Linden Labs has announced some of the features they are working on for the Q2 release of the Second Life tools, and it has some great additions. One thing many designers have been craving is support for Mesh Import, allowing much simpler import of 3dsMax and Maya models into the world. One thing users will love is the new integration of the Havok physics engine inworld.
Server 1.40 is primarily going to roll out the Havok 7 Physics Engine. The Havok 7 engine will provide some nice performance enhancements, but the work is foundational as we look ahead into later in 2010 and 2011. Also in Server 1.40 are web services that will make the integration between the Second Life Marketplace and the inworld Second Life experience smoother than it is at the moment. We anticipate shipping Server 1.40 by summer.
Linden is careful to state that some of these may not make it, but I’m sure they wouldn’t be talking about them unless they were already fairly far along in development.
Update 1:30pm: Here’s a video of some of the Havok features:
The Tesla is a high-end product from Nvidia that is meant to serve the General Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU). Nvidia’s partners have started announcing products based on the latest version of the Tesla. For example, Supermicro has found a way to fit the Tesla M2050 – which is really just a professional version of the GeForce GTX 470 – into a 1U 19-inch rackmount chassis.
Today we saw the first of a series of launches from our partners of new products based on our new Tesla M2050 GPU Computing modules. What’s particularly exciting about these launches is that they are all server products, an important area of the Tesla business and one that’s about to take off exponentially. For the last 3 years we have seen a lot of pilot projects — in banks, in the military, in science — projects that enabled scientists and researchers to experiment with GPUs and see how they can be used to increase the pace and scope of their work.
VR Zone is reporting that Nvidia will not be launching a GeForce GTX 460 at COMPUTEX 2010. Instead it will be named the GeForce GTX 465. I am not sure why they put the “5″ in the name of the card. At any rate, the graphics card will feature 352 CUDA cores with a core clock of 607 MHz, a shader clock of 1215 MHz, and a memory clock of 1603 MHz. It will come with 1 GB of memory on a 256-bit memory interface. The estimated cost for the GeForce GTX 465 is $249. This is close to the rumors that we posted about last month.
Indeed, NVIDIA is preparing to launch the GeForce GTX 465 at COMPUTEX 2010 which is taking place from June 1st – 5th. Interestingly, we heard the current batch of GTX 465 cores are essentially GTX 470 with just some CUDA cores turned off…
The Scientific Visualization Studio at NASA’s Goddard Flight Center has released its latest visualization of the health of the cryosphere from space. Since most of the ice is in the polar regions, I wish that they had kept the visualization focused on that region instead of showing the equatorial view of Earth.
Sea ice is frozen seawater floating on the surface of the ocean. Some sea ice is semi-permanent, persisting from year to year, and some is seasonal, melting and refreezing from season to season. The sea ice cover reaches its minimum extent at the end of each summer and the remaining ice is called the perennial ice cover.
The Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer – Earth Observing System (AMSR-E) instrument on the NASA Earth Observing System (EOS) Aqua satellite, provides data mapped to a polar stereographic grid at 12.5 km spatial resolution. This satellite data can be used to monitor the health of the cryosphere from space.
Over the water, Arctic sea ice changes from day to day showing a running 3-day maximum sea ice concentration in the region where the concentration is greater than 15%. The blueish white color of the sea ice is derived from a 3-day running maximum of the AMSR-E 89 GHz brightness temperature. Over the terrain, monthly data from the seasonal Blue Marble Next Generation fades slowly from month to month. For more information about sea ice see http://nsidc.org/data/amsre or http://modis-snow-ice.gsfc.nasa.gov
Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
Graphics.com has a good excerpt from O’Reilly Media’s “Beautiful Visualization“, providing some guidance on hwo to take default boring data and make it not only beautiful but informative.
Standard formats and conventions do have their benefits: they are easy to create, familiar to most readers, and usually don’t need to be explained. Most of the time, these conventions should be respected and leveraged. However, the necessary spark of novelty is difficult to achieve when using utilitarian formats in typical ways; defaults are useful, but they are also limiting. Defaults should be set aside for a better, more powerful solution only with informed intent, rather than merely to provide variety for the sake of variety.
The Washington Post has a well-made map of the Oil spill in the Gulf, showing a surprising amount of information in a small space.
Still staggering from devastating hurricanes several years ago, residents and wildlife along the Gulf Coast are threatened again, this time from a potentially catastrophic oil spill. As shown in the map below, tourism, commerce and the coastline are all at risk.
My only complaint about the map is that it is a little light on resolution. The text is a bit difficult to read, but it’s still surprisingly well done.
If you’re still a bit uncertain about exactly what happened with Deepwater Horizon or the various options for cleanup, Al-Jazeera has a nice simple animation showing the details. In it they cover the three leaks, the robot subs, the dome, and the relief well strategy.
The Gulf of Mexico oil leak is spilling 5000 barrels of oil a day into the ocean, but just how much is 5000 barrels a day? A new infographic from Tiffany Farrant has the answers.
3.5 Barrels per minute
The Size of Jamaica
42×80 Miles
It also includes options for dealing with it, and estimated costs of it all.
3dTotal has a huge collection of 50 great character modeling tutorials online for your viewing pleasure.
Here we have a collection of 50 of the best character tutorials and making of’s specializing in everything from aliens and humanoids to fantasy and organic characters, compiled together all in one place.
This collection has tutorials relating to 3d Studio Max, Maya, Z brush, Softimage xsi, and Cinema 4d as well as many other 3d packages. Hope this collection proves useful, and keep posted for future collection’s…
XKCD recently ran an interesting web survey of its users about colors. Simply presenting a color to the user and asking them to name it. Sounds simple enough, but the results are amazing. Of course, the sampleset is a bit suspect (geeks who are already Xkcd fans) and self-selected, but the results show not only interesting trends in color perception and human vision, but in the psychology. Such as:
Colorblind people are more likely than non-colorblind people to type “fuck this” (or some variant) and quit in frustration.
Indigo was totally just added to the rainbow so it would have 7 colors and make that “ROY G. BIV” acronym work, just like you always suspected. It should really be ROY GBP, with maybe a C or T thrown in there between G and B depending on how the spectrum was converted to RGB.
You can still view the survey here, but definitely hit his website for some fascinating graphs.
Linden Labs has announced some of the features they are working on for the Q2 release of the Second Life tools, and it has some great additions. One thing many designers have been craving is support for Mesh Import, allowing much simpler import of 3dsMax and Maya models into the world. One thing users will love is the new integration of the Havok physics engine inworld.
Graphics.com has a good excerpt from O’Reilly Media’s “
The Gulf of Mexico oil leak is spilling 5000 barrels of oil a day into the ocean, but just how much is 5000 barrels a day? A new infographic from 
3dTotal has a huge collection of 50 great character modeling tutorials online for your viewing pleasure.
VizWorld.com 
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