VizWorld.com

We are all aware of the amount of damage BP’s Dark Mess caused. But have you ever thought what could be bought with all the money lost so far by the company? Have a look at Visual Economics graphic – and be amazed! Also amazing is the information visualization to explain the history, worth, and importance of the FTSE 100, developed by designer Jeremy Christopher. Next, we have a look at Bejing’s Real Estate market, by Chinfographics, and a cool visualization on Vitamins Supplements, from Pharmas.co. Last, but not least, a number of curious facts about pet ownership in America, produced by the folks at Dogatar.

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Graphics, Science design, infographic, Visual Loop, visualizations

Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg of Many Eyes fame will be releasing a new data visualization tool they call ‘Time Flow’ soon on the website of their current company ‘Flowing Media’.  The tool is a simple way to create visual timelines from textual data (appointment lists, contributions, etc) and show it as a calendar or timeline.  It also has other various visualization methods such as lists, tables, and graphs that offer statistical summaries and data analysis algorithms.

The software will be released as open source, but no license is specified.

Impressive data visualization tool to be released as open source – Computerworld Blogs.

Science software, timeline

Southpaw Technologies has just announced the immediate availability of TACTIC3.0, their production digital asset management product that has just recently achieved integration nirvana with NUKE.  This new version, to be demonstrated at SIGGRAPH, offers improved interfaces and a powerful expression language enabling integration with a wide variety of systems.  In addition to Nuke, this version also integrates with the Adobe Suite, Rush render queue, and IRIDAS FrameCycler.

“TACTIC is the bedrock of our pipeline,” said Todd Jahnke, head of production at March Entertainment. “We use it for our production management, asset management, and overall pipeline solution. TACTIC also manages our communications with production partners spread across four countries. For March Entertainment, TACTIC is our solution to redefining what can be achieved in the production triangle of time, money, and quality.”

Full announcement and screenshots after the break.

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Graphics plugin, siggraph, software, southpaw, tactic

Lightworks will be at SIGGRAPH again this year, and once again will be showing how well their products operate with the impressive Caustic Ray-Tracing solutions.  This year they’ll have the CausticOne and the new OpenRL spec showing real-time raytracing power.

Dave Hutchinson, Product Director at Lightworks, commented “At Lightworks we aim to be at the forefront of new technology so that our customers are always in the best position to compete within the global market place. We’re delighted to be able to enhance our products by offering OpenRL to our customers, as we know it will be incredibly beneficial and give additional value to their own applications.”

It’s important to note that while many vendors are showing “RealTime Raytracing” systems, only the Caustic solution is truly RealTime & Interactive full-screen Raytracing.  Many solutions use iterative rendering (like mental images’ iray), but the Caustic solution renders full-frame real-time RayTraced imagery, and even allows geometry and light manipulation on-the-fly.

I plan to stop by their booth and check it out, I recommend you do as well!

via Lightworks implements Caustic OpenRL to accelerate rendering.

Graphics, Hardware caustic, lightworks, siggraph

Indirect Multi-Touch Interaction for Brushing in Parallel Coordinates from Robert Kosara on Vimeo.

Robert Kosara was inspired by the clever multi-touch capabilities of his new Macbook pro, and found a great use for it when dealing with selections in Parallel Coordinates graphs.  While writing a paper for an upcoming conference about it, he was unable to include graphics so instead linked to a video he squirreled away on Vimeo.  Now that video is getting some attention (before the paper was printed), and he’s taken the opportunity to talk about it on his site.

If you’ve used a MacBook or MacBook Pro, you know how simple and intuitive the two-finger scrolling is. Similarly, there are some interactions on the iPhone that are so obvious (like the pinch for zooming) that it’s tough to remember how we did things before touch screens. I wanted to create a similar experience for brushing in parallel coordinates.

He also released a tiny demo app to show how it works, available at his site to try.

via Multi-touch Brushing for Parallel Coordinates | eagereyes.

Science algorithm, paper

As if the Oil Spill wasn’t bad enough, now BP has gone and shown us another level of ineptitude: Their complete lack of Photoshop skills.  A series of images has been released by various BP organizations purportedly showing just how hard they’re working on solving the Gulf Oil Crisis.  Sadly, the images are fabrications, and not very good ones.

The first one found was this image of the BP Command Center.

Several people have dissected this image (Gizmodo, Ameriblog) and have very detailed zooms showing how BP, for some unknown reason, decided to replace blank monitors with video footage.  In particular, the guy on the right seems to be staring at some kind of Sun chart?  In reality, he was staring at a screen with nothing but a white line on it, some of which you can still see on either side of his head.

