Infographic: The top-spending cities for travel, cable and entertainment
3:30 pm
Several more infographics in the report at the link below.
Infographic: The top-spending cities for travel, cable and entertainment : Bundle.
SPHERON VR’s first live-action HDR Video Sequence
3:00 pm
SPHERON-VR will be back at SIGGRAPH this year showing an updated version of their prototype HDR video camera cable of 50x EXR fps, with each frame containing 20 f-stops of range. To generate some buzz, they’ve released a video of some life-action shot with the camera and show how you can dynamically adjust the lighting settings to get the desired result.
‘Throughout Spheron VR’s successful growth, we have always focused on being at the cutting edge of research into digital imaging technology’ said Spheron’s founder and CEO Mr.Gerhard Bonnet, ‘showing this content publicly is yet another important milestone in our company’s history of achievements’
The video shows several ‘stare at a bright light’ tricks, along with true motion blur in HDR and other stunts. The results are impressive, although I think Vimeo somewhat crushes the amazing range. See the video below, and the ‘real thing’ at SIGGRAPH Booth 1011.
via SPHERON VR : Details.
Spheron HDR video – footage from SpheronVR AG on Vimeo.
NVidia GPUs and Ray Tracing all over SIGGRAPH
2:30 pm
If you didn’t believe my comment yesterday about several places demonstrating real-time raytracing solutions at SIGGRAPH, then check out this new press release from NVidia. If you check out the floor at SIGGRAPH, you’ll see CUDA-powered ray tracing in:
- mental images, showing iray interactive rendering, using CUDA C, at the NVIDIA booth (#717)
- NVIDIA, showing OptiX interactive examples, using CUDA C, at the NVIDIA booth
- Bunkspeed, showing SHOT with interactive iray, at the NVIDIA booth
- Lightworks, showing Artisan, using CUDA C and OptiX, at the Lightworks booth (#225)
- Works Zebra, showing Zeany, using CUDA C and OptiX, at the NVIDIA booth
- cebas Visual Technology Inc., showing Final Render, using CUDA C, at the cebas booth (#314)
- Refractive Software, showing the Octane Renderer, using CUDA C, at the Cubix Corp. booth (#1126)
- Chaos Software Ltd., showing V-Ray GPU, using OpenCL, at the Chaos booth (#313)
And that’s just the ones that NVidia knows about, undoubtedly there will be others.
“What used to be an excuse for a coffee break is now a real-time experience when running on NVIDIA’s newest GPUs”, said Jeff Brown, general manager Professional Solutions Group, NVIDIA. “The speed up is truly transformative for our customers – giving them interactive insight and dramatically enhancing their creative process in ways that have not been possible on individual workstations before.”
In addition to the exhibition floor, they’ll be in the technical sessions as well as NVidia has 2 papers (one on OptiX and one on PantaRay) in the technical talks, and NVidia is sponsoring a developer session on OptiX.
What is AMD doing at SIGGRAPH, you may ask? All I’ve heard so far is demonstrations of a new FirePro card and Eyefinity.
See the full announcement below.
Shotgun Coming out of Beta at SIGGRAPH 2010
2:00 pm
Shotgun Software will be formally releasing their “Shotgun” production tracking and collaboration system next week at SIGGRAPH, and already has an impressive collection of 170 clients covering the visual effects, video games, and post production industries. In addition, they’ll be launching a new Open Source project enabling users and developers to write their own extensions and addons to the Shotgun framework.
“We recognize it is not practical to build a single ‘pipeline in a box’ that works for all studios. Instead, we’re building an application framework and an open-sourced ‘box of pipeline parts’ that provides a growing suite of tools that studios can use to quickly bootstrap together parts of their pipelines,” said Don Parker, CEO Shotgun Software.
You’ll be able to see Shotgun and preview the upcoming v2.1 at SIGGRAPH, as well as attend presentations from users and partners.
Scientific Visualization in Google Earth with OpenEarth
1:00 pm
A group called ‘OpenEarth’ is pitching the idea of using Google Earth as a visualization platform for climate and watershed models by creating open-source tools and models to convert your simulation results into Google Earth’s KML format.
OpenEarth is the open source initiative to archive, host and disseminate Data, Models and Tools for marine & coastal scientist and engineers. It aims to remedy the above-described inefficiencies by providing a project-superseding approach.
