Halloween Sales and Trends
11:30 am
3D Vision Live
11:00 am
Nvidia announced today that they have created a new 3D streaming Web site called 3DVisionLive. While Nvidia is claiming that this is the “world’s first 3D streaming Web channel”, I am not certain why they think that. After all, YouTube3D has been up for awhile now, and even featured here at VizWorld. Still, it is nice to see more 3-D content making its way to the web. Nvidia is using Microsoft’s Silverlight to display the 3-D videos. Currently the site has about 20 3-D video clips available for watching online. These include Resident Evil: Afterlife trailer, and The Ultimate Wave in 3-D.
Today, we’re excited to announce the next evolution of 3D — the world’s first 3D streaming Web channel. 3D Vision Live is an online video destination that will stream 3D trailers, music videos, sports, shorts, and more all to your 3D Vision PC. The site is initially launching in Beta so that we can get your feedback to help us improve as we aquire new content and features.
Earlier this summer, NVIDIA 3D Vision and Microsoft Silverlight partnered to stream the 3D NASCAR and PGA Championship events. Now, 3D Vision Live will bring great 3D content to your PC 24×7.
Visit www.3DVisionLive.com to check out all the free 3D content up already, and stay tuned as we add more videos and exciting new functionality in the coming months.
via The NVIDIA Blog – 3D Vision Live – World’s First 3D Streaming Web Channel.
AMD’s Zacate APU Performance
10:00 am
AnandTech has posted a couple of articles on AMD’s Zacate. What is a Zacate? Well, the Zacate is AMD’s APU. APU does not stand for axillary power unit. Instead it stands for accelerated processing unit. It is a combination of an AMD CPU and a Direct X11 GPU. It consumes just 18 Watts, and is aimed at the notebook market. The problem with Zacate is that the performance in one test was a bit too high. Was AMD cheating? No, not at all. It turns out that the test was valid, but you need to read the article to find out why the performance of Zacate was so good.
The first demo we saw on Monday was the system running City of Heroes. In CoH Zacate managed to reach frame rates around 2x of what we saw on the Core i5-M 520. AMD also ran through a number of IE9 performance tests including the Psychadelic HTML5 benchmark and the Amazon Shelf test. In both of those tests, the Zacate platform was significantly faster than the Core i5-M 520. And it was those IE9 tests that seemed suspect.
I didn’t think much of it at first, but Zacate managed a ~10x performance advantage in the IE9 Psychadelic benchmark. While Zacate should have a higher performance GPU, it shouldn’t be that much faster. Something was amiss.
via AMD’s Zacate APU Performance Update – AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News
50% off 3DATS Books, Soldiers to the Summit Promo
9:48 am
If you’ve had your eye on a book from 3DATS but have been holding off, here’s the prefect time to buy. CGArchitect is offering 50% off all 3DATS books currently in print, with every dollar being donated to the Soldiers to the Summit charity.
On October 1st, a group of 12 disabled American veterans will embark on a dangerous journey to overcome devastating injuries from service in Iraq and Afghanistan in order to summit a Himalayan giant. 3DATS is proud to sponsor their journey by donating 100% of sales of books in the month leading up to their journey. Your support will not only help ensure that these heroes are safely equipped with the supplies they need, it will help improve the chance of future climbs by other heroes.
So get a great deal on some books, and help out a great cause at the same time.
iPad light painting and Stop-Motion Animation
9:37 am
Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.
Detsu London has an interesting video up on Vimeo where they combine long-exposure “light painting” with 3D Modeling and an iPad to create text and models floating in space, then use those images in a stop-motion movie of robots and text flying around us.
We use photographic and animation techniques that were developed to draw moving 3-dimensional typography and objects with an iPad. In dark environments, we play movies on the surface of the iPad that extrude 3-d light forms as they move through the exposure. Multiple exposures with slightly different movies make up the stop-frame animation.
