Visualization company ‘ezViz’ has just announced a bair of new BI products called ezViz RealTime and ezViz Office. Working with input data from Excel spreadsheets, they are designed to provide easy visual interactive and analysis tools to users directly within Excel’s familiar environment.
Brian O’Keefe, President of ezViz, stated, ” ezViz was created to fill a void in the BI market by connecting users to their data and by removing typical BI barriers to entry – high costs, steep learning curves and IT reliance. With ezViz, users can buy, download, install and analyze data in minutes. Implementing ezViz software doesn’t require IT or procurement involvement and data does not need to be ‘prepped’ by power users or SQL experts beforehand.
As far as BI software goes, this is probably the most reasonably priced I’ve seen, with prices from $79 – $149 for a single license, with a free trial. Although, the name does make me chuckle.
The RTT Excite conference, sponsored by Fujitsu, is only 10 days away in Munich. Over the last 10 years, the conference has gathered visualization experts around the world to discuss realtime 3d visualization and rendering, and this one is no exception.
We have now combined the success and experiences from the past few years into a new concept. With RTT Excite, we intend to blur the boundaries between presenters and visitors and provide you with an exciting venue to experience different worlds first hand.
I don’t think anyone saw ‘Clash of the Titans’ and left amazed at the stellar quality of the 3D effect. Added completely post-shooting, in somewhat of a rush, most people complained that it was flat and migraine inducing. However, the movie was a box-office success that has convinced the studios that it works, and they’re going to repeat the process for ‘The Last Airbender’, but maintain the July 2nd release date (which means they have 2 months).
Though Clash of the Titans was successful, there was criticism that the conversion to 3D was flat. Tests of Airbender convinced the producers it looks good. Industrial Light and Magic’s Visual Effects Supervisor, Pablo Hellman, told ComingSoon.net that Shyamalan’s way of shooting without fast edits and the film’s visuals could lend itself to the conversion to 3D well.
A Gamma-ray burst (GRB) is a flash a gamma rays that are thought to be either the merging of two neutron stars, or the death of a massive star into a black hole. Long gamma-ray bursts, which are those that last over 2 seconds, are thought to be the result of a core-collapse supernova. Short gamma-ray bursts, which are those that last less than 2 seconds, are hypothesized to be the result of a binary neutron stars merging. NASA’s Swift spacecraft was launched on November 20th, 2004. Its mission was to observe 200 gamma ray bursts. It has now seen over 500 of them.
In its first five years in orbit, NASA’s Swift satellite has given astronomers more than they could have hoped for. Its discoveries range from a nearby nascent supernova to a blast so far away that it happened when our universe was only 5 percent of its present age.
Swift primarily studies gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) — the biggest and most mysterious explosions in the cosmos. On April 13, the spacecraft’s “burst-o-meter” cataloged its 500th GRB.
CryTek has published the details of the new CryENGINE 3.1 SDK, and it’s a massive live of new features and tools. They’ve added some of what they showed at GDC2010 like the Shader Editor and new profiling tools, but also added new features like procedural deformation, irradiance volumes, physics simulations, light propagation volumes, HDR support, and more.
CryENGINE 3.1’s Blend Shader eradicates tiling of identical materials throughout games, without the need for large texture sets. A new Visual Budget System lets developers maximize performance and quality in their games, in real-time. Upgrades to the incorporated CryENGINE 3 Asset Browser ensure increased development speed for all designers and artists using CryENGINE Sandbox. Work has also been done to give directors and animators more control over their creations. The cut-scene and cinematic tool, TrackView, has been given a major overhaul, while the introduction of AnimGraph 1.5 not only facilitates access to parameters and blending values, but also features new tools that smoothly integrate animations with audio, particles, game events and effects.
NewMediaWebinars.com has recently released a new episode of The Digital Scene. The different episodes of this show cover what happens at all the major conferences. In this episode, they focus on using Nvidia technology for 3-D web videos.
