Zugara partnered up with ESPN & AT&T to help build a clever banner ad for their “Rethink” campaign, that uses basic augmented reality and face tracking tools to let you use your own head to score some goals from the comfort of your own desk.
Practice your heading skills with this World Cup banner game for AT&T, created out of Digital agency Zugara, BBDO and Zoic Studios. Zugara, best known for its useful AR-enabled technologies, applied its ZugMo motion capture tech that allows users with a webcam to practice heading in some corner kicks. The banner is currently in rotation at ESPN.com.
Watch the demo video above, or hit the link below to go directly to a test page and try it yourself.
NYC Design Studio ‘Hyperakt’ has created a clever poster representing the 2010 World Cup brackets in a radial design. Of course, the poster won’t be ‘complete’ until the World Cup is awarded to the victor, but they are already taking pre-order pledges.
The limited edition 18″ x 24″ and 24″ x 36″ prints will be printed in CMYK plus silver, on a heavy bright white uncoated stock. Anyone who pledges $25 or more will receive a 18″ x 24″ print and an additional print for $25 increments thereafter. Pledges of $40 or more will have the option of choosing the 24″ x 36″ print and an additional print for $40 increments thereafter. Pledgers will get to see pictures of the poster while it’s being printed.
A clever way of representing the “2 teams enter, 1 team leaves” nature of the World Cup by putting the victor in the center.
NVidia has just rolled out their own answer to the ATI Eyefinity system: 3D Vision Surround. It looks impressive, however comes with several caveats:
Using 3 monitors requires 2 video cards in SLI configuraiton
The 3 monitors must be identical, as in not just the same size but same Model Number
Limited to 3 monitors
That said, it’s an exciting offering. Unlike AMD’s Eyefinity, NVidia decided to bring 3D Vision Surround to the table a bit late in hardware development so it’s entirely a Software solution.
The biggest remaining question right now will be whether a pure-software approach differs from AMD’s hardware + software approach in terms of performance and game compatibility. NVIDIA’s own internal benchmarks have a SLI GTX 480 setup beating a CF 5870 2GB setup, but the GTX 480 is already faster than the Radeon HD 5870 so this wouldn’t be wholly surprising. As for compatibility we do know that NVIDIA is still fighting with the issue much like AMD has been, as NVIDIA is suggesting the use of the 3rd party Widescreen Fixer to fix the aspect ratio of several games
They also made some interesting decisions like using completely Frame-Alternate rendering: eg: GPU1 renders both left and right eyes full-frame, while GPU2 renders the next frame left & right eye. This guarantee’s synchronization between eyes (since a single GPU is rendering both eyes from a single set of data), while reducing input lag and latency by freeing up the second GPU to render the next frame.
The feature itself is still in beta, but available to the public to try out. They support adjusting for bezels at the driver level, which is a nice feature, but have disabled anti-aliasing levels over 2x when operating in 3D Vision Surround mode. Hopefully these kinks will be ironed out before it goes “official”.
I’ve heard a few people discussing “What are the requirements for being on the World Cup Team?” . Do you have to live in the country? Play for a team in the country’s national league? Work in the country? It all seems a bit artificial, but you can see the increased ‘diversity’ of the various teams via this interactive chart over at Estadao (it’s in spanish Portuguese) which shows each team in the World Cup and the various locations their players work.
It is interesting to compare the 2010 teams to the 1998 and 1994 teams (available in the chart) and see how few of them ‘work’ in the country they are playing for this year.
The BBC has an article on the European Space Agency’s GOCE satellite being used to map the variations in gravity. What! You thought that gravity was just 9.8 meters/sec²? That was the value we used in all of our engineering classes (unless we had to use English units and use 32.2 ft/sec²). Actually, gravity varies from 9.78 meters/sec² at the equator to 9.83 meters/sec² at the poles. (The newest weight loss regimen will be to move to one of the dark blue areas, I suppose.)
Launched in 2009, the sleek satellite flies pole to pole at an altitude of just 254.9km – the lowest orbit of any research satellite in operation today.
The spacecraft carries three pairs of precision-built platinum blocks inside its gradiometer instrument that sense accelerations which are as small as 1 part in 10,000,000,000,000 of the gravity experienced on Earth.
This has allowed it to map the almost imperceptible differences in the pull exerted by the mass of the planet from one place to the next – from the great mountain ranges to the deepest ocean trenches.
A clever art/design experiment combines image recognition with augmented reality to let you play with artificial light and shadow.
The project plays on the fact that shadows present distorted silhouettes depending on the light. Augmented Shadows take the distortion effect into the realm of fantasy. Shadows display below the objects according to the physics of the real world. However, the shadows themselves transform the objects into houses, occupied by shadow creatures. By moving the blocks around the table the user sets off series of reactions within this new fantasy ecosystem.
It was over 50 years ago when Russell Kirsch scanned a photograph of his infant son and digitized it into a mere 176×176 pixel matrix, setting forth what became one of the unshakable foundations of computer graphics: Square Pixels. Chosen merely for its simplicity, he has forever regretted the decision that has limited innovation and visualization ever since. In the May/June issue of “Journal Of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology” (also knows as NIST), he proposes a new algorithm that can take these simple square pixels and recreate something far more useful and accurate.
Kirsch’s method assesses a square-pixel picture with masks that are 6 by 6 pixels each and looks for the best way to divide this larger pixel cleanly into two areas of the greatest contrast. The program tries two different masks over each area — in one, a seam divides the mask into two rough triangles, and in the other a seam creates two rough rectangles. Each mask is then rotated until the program finds the configuration that splits the 6-by-6 area into sections that contrast the most. Then, similar pixels on either side of the seam are fused.
His algorithm already shows promise in fields like medical imaging due to its ability to improve MRI scans. Also, the algorithms nature to find edges rather than similar regions allows it to compress megabytes of pixels into mere kilobytes of data, making it great for long-distance transmission (eg. Satellite imagery).
If you pick up the latest issue of Time of Newsweek, you’ll see a great example of the capabilities of NewTek’s LightWave 3D tool. Focusing on the BP Oil Crisis in the Gulf and the various financial crises affecting US States, both covers take some liberties with scale and reality and create evocative and eye-catching covers.
To produce the Newsweek cover, artist Ed Gabel mapped a photograph of the presidential seal onto a 3D object and used LightWave to create the illusion of dripping oil oozing into the hollow spaces of the seal. Zeff then lighted and surfaced the oil model to achieve the desired look and feel, delivering a near-final render to the client in less than a day. Working under such unforgiving deadlines makes repurposing existing assets critical to the design process. Zeff was able to re-use the surfacing and lighting from the cover illustration to generate additional images for the interior pages of the magazine.
NVidia has just rolled out their own answer to the ATI Eyefinity system: 3D Vision Surround. It looks impressive, however comes with several caveats:
I’ve heard a few people discussing “What are the requirements for being on the World Cup Team?” . Do you have to live in the country? Play for a team in the country’s national league? Work in the country? It all seems a bit artificial, but you can see the increased ‘diversity’ of the various teams via this interactive chart over at Estadao (it’s in 
VizWorld.com 
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