While several companies are now selling stereoscopic televisions a BluRay players, there is still an incredible vacuum of 3D content to view on them. Gamasutra talks to Microsoft’s Habib Zargarpour about Stereoscopic 3D in the home and he reveals that he believes the gaming industry will be critical in pushing stereoscopic 3d to the forefront of television.
In fact the 3D veteran hopes that games may be the killer app that helps 3D take hold in the home. “People aren t going to buy those TVs unless there s stuff to do with it” he said. While Blu-Ray 3D may be somewhat interesting playing major interactive games in stereoscopic 3D will be a lot more tempting for consumers he added.
The UK just wrapped up a huge election for numerous positions, and the BBC celebrates the event with a visual history of the Swingometer which has been used to visualize and predict elections for the last 50 years.
Made famous by Robert McKenzie, they show the various mechanical and cardboard constructions through the more recent computerized and online versions, complete with detailed photographs of each.
GE has created an interactive infographic tool that shows you the power consumption of various home appliances and allows you to enable/disable the various appliances to compute a rough estimate of your own power consumption.
In the United States, over 20% of our total energy consumption is residential. In fact, in the United States, we are the 7th largest per capita consumer of residential energy. Where is all of that energy going? Are you living with a “gas-guzzler”? Explore the application below to understand more about how we consume energy in our homes. Blue stars indicate ENERGY STAR models are available. Click on the green stars to find out how quickly an ENERGY STAR appliance can pay for itself.
A surprising amount of information in a small space, and kinda fun to play with. My favorite part is to select “What does 1 Kilowatt hour yield” at the top, and then see the number of loads washed, messages recorded, or pages printed of the various appliances. FYI: 1 Kilowatt Hour records 60,000 Answering Machine Messages, and operates a wireless router for 6 days.
Last month, e-on software released Vue8.5 and offered up a pre-release version of their new Infinite & xStream products to lucky maintenance subscribers. Now they finally offer it up for everyone to check out.
Vue xStream and Vue Infinite are the company’s flagship solutions for the creation of natural 3D environments. While Vue Infinite is a standalone application, Vue xStream operates seamlessly inside 3ds Max, Maya, Softimage, LightWave and Cinema4D. Specifically designed for graphics professionals, these products combine a multitude of cutting edge features that easily integrate into existing production pipelines.
xStream is available for $1495, while Infinite goes for $895.
Back in January we brought you news of AMD demonstrating their External Graphics Platform (XGP) on a Laptop driving 3 monitors with the special external adapter. The promise is that you’ll be able to upgrade your laptop video card as easy as a desktop’s (although externally), and then be able to drive all those 30″ displays on your desk. While demonstrated in the Acer Ferrari One, and the port remains available in that model, Acer has failed to bring it to any other technology. When asked why, Acer was rather unimpressed:
However, in response to TechRadar’s probings about a release date Acer responded with a less than flattering description of XGP, even though it has already used the port part of the technology in its Ferrari laptop.
“Acer is interested in this solution, but at the moment it doesn’t offer the best user experience,” said a spokesman for the company.
Personally, I’m curious if they were initially interested but then news of NVidia’s Optimus came out and showed how much better it could be done internally. I still think the possibility of an external adapter shows promise (so does NVidia), but we’ll have to wait for the industry to bring it to us.
Yesterday we posted a static picture of Galaxy Cluster Abell 315. As fascinating as that was, today we bring you a video which zooms into the cluster.
A new wide-field image released on May 5, 2010 by ESO displays many thousands of distant galaxies, and more particularly a large group belonging to the massive galaxy cluster known as Abell 315. As crowded as it may appear, this assembly of galaxies is only the proverbial “tip of the iceberg,” as Abell 315 — like most galaxy clusters — is dominated by dark matter. The huge mass of this cluster deflects light from background galaxies, distorting their observed shapes slightly.
Bruce Beresford’s “Mao’s Last Dancer” tells the story of a poor Chinese boy who becomes a member of a top American ballet troupe, and used Rising Sun Pictures (RSP) to add some extra pop and effects to a few scenes. In a talk with FXGuide, visual effects supervisor Tim Crosbie talks about how they build some of the more complex scenes and gets into a laundry list of little annoyances they had to add along the way.