Several people are calling this an “iPad Hologram”, which is inaccurate. It’s a clever combination of catchy words, but this is more realistically something like stop-motion light-painting, similar to the Sprint Flashlight commercials, but using an iPad.
Daily Viz from Visual Loop – 15/09/2010
7:00 am
Few things can change our mood more than irritating noises. Or loud ones. So, Fixr‘s infographic is worth looking, with all the facts and infos about this type of pollution. And another kind of overload we hear about constantly is the information one. Too much information, its true. But is it affecting our habits on such a profound way? Find out on Fast Company‘s infographic. We continue our daily selection with Milo‘s look on the costs of Shipping our online shopping, and from Discount Vouchers comes the truth about money in the Food Industry. Finally, E-Learners shows us the best – and worst – paying jobs on a College Campus.
RTT goes Real-Time with DeltaGen9.6 and RealTrace
2:00 pm
RTT has just announced a new version of their popular RTT DeltaGen product, version 9.6, that lets users create presentation quality photorealistic renderings with a minimum of fuss in their usual workflow. The big new feature in this version is their integrated real-time raytracing product they call ‘RealTrace’. It works in conjunction with RealScale to offer near-linear performance scaling.
The two render technologies Raytracing and Global Illumination give the user two options for calculating realistic virtual reality scenes. The CPU-based Raytracing depicts reflective and transparent materials with improved quality and at a higher speed. Thanks to Global Illumination, displays of light and shadow appear more natural and much more convincing. The different calculations for static and animated scenes take into account all types of light sources and, by adjusting for the harshness of shading, fill the environment with the greatest precision for the desired lighting atmosphere. The results are extremely realistic visualizations, which are required, for example, in the automotive industry for depicting headlight elements with precise refractions of light and reflections in the design stage.
Full press release after the break.
RED releases new REDCINE-X and RED Firmware
2:00 pm
Big announcements from RED today as they’ve released new firmware for their RED camera to support the now publicly available Mysterium product and a new version of REDCINE-X. One of the biggest features that users will love in REDCINE-X is that they’ve finally added R3DTrim support so that you can trim clips down to exactly what you need. But that’s not all:
Changes from 320 to 321:
- Multiple Rockets supported
- Rocket Video Out fixed.
- R3DTrim added to REDline.
- REDlog Film added to REDline
- RMD files are now saved along with Trim Exports.
- Close button on video player will no longer show up in the middle when fullscreen.
- 64Bit builds have quicktime wrappers working.
- Fixed some dependency issues with Windows 64bit.
- Snapshot file naming for when unique names are needed.
Stereoscopic Timelapse Video
1:00 pm
Riku Naskali of Stereo Window shot some stereoscopic timelapse Video and posted it to YouTube 3D. The cool thing about YouTube 3D is that it allows you see in 3-D with 14 different settings. There are two more settings, but those are for left and right eye views, so that they are really 2-D.
A stereoscopic timelapse showreel by Riku Naskali of Stereo Window. All shots were shot and post-produced by me.
Most of it was shot in Switzerland, what a beautiful country! I truly wish I can someday go back there with enough time and just timelapse my heart away :)
Microwave Sea Ice
12:00 pm
Here is another fine visualization from Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio. In particular I like the tidbit that even humans emit microwave radiation. That leads to the question: How many humans would it take to pop a bag of popcorn?
Everything on Earth’s surface – including humans – emits microwave radiation, though the properties vary with the emitter. The AMSR-E microwave sensor on Aqua relies on those emissions to map the planet. Ice emits more microwave radiation than water, so ice-covered waters appear much brighter than the open ocean to the AMSR-E sensor (see top image). This difference allows the satellite to capture a year-round sea ice record, despite cloud cover and months of polar night.
Visualization created by Cindy Starr and Trent Schindler, Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio. MODIS imagery by Jesse Allen, working with data from the MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC. Caption by Kathryn Hansen, NASA Earth Science News Team, and Mike Carlowicz, Earth Observatory.
VizWorld.com 
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