I’ve personally seen this trend growing as several researchers I know have begun integrating KML as a native simulation output, and creating web-portals and the like to allow live in-situ visualization of running simulations via Google Earth. The possibilities are huge, if only they can overcome the problems with the high poly counts and large simulation sizes.
Kitware is Hiring Engineers, Programmers, & Researchers
12:00 pm
Kitware, the company behind such ubiquitous scientific visualization tools as VTK, ITK, and ParaView, just let me know that they’re growing like mad and have plenty of openings available! They’ve hired 22 people so far in 2010, and they’re looking to hire 12 more! The current openings cover the gamut, and include:
- R&D Engineer
- Computer Vision Software Developers
- Digital Library software developers
- Biomedical Engineering Software Developers
- Various other Software Engineers & Researchers
These are byproducts of some huge contract wins from LCA, DARPA, and other organizations that are fueling new products and enhancements across the board to not only their visualization tools, but their process management and code evaluation tools (CMake, Dart, etc). Go hit their website for all the details and get your resume in today!
The Pleiades
11:00 am
The Pleiades are an open star cluster that is approximately 440 light years away from Earth. It is easy to see at night, even with the naked eye. However, when I look through my telescope at night at the Pleiades, this is not the image that I see. This is an image captured from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope. This space-born telescope has a 16 inch diameter and surveys light in the infrared wavelengths.
All four infrared detectors aboard WISE were used to make this mosaic. Color is representational: blue and cyan represent infrared light at wavelengths of 3.4 and 4.6 microns, which is dominated by light from stars. Green and red represent light at 12 and 22 microns, which is mostly light from warm dust.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team
7 Basic Rules for Making Charts and Graphs
10:00 am
Next time you’re pulling together a chart, be it for a report, infographic, or presentation, run it against Nathan Yau’s 7 Rules for Charts & Graphs and see how it stacks up before you put it in front of hundreds or millions of viewers.
Charts and graphs have found their way into news, presentations, and comics with users from art to design to statistics. The design principles for these data graphics will vary depending on what you’re using it for. Making something for a presentation? You’ll want to keep it extremely simple and avoid using a lot of text. Designing a graphic for a newspaper? You’ll have to deal with size constraints and try to explain the important parts of your graphic.
However, whatever you’re making your charts and graphs for, whether it be for a report, an infographic online, or a piece of data art, there are a few basic rules that you should follow.
Land Surface Temperatures Anomalies
9:00 am
It is hot outside! Is that because of a local heatwave, or because it is summer, or because of global warming? Just how hot is it compared to the past few years? These are the types of questions that NASA seeks to answer with its latest image showing the anomalies in land surface temperatures when compared to recent years. However, you need to read the information below to understand the full implications of this scientific visualization.
This global map shows temperature anomalies for July 4–11, 2010, compared to temperatures for the same dates from 2000 to 2008. The anomalies are based on land surface temperatures observed by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. Areas with above-average temperatures appear in red and orange, and areas with below-average temperatures appear in shades of blue. Oceans, lakes, and areas with insufficient data (usually because of persistent clouds) appear in gray.
Because this image shows temperature anomalies rather than absolute temperatures, not all red areas are warmer than all blue areas. Red-hued northern Canada, for instance, is not warmer than blue-hued northern Mexico. Although deep red tones predominate along the mid-Atlantic coast, absolute temperatures are probably warmer in the barely orange American Southwest. Unusually warm conditions predominate in South America, but the Southern Hemisphere is in winter.
via Land Surface Temperatures, Early July 2010 : Image of the Day.
Autodesk Acquires Illuminate Labs
8:00 am
Illuminate Labs, creator of the ‘Beast’ lighting engine used in games like Mirror’s Edge and the ‘Turtle’ precomputed-lighting texture baking system used in several games, has now become yet another part of the always-growing Autodesk stable of products. The plan (for now) is to keep Beast as a standalone tool in their suite of Middleware solutions including “HumanIK” and “Kynapse”, but integrate Turtle into future solutions (hopefully an upcoming edition of 3dsMax or Maya).
Stevens added: “Advanced lighting solutions help game developers achieve their aesthetic goals, enhancing the game’s design and story. Lighting brings games to life by defining environments, establishing mood, creating atmosphere and guiding players. Illuminate Labs’ lighting technology and workflow tailored to game development are some of the most advanced in the industry. They complement Autodesk’s games middleware offering.”
Congratulations to the Illuminate Labs guys, hope you all had a big wad of options :)
Full release after the break.
VizWorld.com 
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