There’s also a sequence at the end of the film where the audience throws streamers at the stage. When they shot it, the scene didn’t quite have the big impact they were after. So we built a bunch of CG streamers to go along with a set of practical streamers shot against black and added them into the shots. In a train shot, there were some young kids staring out of the train that was shot without glass, so we added VFX glass. Another shot with a steam train coming from middle distance to screen camera left involved a mix of three plates and getting the steam from one to another, which was pretty tricky. In the Chinese Embassy there was an exit sign we had to take out because it had English writing on it. There were also some exterior shots of an open air theatre that needed a little work, mostly colour correction and a little roto/paint work. One of these shots had a PA walking into the scene while on a mobile phone, would have been fine if he hadn’t been on the phone but seeing as this is just before the 80s we removed it.
LearningFundamentals has an impressive collection of 11 Mind Maps showing how you can impact Climate Change. Covering Health, Chemistry, Behavioral, and Scientific facts about Climate change, as well as the various impacts it could have on our environment, they are impressive to check out, if not a bit Simplistic.
Targeted at Teachers and Educators, the maps are available online in full resolution, although they do request a donation for the effort required to create them.
The European Southern Observatory (ESO) used a 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile to take this image of thousands of galaxies. They used a wide-field shot, which covers an area of the sky that is approximately the size of a full moon. In some of the galaxies, one can discern the spiral arms or elliptical halos. These galaxies are thought to be closer to Earth. Some of the galaxies are indistinct blobs. These galaxies are thought to be farther away from Earth.
Beginning in the centre of the image and extending below and to the left, a concentration of about a hundred yellowish galaxies identifies a massive galaxy cluster, designated with the number 315 in the catalogue compiled by the American astronomer George Abell in 1958 [1]. The cluster is located between the faint, red and blue galaxies and the Earth, about two billion light-years away from us. It lies in the constellation of Cetus (the Whale).
and what about those red, green, and blue streaks?
The blue, green or red tracks indicate that each asteroid has been detected through one of the three filters, respectively. Each track is composed of several, smaller sub-tracks, reflecting the sequence of several exposures performed in each of the filters; from the length of these sub-tracks, the distance to the asteroid can be calculated.
Haven’t heard much from Gaikai lately, but one of their head honcho’s (David Perry) posted a picture on his blog showing Blizzard’s “World of Warcraft” running on his new iPad via Gaikai. Some doubters question its authenticity:
While the screenshot is amazing, there are doubts to its credibility since iPad’s browser doesn’t support Flash. Unfortunately no video of the game in action was provided. However, the concept surrounding Gaikai, and the implications for browser-based games that are graphically intensive like World of Warcraft are fascinating.
The obvious answer is that it’s not in the browser, but Gaikai has developed an iPad App for just this use. If so, it really could make the iPad a popular tool for gaming (if they can overcome the typical requirements of external keyboards, mice, and controllers).
While several companies are now selling stereoscopic televisions a BluRay players, there is still an incredible vacuum of 3D content to view on them. Gamasutra talks to Microsoft’s Habib Zargarpour about Stereoscopic 3D in the home and he reveals that he believes the gaming industry will be critical in pushing stereoscopic 3d to the forefront of television.
The UK just wrapped up a huge election for numerous positions, and the BBC celebrates the event with a visual history of the Swingometer which has been used to visualize and predict elections for the last 50 years.
GE has created an interactive infographic tool that shows you the power consumption of various home appliances and allows you to enable/disable the various appliances to compute a rough estimate of your own power consumption.
Last month,
Back in January we brought you news of 
Bruce Beresford’s “Mao’s Last Dancer” tells the story of a poor Chinese boy who becomes a member of a top American ballet troupe, and used Rising Sun Pictures (RSP) to add some extra pop and effects to a few scenes. In a talk with FXGuide, visual effects supervisor Tim Crosbie talks about how they build some of the more complex scenes and gets into a laundry list of little annoyances they had to add along the way.
LearningFundamentals has an impressive collection of 11 Mind Maps showing how you can impact Climate Change. Covering Health, Chemistry, Behavioral, and Scientific facts about Climate change, as well as the various impacts it could have on our environment, they are impressive to check out, if not a bit Simplistic.
VizWorld.com 
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