DirectX 11 Tessellation Comparison Video
11:00 am
EVGA whipped up a nice DirectX 11 Tessellation video which shows off the new visual enhancements you can expect on the latest GTX 480/470 cards from EVGA!
How Much Do Music Artists Earn Online?
10:00 am
If you think you have it bad, imagine making only $0.00043 cents per song you make. Your song would have to be played over 23 times just to make a penny, and over 2,325 times just to make a dollar. Then you could go buy something off the cheap menu at McDonalds.
Recently, the UK government passed The Digital Economy Act which included many, perhaps draconian, measures to combat online music piracy (including withdrawing broadband access for persistent pirates).
Much was proclaimed about how these new laws would protect musicians and artists revenue and livelihoods.
But how much money do musicians really get paid in this new digital marketplace?
via How Much Do Music Artists Earn Online? | Information Is Beautiful.
NAB Video: RED, Angenieux, Zacuto, Cooke Optics, and More
9:31 am
If you weren’t able to attend NAB this year, then definitely head over to StudioDaily where they’ve got dozens of short videos interviewing and demonstrating technology from RED, JVC, and many more.
Studio Daily Blog » NAB Video: RED, Angenieux, Zacuto, Cooke Optics, and More.
Resource Of The Week for 4/14/2010: Storyboarding
9:00 am
This week’s recommended resource comes from Marcie Begleiter
Never before have the means of cinematic storytelling been put into the hands of so many. Thousands of new storytellers are taking advantage of media that did not exist a decade ago. With entry-level HD recorders, even beginning students have access to low-cost, professional-quality image making. However, there’s no digital replacement for the skills needed to visualize a film and plan its execution. From Word to Image will help you master the steps of translating a written story into a sequence of moving images. This is a guidebook to creating your visual script.
New contents include:
- The Use of Color in Visual Storytelling
- New Interviews about the Use of Previsualization Techniques for Animation, New Media, and Visual Effects
- Revised and Expanded Appendices
This book, as well as many others, is available in the VizWorld Store.
Double Negative on Creating the Green Zone
8:00 am
Double Negative got the job of recreating the 2003 Iraqi invasion that search, fruitlessly, to find the Weapons of Mass Destruction Saddam had stashed away. Through frequent reporting and hindsight, the region is well known to many in the world, making the job of recreating the landscape that much more difficult.
Getting proper results meant data had to be properly collected and visualized. To accomplish this, DNeg’s FX supervisors gathered on-set information during filming, taking set measurements and extensive photographs to bring back to the artists. The order was to create over 650 shots and accurately portray the early stages of the Iraqi war, starting with the ‘Shock and Awe’ campaign.
Infographic: How Much Are You Worth to Merchants?
7:00 am
This new infographic from Permuto analyzes the relative popularity and price of various keywords in several categories to show you just how much merchants are willing to pay to get their wares in front of your eyeballs.
Keyword prices represent how merchants perceive the value of marketing to potential customers. It is essentially the value of reaching specific audiences, with prices adjusting based on competition and search volume. Below, we took a look at some of the more popular keyword categories for consumer products, as well as their search figures and average pricing.
Aside from the constant ‘blah circles’ argument, it does a decent job of presenting the relevant information (Number of advertisers, number of search queries, and the average price). I personally would like to have seen some more visual appearance of the other information (aside from price, which keywords are the “most popular”, meaning they have the most advertisers, and “least popular).
See the full-size after the break.
via Permuto Discoveries » How Much Are You Worth to Merchants?.
Inside Apple’s automatic graphics switching
5:05 pm
News is still coming out about the surprise that Apple’s switching-graphics technology is in fact not NVidia Optimus but a wholly Apple-grown technology. Ars Technica got some info from Apple about the technology on how exactly it differs, and why they consider it superior:
Apple’s approach in the new 15″ and 17″ MacBook Pros differs from Optimus in two key ways. The first is that the switching is all handled automatically by Mac OS X without any user intervention (though there is actually a System Preference to deactivate it, if you choose). Apps that use advanced graphics frameworks such as OpenGL, Core Graphics, Quartz Composer or others will cause the OS to trigger the discrete GPU. So, when you are reading or writing Mail, or editing an Excel spreadsheet, Mac OS X will simply use the integrated Intel HD graphics. If you fire up Aperture or Photoshop, Mac OS X kicks on the NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M.
The second way that it differs from Optimus is that the integrated graphics are powered down when the discrete GPU is active. This saves even more power than Optimus does, leading to a stated battery life as long as nine hours.
One interesting detail I had not thought of before is that in Optimus, when the Discrete GPU is enabled, the integrated GPU is still powered up and in fact being used, the framebuffer is simply being ignored. This means when you are using the discrete (eg. Fast) graphics, you wind up communicating to both GPU’s simultaneously, wasting (albeit a tiny amount) of power and adding a lot of extra communication to the system bus.
Earthquakes and Eruption in Iceland 2010 on Vimeo
4:00 pm
Over on Vimeo, folks at DataMarket.net have taken data published by the Icelandic Met Office and created a movie showing the earthquakes leading up to the eruption of in Eyjafjallajökull, Iceland in March 2010.
They tell me that this is just the first of many visualizations they plan to make utilizing this Icelandic Earthquake data.
We will follow up on this one in the next few days with a few more visualizations using Icelandic earthquake data, trying to explain some of the geology and consequences of the country being slowly ripped apart by tectonic plates.
Earthquakes and Eruption in Iceland 2010 from hjalli on Vimeo.
NVIDIA releases OpenGL 4.0 drivers
3:00 pm
NVidia has just released their first official OpenGL4.0 driver for Windows and Linux, and it’s WHQL-certified. I personally wouldn’t recommend installing the driver unless you plan on doing some OpenGL4.0 programming, as it doesn’t seem to offer any other impressive reasons to upgrade, and given NVidia’s recent problems with drivers I would be wary. The driver also, in classic fashion, adds a few NVidia-specific extensions:
- ARB_texture_compression_bptc
- EXT_shader_image_load_store
- EXT_vertex_attrib_64bit
- NV_vertex_attrib_integer_64bit
- NV_gpu_program5
- NV_tesssellation_program5
- NV_gpu_shader5
- NV_shader_buffer_store
You can download the driver at the OpenGL Driver Page.
Infographics: The Evolution of the Bra
2:38 pm
That greatest of all feminine undergarments, the Bra, now has a pair of infographics worthy of its stature courtesy of Suzi Slavik. The two graphics show the evolution of the bra since it’s first versions, and how the design has evolved through fittings, fabrics, and various historical milestones. Suzi was kind enough to send VizWorld an exclusive pair of high-resolution graphics of these for your viewing pleasure, along with these details:
The Evolution of the Bra is a product of an information graphics design course at the Ohio State University based on graphically representing a cycle, evolution or progression.
The first panel is devoted to social influences, industry leaders, and shifts in fashionable silhouettes. The second panel discusses historical milestones, significant fabrics used, and the bra fitting procedure.
Over 4 months of research and re-designs, I presented a micro and macro view of the modern brassiere in my own voice, illustrations, and photography. My main resources were accredited publications, particularly, Uplift: The Bra in America by Jane Farrell-Beck.
See the panels after the break.
VizWorld.com 
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