You wouldn’t expect a company like UPS to be experts in data visualization, but when you think about it: How better to track the massive quantities of trucks and packages at their command? A webinar at Information Management will covers some of UPS’s techniques and tools and gets down into the Management-centric details of how they use their visualizations to make money.
UPS uses data analysis and visualization as part of its tactical and strategic planning process. In an industry where delivery time is critical, UPS leverages tools which allow them to make game-time decisions and quickly adjust their operations as new information is received.
Attend this session and learn how to:
Recognize immediate cost savings opportunities on even the most complex data sources.
Use mapping to understand location trends in your business.
Quickly and easily build dashboards regardless of technical or analytics ability.
Identify challenges that can be addressed with advanced visualization.
The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a computer program to allow people to view outer space. Written by Microsoft, the program turns your computer into a virtual telescope. It does this by using the best imagery available from both ground-based and space-based telescopes.
Recently the program has been updated with over 13,000 detailed images from various NASA spacecraft. This enables users to view Mars using a high-resolution 3-D map of the terrain.
“By providing the Mars dataset to the public on the WorldWide Telescope platform, we are enabling a whole new audience to experience the thrill of space,” said Chris C. Kemp, chief technology officer for information technology at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
A great little visualization from “The State Of The USA” compiles data from around the world of historical nuclear stockpile sizes into a nice interactive visualization on Tableau Public.
The size of the U.S. stockpile of nuclear warheads was officially disclosed in May to promote transparency and give a boost to non-proliferation efforts, according to the Department of Defense. Once a closely guarded secret, the number of nukes was released on background, or without attribution, by a DOD official. As of Sept. 30, 2009, there were 5,113 warheads in the U.S. arsenal — an 84 percent reduction from the stockpile's peak in 1967. From 1994 through 2009, the U.S. dismantled 8,748 warheads, the department said.
Some nice information here, and great use of annotations. This is quite possibly one of the most ‘beautiful’ and clean Tableau Visualizations I’ve seen.
This zoom sequence begins with a very wide-field view of the southern sky including the spectacular Milky Way. We gradually close in on the stellar nursery NGC 2467 and as the zoom finishes the full majesty of this complex region of gas, dust and young stars is revealed in a very detailed picture from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
credit: ESO, S. Brunier, NASA, ESA and Orsola De Marco (Macquarie University). Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin
A lot has been said about the Gulf oil spill, and Travel Insurance helps us understand who’s doing what to resolve the disaster. Not less shocking is Turbo Tax‘s informative take on how much the U.S. Government is making with alcohol taxes, while so many are still trying to get out of the crisis. Credit Loan provides an interesting visual guide to getting out of debt, and from designer John Hu comes another guide, this one for students looking for some free web services to help them get along college. And we finish with a great infographic about the growing world of apps, made by Ricky Linn.
Over in Europe, researchers with the Immersence project are working to bridge the gap between real reality and virtual reality with a series of projects working on tele-immersion and haptic feedback. One interesting project used 3D scanners to analyze and digitize a physical object, then transfer the data to a remote location where a user to interact with it in Virtual reality.
“Haptic technology is still in the early stages. For the haptic interface, we used a robotic arm called a PHANTOM that has one contact point. This gives the sense of touching an object, but you can’t pick it up or handle it. However, one of the other project partners, the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, is developing a haptic device with two contact points that should make it possible to grasp an object with a virtual hand,” Schweinberger explains.
In another project they used similar technology and a headset viewer to create realistic ‘robot dancers’ that could be replaced (in VR) with the avatar of another user.
At the lab in Munich, they used a mobile robotic platform with two arms to serve as the dance partner for a real human dancer. By wearing VR goggles, the user would see a dancer of the opposite sex and could dance with them by holding the “hands” of the robot.
“To program the robot we first recorded the forces, balance and movement of a real human dancer and applied these to the robot. In a VR environment, the robot could be a computer-controlled agent or the avatar of another person,” the project manager says.
Now how long before someone hooks this up to something like Second Life?
Lightworks engineer Manuel Gamito will be presenting a paper entitled ‘Accurate Multi-Dimensional Poisson-Disk Sampling’ at SIGGRAPH in LA, discussing how the technique can be used to improve performance of Global Illumination and Anti-Aliasing processes. His paper synopsis:
Poisson-disk distributions have been found to be optimal for computer graphics because they are random and yet all the samples are reasonably equidistant to their nearest neighbours. This has significant applications for graphics techniques such as anti-aliasing, final gathering or texturing. Previous techniques were either very expensive or had to introduce simplifications, due to speed concerns, that compromised the quality of the sample distributions. The proposed method is statistically correct, works on 2D, 3D or even higher dimensions, and is made efficient through the use of a spatial subdivision tree.
Manual says that the work is already integrated into the upcoming version the Lightworks Rendering software. You can check out his presentation on Tuesday 27th July, as part of the ‘Geometry Algorithms and Sampling’ session, between 15.30 and 17.30 in Room 502B. Full release after the break.
If you’ve seen the RealFlow promotional material, then you’ve no doubt seen the giant ‘liquid brain’ image used in the branding. That image was generated by Fusion CI Studios and DMG for Fonterra’s “Whole Water” commercial we’ve covered before. In fact, the commercial was instrumental in some of the features added to RealFlow5.
The brain is particularly meaningful because its creation is a tribute to the ongoing joint development efforts between Next Limit Technologies and Fusion CI Studios. Next Limit had only recently upgraded RealFlow with Python scripting capabilities at the time, so co-owner and VFX sup at Fusion, Mark Stasiuk, was able to use that to build a proprietary fluid morphing behavior with features that went beyond RealFlow’s native toolset. And, after seeing the demonstration of the fluid morphing capability in the “Whole Water” spot, Next Limit’s developers were inspired to create an improved fluid morphing tool within RealFlow 5. That brain represents a “whole” lot of action on the leading-edge of CG fluid fx!
See more information about the project after the break.
You wouldn’t expect a company like UPS to be experts in data visualization, but when you think about it: How better to track the massive quantities of trucks and packages at their command? A webinar at Information Management will covers some of UPS’s techniques and tools and gets down into the Management-centric details of how they use their visualizations to make money.
A 
Over in Europe, researchers with the Immersence project are working to bridge the gap between real reality and virtual reality with a series of projects working on tele-immersion and haptic feedback. One interesting project used 3D scanners to analyze and digitize a physical object, then transfer the data to a remote location where a user to interact with it in Virtual reality.
Lightworks engineer Manuel Gamito will be presenting a paper entitled ‘Accurate Multi-Dimensional Poisson-Disk Sampling’ at SIGGRAPH in LA, discussing how the technique can be used to improve performance of Global Illumination and Anti-Aliasing processes. His paper synopsis:
VizWorld.com 
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