The Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center has an interesting new rehabilitation project in Second Life’s virtual world called “AVESS” (Amputee Virtual Environment Support Space). Soldiers abroad who find themselves an amputee typically spend weeks or months in rehab afterwards, away from their friends and family back home. Then when they do return home, they find themselves isolated from their support system of therapists, psychologists, and friends. The in-world AVESS attempts to allow these soldiers to interact with their family Virtually, and then attend presentations and group activities inworld once they return home.
When wounded warriors return home, they face long term care and recovery, often isolated from their family.
TATRC is now developing the Amputee Virtual Environment Support Space on the Second Life Enterprise platform as a virtual clinic where amputees, their families and healthcare providers connect to supplement care and improve the quality of life of patients.
Currently available inworld as a test proof-of-concept, DOD requirements will put the official version in the SL Enterprise space (behind DOD firewalls and security controls). Overall, it looks amazing and powerful, if it catches on.
The newest issue of Playboy has centerfold Hope Dworaczyk in Anaglyphic stereo glory 3D. This is an attempt by owner Hugh Hefner to reclaim some falling circulation with a “clever trick” to garner new viewers. As Hef puts it, “What would people most like to see in 3-D? Probably a Naked Lady”.
“This particular picture is one example of how books and magazines are different (than computer images),” Hefner added. “You can hold it in your hands, save them, and as Dad used to, put them under the mattress.”
Sadly, Hef is either showing his age or showing his ignorance by picking the single least flattering 3D technology out there: Anaglyphic Red/Cyan. Why he didn’t pick something that would preserve some of the colors and skin tones, or possibly go Augmented Reality and link it with web video, I guess we’ll never know.
No doubt a movie about an invincible flying suit of armor would contain a lot of CG effects, but perhaps not as many as you think. Iron Man 2 contains numerous FX shots, but some of the armor Tony Stark wears is physically fabricated with the assistance of an Objet printer.
For the sequel, Legacy Effects scanned actor Robert Downey Jr.’s hands to create flexible gauntlets no thicker than a dime, which stand in marked contrast to the gloves in the original Iron Man, which were clunky and difficult to maneuver. “He was thrilled with the change and happy to work in them for hours,” notes Objet in a press release.
Many people think visualization is limited to basic pie charts, line graphs, and bar graphs, without knowing the wealth of alternatives that exist. Over at the ACM Queue, an article showcases the “Zoo of Visualization” with some of the more exotic techniques.
In many situations, simple data graphics will not only suffice, they may also be preferable. Here we focus on a few of the more sophisticated and unusual techniques that deal with complex data sets. After all, you don't go to the zoo to see Chihuahuas and raccoons; you go to admire the majestic polar bear, the graceful zebra, and the terrifying Sumatran tiger. Analogously, we cover some of the more exotic (but practically useful!) forms of visual data representation, starting with one of the most common, time-series data; continuing on to statistical data and maps; and then completing the tour with hierarchies and networks. Along the way, bear in mind that all visualizations share a common “DNA”—a set of mappings between data properties and visual attributes such as position, size, shape, and color—and that customized species of visualization might always be constructed by varying these encodings.
All of their techniques are accompanied by a static image and an interactive example developed in ProtoVis, complete with source code for you to peruse and try yourself.
We told you earlier that the Nvidia’s driver for 3D Vision Surround for the GeForce GTX 400 series of graphics cards will be ready by the end of June. Tom Petersen, on his 3D Vision blog, talks about four new games that are coming out that will be good candidates for being 3D Vision-ready. Not that it is official or anything. After all, it is kind of hard to make it official when there are no official drivers from Nvidia. Right?
… this is about to change, because it the next two months we are going to have 4 major games available and all of these would benefit a lot from good stereo 3D compatibility, so I would watch for thee titles. Of course they are not officially 3D Vision-ready or anything to give us hints about good stereo 3D compatibility, so we’ll have to wait a bit more and try them out. I also went back to look for some interesting titles in the last few years, so you can expect about that very that soon, but now lets get back to the upcoming interesting games…
When will Nvidia release their 3D Vision Surround for the GeForce GTX 400 series of graphics cards? According to a post on the Nvidia nTersect blog, they are planning to release the new drivers at the end of June. At that point in time, will provide a list of games that support it, as well as guidance on how to get the best results using 3D Vision Surround. Personally, I am very curious to see how it will turn out. I can think of several things that might ruin the experience (much like the bezels do with ATI’s Eyefinity6). But I remain hopeful.
The fact is we are not ready yet – the surround driver needs some final improvements. When we first showed this technology live at CES in January, we expected this to become available with the first release of our 256 branch driver which was then targeted for April. Our new target for 3D Vision Surround is the end of June in a follow-on release of this 256 driver branch. Our first 256 based driver is planned to post to nvidia.com on May 24th and will enable new SLI setup controls and improve performance on several key applications for GTX 400 GPUs.
Yucca Mountain lies approximately 80 miles northwest of the Las Vegas, Nevada. This mountain was the proposed site for long term storage of nuclear waste in the United States. US Infrastructure has published an infographic about Yucca Mountain.
Earlier in the year, plans to store America’s nuclear waste inside one of America’s most challenging engineering feats, Yucca Mountain, were scrapped due to a lack of federal funding.
The Yucca Mountain project, located in Nevada near the nuclear test sites, had been underway since 1987, when Congress had selected the site as America’s nuclear waste repository. To ensure the waste was safely stored, over $9 billion was spent on concrete tunnels and chambers designed to keep waste safe for at least a million years.
If you check out the UMass Amherst page for Professor Blair Perot, you’ll find several interesting little programs that are part of the Fluid Dynamics lab.
The Theoretical and Computational Fluid Dynamics Laboratory is dedicated to the development of practical and generally applicable tools for the prediction of complex and often chaotic fluid flows.
Research at the Lab is focused on the entire CFD food chain from hardware and software to algorithms and turbulence models. Understanding in detail how the computational, mathematical, and physical problems of CFD interact is the key to designing lasting CFD solutions.
He has an interesting collection of little programs. Things like a simple 2D fluid solver called “StirCrazy” and a 3D fluid program called “PollenSeed”, but all of them make use of GPU acceleration to make them interactive.
Samuel Anjam has created a new 3D Gaming Engine he calls “BlendELF” has part of a student project, and so far the results are pretty impressive. Supporting skeletal animation, LUA, C++ and .NET API’s, some advanced lighting effects and much more, it’s a pretty impressive demonstration that runs on both Windows and Linux.
BlendELF is a game engine written by me, Samuel Anjam, an IT student at the University of Jyväskylä. I am coding the engine as my portfolio project, as a proof of my skills in 3d graphics and game logics/systems coding. I release this engine under the assumption that it could be useful for other people in making prototypes, games and virtual realities.
If you use Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE for development and write any shader code (GLSL, HLSL, CG, etc) then you definitely should check out NShader. It’s a free addon that adds syntax highlight for those languages, making Visual Studio a much more fully functional IDE for those who work in shader languages. It does have a few limitations:
The CG syntax highlighter is using the same HLSL syntax highlighter (they have similar keywords).
No syntax analyzing and checking. NShader only use a basic tokenizer to extract keywords. Future versions may include syntax analyser.
No braces/bracket matching
No completion
No formatting
But given how poor Visual Studio’s existing support is, it’s a huge benefit.
If you use Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE for development and write any shader code (GLSL, HLSL, CG, etc) then you definitely should check out NShader. It’s a free addon that adds syntax highlight for those languages, making Visual Studio a much more fully functional IDE for those who work in shader languages. It does have a few limitations:
VizWorld.com 
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