graphics and text. Internet Explorer 9 is the first browser designed to take advantage of modern hardware, resulting in graphics and performance improvements throughout the browser including the first to deliver hardware accelerated scalable vector graphics( SVG); the first to enhance JavaScript engine performance with the benefit of shifting from the CPU to the GPU; and the first to deliver GPU-Powered HTML5.

I’m excited to see just how much they can offload to the GPU, but I have to really wonder if GPGPU browsers are doing the open-nature of the internet a disservice.  What will happen with websites start flashing “Sorry, you must have an NVidia GeForce 480GTX or better to view this page” the way they do for Flash and Java now?

NVidia’s press release makes a few other claims that I’ld like to put out for discussion/debate:

• “Microsoft has always been a leader in visual computing.”
• “They were the first to make a visual computing application everyone would use when they released Windows Vista.” – Video Encoders?  Photoshop?
• ” This was the first time an operating system was accelerated by a GPU.” – Hasn’t OSX had GPU acceleration for longer?  Linux? Irix (for those old enough to remember Irix)?

Discuss it in the comments.

via nTersect Blog – Visual Computing Has Another Killer App.

Graphics gpgpu, microsoft, nvidia

BOXX technologies has just made a leap in compute density with their new “renderBOXX 10400″ system that features Intel’s Xeon 5600 6-core processor.

Previous generation 10300 five-module render farms featured 80 processing cores in a 4 rack unit space. The new 10400 increases the amount to 120 cores in that same space. renderBOXX 10400 also carries the distinction of being the first dedicated rendering solution to feature solid state drives for increased R/W performance, greater efficiency, and stability. In terms of throughput, the 24 core renderBOXX delivers an astonishing 222 MB per second.

So now you can pack 120 cores in a 4U space, or 1200 in a 42U rack, with a bit of space left over.  From the specs they show, I believe this is a small 4-processor box (4 processors * 6 cores = 24 cores) that you can pack 5 into a 4U space (similar to a blade design), making 5 boxes * 24 cores = 120 cores in a 4U space.   Their website seems a bit slow at the moment, so you can view the Spec Sheet here (download PDF).

via New BOXX Rendering System Features Six Core Processors and Solid State Drives.

Hardware boxx

Adrian Lark has produced a 3-D animation of a flight over Mars. The animation was produced from data from the Mars Explorer, and is displayed in real time. That means that there was no overnight rendering that had to be performed to produce this video. Now that is impressive.

This is an animation flying over southwest Candor Chasma on Mars. It was created from NASA’s HiRISE DTM and image data. The spatial resolution is 1 meter for the altimetry data and 0.25 meters for the image data. There is no vertical exaggeration. The animation was created using Mars Explorer and was captured in real time.

Be sure to check out some of the other fun renderings based on the HiRISE data as well.

via : The Planetary Society Blog

Science astronomy, mars, nasa

The announcement of James Cameron’s Avatar includes a not-so subtle continuation of the movie’s “be nice to nature” message in the form of the release date: April 22nd, Earth Day.

The story of an ex-Marine who comes to befriend the indigenous population of a distant planet being mined of its natural resources by an aggressive corporation from Earth, “Avatar” stars Sam Worthington, Zoë Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, Giovanni Ribisi, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Wes Studi and Laz Alonso.

Of course, no pricing or details are available yet but you can hit Amazon and sign up for notification when the BluRay or DVD are available for pre-order.

‘Avatar’ Gets Earth Day Video Release – @ The Movies News Story – WJXT Jacksonville.

Graphics avatar, bluray, dvd, movie