NVIDIA shows us how their technology speeds up 3D encoding (on the server side) and 3D decoding (on the client side) for stereoscopic web videos.
The Carina Nebula, also known as NGC 3372, is an Emission Nebula in the Milky Way. This nebula is four times larger than the Orion nebula. It is located between between 6,500 and 10,000 light years from Earth. However, it is found in the night skies of the southern hemisphere. The Hubble Telescope’s 423 million pixel image of this nebula has been displayed on the TACC Tiled Display.
Today, in celebration of 20 years of Hubble, NASA has released a new image of the Carina Nebula. In the picture you can see what appears to be a tower of hydrogen and dust rise out of the nebula. This tower, however, is three light years tall.
The best recognised, longest-lived and most prolific space observatory zooms past a milestone of 20 years of operation. On 24 April 1990, the Space Shuttle and crew of STS-31 were launched to deploy the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope into a low-Earth orbit. What followed was one of the most remarkable sagas of the space age.
Indiana University just won the Internet2 Driving Exemplary Applications (IDEA) award for their “Worldview” networking monitoring and visualization tool. The tool monitors over 3,300 interconnects between 1,700 switching devices across various networks, and provides a highly sophisticated multi-touch visualization interface to analyze the data.
Wheeler said users have already imagined numerous ideas for other applications and additional data layers. For instance, Worldview can be used to track the impact of the nation's broadband stimulus projects, overlaying collected census block data to show unserved and underserved areas and how those areas change over time as broadband becomes more pervasive.
Fans of Edward Tufte are familiar with his criticisms of “Chart Junk”, all the extra pretty or frilly stuff that has almost nothing to do with the data but serves to catch the eye and fill blank space. Robert Kosara points us to a paper (View Online) by Scott Batement and others from the University of Saskatchewan that shows the “chart junk” may be useful in activating neural pathways improving recall, while not actually contributing to the information.
The study consisted of two possible recall tasks, one five minutes after being shown the charts, and one two to three weeks later. The authors found that in both cases, participants had a significantly higher chance of getting the message of the chart in the case of the highly embellished Holmes-style chart. And while there were no significant differences in recalling the subject, categories, and trend between the two chart types after five minutes, all three were significantly better for Holmes-style charts in the long-term case.
“Representation and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers … . The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.”
– Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution of the United States
Every 10 years, the United States Constitution mandates a head count of every American. This enumeration is important because it is used to determine how many seats in the House of Representatives each state will receive. It can also mean billions of more dollars for one state over another. VisualEconomics has published an infographic on the United States census.
The US Census does a lot more than just count population. Here’s a breakdown of what it does and its progress through the years.
Visualization company ‘ezViz’ has just announced a bair of new BI products called ezViz RealTime and ezViz Office. Working with input data from Excel spreadsheets, they are designed to provide easy visual interactive and analysis tools to users directly within Excel’s familiar environment.
The RTT Excite conference, sponsored by Fujitsu, is only 10 days away in Munich. Over the last 10 years, the conference has gathered visualization experts around the world to discuss realtime 3d visualization and rendering, and this one is no exception.
I don’t think anyone saw ‘Clash of the Titans’ and left amazed at the stellar quality of the 3D effect. Added completely post-shooting, in somewhat of a rush, most people complained that it was flat and migraine inducing. However, the movie was a box-office success that has convinced the studios that it works, and they’re going to repeat the process for ‘The Last Airbender’, but maintain the July 2nd release date (which means they have 2 months).
CryTek has published the details of the new CryENGINE 3.1 SDK, and it’s a massive live of new features and tools. They’ve added some of what they showed at GDC2010 like the Shader Editor and new profiling tools, but also added new features like procedural deformation, irradiance volumes, physics simulations, light propagation volumes, HDR support, and more.
Fans of Edward Tufte are familiar with his criticisms of “Chart Junk”, all the extra pretty or frilly stuff that has almost nothing to do with the data but serves to catch the eye and fill blank space. Robert Kosara points us to a 
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