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Over at WeatherSealed, Stephen Von Worley  took the data from the XKCD color survey and plotted it in an interesting new way that shows just how popular various names are used for various colors.

The Color Strata includes the 200 most common color names (excluding black-white-grayish tones), organized by hue horizontally and relative usage vertically, stacked by overall popularity, shaded representatively, and labeled where possible. Besides filtering spam, ignoring cruft, normalizing grey to gray, and correcting the most egregious misspellings (here’s looking at you, fuchsia), the results are otherwise unadulterated. As such, similar color names, like sea green, seafoam green, and seafoam, each appear separately. They’re synonymous… or are they?

If you think that’s neat, then definitely check out his “smoothed” version. Instant Wallpaper Classic.

via The Color Strata – Color Names, Common And Less So, Compared.

Graphics, Science color, survey

Assisted Living Facilities Costs – Assisted Living Facilities.

infographics

This article is the second in a series of wrap-ups from VizWorld reader T.J. Jankun-Kelly (@dr_tj) of the EuroVis2010 conference currently underway.  If you missed it, see Part 1.

Day of EuroVis was the first day of parallel tracks. Today, your humble scribe attended the A track, which largely focused on Information Visualization; for the impression of some of the B track, see Charl Botha’s twitter feed (@cpbotha) or the general EuroVis twitter list (via @eagereyes).

Session 3A: Graph Visualization

SmallWorlds: Visualizing Social Recommendations; Brynjar Gretarsson, John O’Donovan, Svetlin Bostandjiev, Christopher Hall, Tobias Hollerer

Gretarsson, part of the group at UCSB, presented a graph-based recommendation system integrated with the Facebook API. Unlike other recommendation systems, the system works entirely via positive recommendations (“likes”) of a limited subset of a population (a user’s friends, as opposed to all Facebook users). These limitations in comparison to other systems are addressed via visualization and interaction: Users can see which friends have similar likes, change the weight of their friend’s recommendations, and also change the weight of their own likes all based upon simple, web-based interactions. The rendering is done server-side and can be seen on the SmallWorlds Facebook App page.

See the rest of TJ’s writeup after the break.

Read more…

Science conference, eurovis, feature

Icrontic take the new ATI FirePro V8800 out for a spin against all of it’s brethren in the ATI and NVidia professional camps, and finds it worthy of praise.  In particular, they like the Eyefinity feature for 4-displays on one card.

Perhaps an even greater addition to the FirePro V8800 is support for AMD’s multiple monitor fete, Eyefinity Multi-display. The GPU supports up to four display outputs at once via the four Displayport connectors. The GPU ships with Displayport to DVI converters to increase display compatibility out of the box. Having the ability to output to an array of four displays from one GPU is a definite killer app in the busy DCC industries. To an artist, it is invaluable to have that much screen real estate.

In the picture above, see the 3 monitors and a Wacom Cintiq all running on the one card with ease.  Currently working in a lab where we’re trying to find a way to get Dual 30″ displays and a Cintiq working with NVidia cards, this is particularly appealing.

via ATI takes the workstation crown: FirePro V8800 reviewed « Icrontic Tech.

Hardware ati, benchmark

With the new flexibility of OpenGL4.0 and the Fermi architecture, Cyril Crassin decided to revisit some of the older A-Buffer algorithms and see what kind of improvements he could manage.  What is an a-buffer, you ask?

Basically an A-buffer is a simple list of fragments per pixel [Carpenter 1984]. Previous methods to implement it on DX10 generation hardware required multiple passes to capture an interesting number of fragments per pixel. They where essentially based on depth-peeling, with enhancements allowing to capture more than one layer per geometric pass, like the k-buffer, stencil routed k-buffer. Bucket sort depth peeling allows to capture up to 32 fragments per geometry pass but with only 32 bits per fragment (just a depth) and at the cost of potential collisions. All these techniques were complex and especially limited by the maximum of 8 render targets that were writable by the fragment shader.

So, he rewrote the algorithms to exploit the new capabilities.  How did it perform?

It worked pretty well since it provides something like a 1.5x speedup over the fastest previous approach (at least I know about !), with zero artifact and supporting arbitrary number of layers with a single geometry pass.

