Many people know the elements of the periodic table by name, but do you really know what chromium looks like? Or Osmium? Wikipedia user ‘Alchemist-hp’ has taken the mission of photographing base elements and constructing a photographic periodic table.
Visit the site (in german) for some breathtaking photographs.
An interesting tech demo from Aircord shows an apparatus that works in conjunction with an Apple iPad to display 3D images within a glass pyramid. It’s very similar in design to the Innovision and RealFiction devices, but I have to question the usability of a system that requires you to set your iPad face down on the surface, thereby eliminating all of the UI functionality.
That said, it is a neat toy.
This has been all over the news, but The Washington Post has compiled a lengthy report of Top Secret Clearances and Projects across the US Government and published the results as a collection of interactive visualization tools on their site. Their purpose is to show how use of the Top Secret Clearance has ballooned out of control of oversight groups since the 9/11 attacks on the WTC, and the government has begun to ignore the old regulation that such work be done by government personnel and instead hire contractors.
“Top Secret America” is a project nearly two years in the making that describes the huge national security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
When it comes to national security, all too often no expense is spared and few questions are asked – with the result an enterprise so massive that nobody in government has a full understanding of it. It is, as Dana Priest and William M. Arkin have found, ubiquitous, often inefficient and mostly invisible to the people it is meant to protect and who fund it.
The visuals are a bit complicated, but effectively you can see the quantity of clearances involved, various corporate involvements, and specific functional areas (IT, Weapons, etc). No details on the actual projects (of course), but a lot of useful information nonetheless.
Lots of people seem to be in an uproar at how many ‘Top Secret’ government functions are in the hands of ocntractors, but I don’t see it as such a big deal. Several reasons, actually:
All in all it’s just cheaper to hire contractors. They’re held to the same security clearance constraints as government people, and the same oversight.
But it makes for nice graphs.
Stereoscopic 3D works by rendering two images on the screen, one for each eye. Sony figures, rather cleverly I might add, that they can usurp that for other uses by displaying a single non-stereoscopic image for two players, giving full-screen multiplayer action to two players simultaneously.
Broke My Controller noticed the patents, filed a year ago and published on Thursday, that show a method for rendering separate images on the same screen, which are then filtered by glasses worn by player 1 and player 2. The glasses also look like they have earbuds, meaning players get a separate audio feed, too.
I imagine ghosting would be a problem with this, and the brightness loss might be annoying. Still, it’s a clever new use for the growing technology.
Did you know that there’s a whole science behind the simple gesture of shaking hands? At least, that’s what the folks at the University of Manchester and Chevrolet say, in today’s first selected graphic. Also in the field of curious facts and figures, Information is Beautiful shows an amazing disparity in their Cognitive Surplus visualization. On the other hand, the infographic by Quicken teach us how small cutbacks may lead to great savings. Yet, another educational piece comes from Ria Novosti, explaining how the nuclear weapons era began, and finally, The Humanitaria Information Unit illustrates the massive refugee presence across the Sub-Saharan Africa.
In addition to Insight VCS, Optitrack will be demonstrating their new Mocap software ARENA that integrates with Autodesk MotionBuilder and other products.
Featuring real-time data streamed between the OptiTrack and Autodesk booths, joint demonstrations will showcase how body motion capture (from OptiTrack ARENA™ software) and virtual camera work (from the OptiTrack Insight VCS) can be combined with Autodesk MotionBuilder, Autodesk Maya, Autodesk 3ds Max and Autodesk Face Robot to create a comprehensive computer generated film sequence.
Live demos, tutorials, and Q&A. See the full announcement after the break.
SIGGRAPH is only a week away, and VizWorld will be there interviewing vendors, reviewing papers, and generally hanging out to see what’s going on in the industry. Of course, the Computer Animation Festival is always a good time, featuring some of the best Animated Shorts of the year. Check out this year’s trailer and see what you think!
cebas has just released a big Service Pack for volumeBreaker, the too behind many of the effects in Roland Emmerich’s 2012.
This latest release includes all of the enhancements found in previous Service Packs. Installing the latest service pack, SP3, will replace all previous installs. With the release of Service Pack 3, overall product stability is greatly enhanced. Previous problematic geometry with defective triangles and open edges, found in SP2, are now more easily managed and will not cause system hangs.
This latest enhancement introduced in volumeBreaker SP3 is a big step forward, allowing the user to easier create more life-like demolition effects.
Registered customers get it for free, and it works for 3dsMax 2008 and newer.
via cebas News Text.
A case study from Intel shows the power behind their Graphics Performance Analyzer (GPA) as used in optimizing the Neoqb game “Rise of Flight”. The study has several interesting examples of how they used GPA to locate bottlenecks and reorganize code for some fairly impressive performance improvements.
Two scenes were the target for my optimization efforts. After analyzing a frame from the first scene with Intel® GPA, performance was increased nearly 70% for that frame, from 41 frames per second (fps) to 69fps. Similarly, the second scene improved 55%, from 40fps to 62fps. After completion of Neoqb’s game optimization using Intel® GPA, Rise of Flight now runs about 15% faster across the board, with some components running nearly 50% faster.
One of the new features in Unity 3.0 is the new Shader Language they’ve created called ‘Surface Shaders’. Given the historical complaints of many having to learn the multitude of shader languages and making them work in the many different rendering models, they’ve decided to write their own much simpler language. A new blog post on their site shows what you can do with the new system.
Over a year ago I had a thought that “Shaders must die”. And what do you know – turns out we’re doing this in Unity 3. We call this Surface Shaders cause I’ve a suspicion “shaders must die” as a feature name wouldn’t have flied very far.
via Unity Technologies Blog » Blog Archive » Unity 3 technology – Surface Shaders.
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