Now, they’ve gone and done it again with this image of their aerial monitoring from helicopters over the gulf.

Click for the fullsize.  Once again, even moreso actually, you can easily see the blurred edges of the water and the oddly placed air traffic control tower in the upper left.  If you look very closely, you can even read the dash instruments which say they are hovering a mere 1 foot off the ground.  Gizmodo breaks it down quite well:

And last, while the helicopter clearly appears to be situated at some height above the boats ahead, the readouts on the dash appear to indicate that the helicopter’s height is 1 foot, and that door and ramp are open and the parking brake engaged, not to mention that the pilot appears to be holding a pre-flight checklist:

Obviously there are bigger fish to fry when it comes to BP. But every time they fabricate an image like this, it undermines whatever little credibility they have left, along with all of the actual documentation of the massive undertaking this has been and will continue to be. It speaks to a company still more concerned with image than reality, in charge of repairing something so terribly broken that we can’t afford to treat it with anything but total candor.

If you find any more, let us know in the comments!

Graphics bad, bp, disaster, oil, photoshop

Imagine being able to watch 3-D movies, not only on your TV or on your personal computer, but also on your laptop. Anton over at the 3D Vision Blog has some information about the latest laptop from LG.

LG is not only interested in 3D HDTV market as well as 3D Gaming monitors, but also in providing a mobile 3D-capable solutions and as a result the company announced their first such product – the LG R590 3D notebook. The 3D laptop has a 15.6-inch screen with resolution of 1366×768 pixels and uses a passive polarization filter along with passive polarized glasses to provide the 3D effect. The software LG is relying to provide the 3D capabilities is DDD’s TriDef giving the user a 3D photo and video player, 2D to 3D video conversion and the option of gaming in stereo 3D mode.

via LG R590 3D Notebook With Passive Polarization 3D Technology – 3D Vision Blog.

Hardware 3d, lg, notebook, passive

The Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20, 2010, killing eleven men. The oil rig then sank on April 22, 2010. Oil geysered into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days before being capped.

The Gulf of Mexico was speckled and streaked with small clouds on July 20, 2010, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image. Between the clouds, however, a silvery-gray streak of oil remained visible offshore of the Mississippi River Delta. The tan-colored waters around the river delta are full of sediment.

via Oil Slick in the Gulf of Mexico : Image of the Day.

Science nasa, oil

Which setup is better in 3×1 multi-display gaming? The GeForce GTX 480 SLI or the Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity6 2GB & 1GB CrossFireX configurations? You should be able to guess the answer. But in case you cannot, [H]ard|OCP has posted an article looking at the 3D Vision Surround experience versus AMD’s Eyefinity.

This evaluation’s focus is on NVIDIA’s Surround Technology supporting multi-display gaming and its performance versus AMD’s Eyefinity all using identical 3×1 Landscape configurations. This will give you an idea how GTX 480 SLI stacks up to 2GB and 1GB HD 5870 CrossFireX in 3×1 gaming at 5760×1200 resolution. We will have a separate performance evaluation on 3D Vision Surround gaming coming up soon as well as articles covering GTX 460 SLI and GTX 470 SLI 3×1 performance.

NVIDIA Surround Technology Performance Review @ [H]ard|OCP

Hardware amd, eyefinity, nvidia, sli

Manufacturing Business Technology has an article up from the VP of Dassault Systems Patrick Michel, who discusses the advantages of using modern 3D equipment and software in the manufacturing process.  He discusses one particularly interesting situation of a recent aircraft manufacturer that was asked to begin construction of an old 1960′s model aircraft, but found themselves fighting with architectural and engineering plans from the 1960′s.  The few remaining engineers from that period still on the payroll were forced to train new employees on the intricacies of the design, resulting in lengthy training, slow work, and general fatigue of everyone involved.  They found that by switching to newer 3D systems, all of these problems went away.

To address all of these needs, the company found a technology that could scan physical parts into a usable 3D model, coupled with a solution to provide 3D interactive assembly instructions to their production workers.

Using these solutions, the company was able to create a clear and simple document that brought total on-the-job autonomy for junior operators. Additionally, the use of these manufacturing instructions could be expanded to any assembly shop in the world, since the document was mostly powered by the universal language of interactive 3D, which requires no thorough knowledge of any particular language.

It’s a particularly powerful case study, but unfortunately the name of the company and the aircraft are not released.

via Breaking Barriers With 3D Technology | Manufacturing Business Technology.

Science case study