I would call that a resounding success! Find details and example code at his site.

via Icare3D Blog: Fast and Accurate Single-Pass A-Buffer using OpenGL 4.0+.

Science fermi, nvidia, opengl

Now that NVidia finally has DX11 hardware available, Microsoft has the chance to compare how well the ATI RadeonHD cards stand up to the new GTX480/470.  Specifically, they were looking for oddities in the DirectX11 implementation, and found one particularly interesting one in NVidia’s use of the “Feature Level” concept.

The ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series only provides one quality level per sample count, while the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470/480 exposes a number of fine-grain quality levels per sample count. This highlighted a few UI bugs in some of the samples as well as DXUT/DXUT11 that were corrected in the June 2010 release. Be sure to test the behavior of any MSAA settings and quality levels in your DX10.x and DX11 programs on both vendor's hardware.

The guys at Geeks3d took both cards for a spin to get the actual results from the ‘CheckMultisampleQualityLevels’ Microsoft mentions, and sees the obvious difference.

Here are the details for a GTX 480 (with R257.15 drivers – Win7 64-bit):

Direct3D 10 - Adapter 0 - Description: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480
Direct3D 10 - Adapter 0 - Dedicated video memory: 1503MB
Direct3D 10 - Adapter 0 - vendorId: 10DE, deviceId: 06C0, revision: 00A3
Direct3D 10 - MSAA 2X supported with 3 quality levels
Direct3D 10 - MSAA 4X supported with 17 quality levels
Direct3D 10 - MSAA 8X supported with 33 quality levels

And here are the details for a HD 5870 (with Catalyst 10.5 – Win7 64-bit):

Direct3D 10 - Adapter 0 - Description: ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series
Direct3D 10 - Adapter 0 - Dedicated video memory: 1014MB
Direct3D 10 - Adapter 0 - vendorId: 1002, deviceId: 6898, revision: 0000
Direct3D 10 - MSAA 2X supported with 1 quality levels
Direct3D 10 - MSAA 4X supported with 1 quality levels
Direct3D 10 - MSAA 8X supported with 1 quality levels

via DirectX 11 Hardware Vendor Differences – Games for Windows and the DirectX SDK – Site Home – MSDN Blogs.

Hardware ati, directx, directx11, microsoft, nvidia

Fine-Tuning the Beautiful Game.

infographics sports

At the end of May, CGTantra hosted the 2010 CGTantra Community Awards, where they honor the best of the community computer graphics scene.

CGTantra Community Awards is an initiative towards recognizing and honoring the best of the artists. CCA unlike other awards of the industry aims towards recognizing the excellence in different aspects of art forms of Animation, VFX and Gaming Industry. And with some mind boggling prizes given away by the Prizes Supporters – COREL Corporation, Aditya Infotech, NVIDIA, Pixologic Zbrush, e-On, Topogun, Evermotion, www.3d.sk, this year’s Cgtantra Community Awards was bigger and better than ever before.

At the same time, India’s biggest expo on Animation, VFX, & Gaming, the CGTExpo, was underway and they have a review of that as well.

Two days the 29th and the 30th of May saw many eager students with very curious eyes, entering the Nehru Centre. They waited to experience the magic of the industry they worship. The days unfolded as a story, a story of action, fun and admiration. The 29th was spectacular with many enthusiasts gushing in, but a pleasant surprise was the big turnout on a Sunday, the next day.

via CGTantra.com – CGTantra Community Awards 2010 – A Review.

Graphics awards, conference

Over at Wired.com, they have an interview with Splice’s visual effects supervisor Robert Munroe about how they created the creepy pseudo-human ‘creature’ that stars in the film.

“It came down to the idea that we would do as much as we could with the real actor and replace only when it’s necessary,” visual effects supervisor Robert Munroe told Wired.com about the process. “We didn’t want Delphine and Abigail to become self-conscious about the fact that their legs were going to be replaced later or that the tail was going to be added.”

via How to Make a Mutant: Splice’s Creepy Creature Evolves | Underwire | Wired.com.

Graphics movie, vfx

Carbon footprint of World Cup 2010 | GDS Publishing via Visual Loop

infographics sports