VizWorld.com

Peter Smith takes a look at the recent DisplaySearch report on 3D Televisions and writes up this great little nugget for ITworld.  In short, they aren’t selling very well.

But the stats are even worse than I thought they’d be. DisplaySearch estimates that 3.2 million 3D TVs will be shipped in 2010 . Note that’s shipped, not sold. 3.2 million equates to 2% of all flat panel displays shipped (as far as I can ascertain, that’s worldwide shipments). So yeah, there are not many 3D TVs being shipped this year.

But wait, that’s not the end of the bad news. In Western Europe (the only region where they offered this data point) sales of 3D glasses are less than 1 per 3D set sold. In other words, a lot of Western Europeans who buy a TV with 3D capability don’t even bother to buy the glasses to use that feature. Presumably they’re either waiting for better glasses prices, more content, or the TV they picked just happened to have 3D capability but it wasn’t a feature they were really interested in.

That second point is the really big one.  People buy a 3D TV just because it’s a good 2D TV as well, with no intention of ever really using the 3D Feature.  That’s a combination of

1. They don’t care
2. There’s no 3D Content (or at least not enough)
3. Manufacturers are pushing 3D TV’s so hard that plain 2D TV’s are starting to become hard to get.  All the nice features go into the 3D TV’s.

Things like 120Hz or 240Hz displays are billed as 3D Televisions, but in reality they make great 2D televisions as well.  The fact that so many people just bought new TV’s to fit into the HDTV bracket probably doesn’t help things either.

No doubt, these percentages will grow as the cost of adding 3D Capability to TV’s falls so more and more TV’s just have 3D as an extra feature like closed captioning or Picture-In-Picture.

via Report: 3D televisions not selling…yet | ITworld.

Hardware 3d, television

A couple of sites are carrying news about AMD’s newest offerings in the graphics space, the Radeon HD6800 series.  Over at EXPreview, they have some details on the upcoming 6870 (shown above) and 6850.

AMD Radeon HD 6870 is based on Barts XT,features 960 stream processors,1GB GDDR5 memory,with memory interface of 256-bit,core/memory frequency of 900MHz/4200MHz,respectively.

AMD Radeon HD 6850 is based on Barts Pro,features 800 stream processors,1GB GDDR5 memory,with memory interface of 256-bit,core/memory frequency of 775MHz/4000MHz,seperately.

And Techspot has a full slide (from Chiphell) showing some of the detailed specs of the 6700 series.

It still seems weird to not be calling them the ATI Radeon’s, but I suppose it had to happen eventually.  All the cards looks pretty nice, but I’m sad to see only 1GB of ram on each, and a 256bit bus.  They might be great for gaming, but seems they aren’t focusing very heavily on GPGPU with these releases.

Hardware amd, ati

Over at maxgadney.com, he looks at the current popularity of “tower graphics”, those tall multi-screen infographics that typically look pretty but contain little substance, and wonders if they’re really all bad.  They’re so popular, why is that?  First off, they fulfill the human drive for simple data fast.

But-it cannot be all bad can it?  If the purpose of structure is to direct to content, the user already knows that to scroll will enable that, so why shouldn’t the designer concentrate on the information- elements on this expansive canvas, rather than mangling them through some clever trope?

Every time I try to hate these, I imagine people who are just interested in the facts finding them easy to use. (albeit hard to search and re-size etc etc).

After that, they’re also a great opposite to more complex (and I would say Useful) visualization tools.

These tower graphics and videos are going against themassive complexity of other modern data-vis too. They are rejecting the pull of making expert interfaces for experts and awards panels, leaving the average user blank. I like that there are some new simple forms – like these old, archetypal USA Today graphics. (but will I ever love them? probably not – but I ‘quite like’ baked beans – I don’t need to love them)

I too have a bit of a love/hate relationship with these things.  They drive pageviews and traffic, and they can be pretty, but so many of them are nothing but junk.  Much like 3D in the theaters, the few good ones run the risk of drowning in the plethora of crappy ones.

In his writeup he says, “Lots of shite TV doesn’t make Mad Men unwatchable.”. True, but lots of shite TV can make me drop my cable alltogether and just start watching Hulu.

via maxgadney.com: The Rise of The Tower Graphic.

Graphics infographics

We all know that the amount of data traveling trough the internet is something ridiculously big, and the folks at GOOD made a simple, yet conclusive graphic about it. A big part of all that data is related to video, and Blog Technica breaks down the World’s habits of Video consumption., which is undeniably related to the broadband and download speed available – something Tech Now Times compares, also worldwide. Finally, Flowtown illustrates the Social Buying Universe, and from designer Robin Richards comes the Microsoft Acquisitions and Investments tube map.

Read more…

Graphics, Science design, economy, environment, infographic, infoviz, Visual Loop, visualizations

This week’s recommended resource is for anyone considering writing their own physically based renderer, or who just wants to know more about how it all works.  The book is Matt Pharr & Greg Humphreys’ “Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation“.

Physically Based Rendering is a terrific book. It covers all the marvelous math, fascinating physics, practical software engineering, and clever tricks that are necessary to write a state-of-the-art photorealistic renderer. All of these topics are dealt with in a clear and pedagogical manner without omitting the all-important practical details.
-Per Christensen
Senior Software Developer, RenderMan Products Pixar Animation Studios

You can get this book any many others in the VizWorld Store.

Science feature, resource of the week

Similar to Strata’s Foto3D CX2 project, Autodesk has a new beta-project code-named ‘Project Photofly‘ that allows you to upload a collection of photos to their cloud, and then download a resulting DWG of the model.

The Photo Scene Editor for Project Photofly is a small application that you download and install on your Windows computer. This application allows you to submit your photographs to the Project Photofly servers and view the Photo Scenes returned by the Project Photofly servers. You can save a Photo Scene in its native format, RZI (Autodesk ImageModeler 2009 format), or export the scene to the DWG file format.

It looks pretty impressive, and another example of doing work ‘in the cloud’, and frankly one of the more impressive ones I’ve seen.  Project Photofly is currently operational, and they aim to keep it in production until August 1st, 2011.  They’ve got a few tutorial and customer testimonials online already.  See one below, then go try it out yourself (if you use a Windows machine, that is).

Graphics, Science autodesk, photography

In the September 1 issue of the Astrophysical Journal, researchers from Princeton University and Lawrence Berkeley National Labs discuss a new collection of 3D simulations of supernova effects from the death of gigantic stars.  Running on the NERSC Franklin Cray XT4, it took 4 million computer hours to get the results, generating a mountain of data.  Of course, the simulation is only half the problem, with analyzing and visualizing the results being the other.

“Visualization is crucial,” Burrows said. “Otherwise, all you have is merely a jumble of numbers. Visualization via stills and movies conjures the entire phenomenon and brings home what has happened. It also allows one to diagnose the dynamics, so that the event is not only visualized, but understood.”

To help them visualize these results, the team relied on Hank Childs of the Berkeley Lab’s Visualization Group. Nordhaus noted that Childs played an important role in helping the team create 3D renderings of these supernovae.

Glad to see a familiar name involved in there (Hi Hank!), and I can bet they visualized it with VisIt .

via Princeton and Berkeley Lab Scientists Watch Stars Explode in 3D.

Science astronomy, hpc, physics, visualization

A new commercial for Coors new Silver Bullet Aluminum Pint required a lot of special attention from Framestore NY to recreate the NASA shuttle-launch environment for the new product.

The launch sequence begins, the vfx-created ice cubes tumble down to commence the final cooling and the silver pint Silver Bullet Aluminum Pint is cleared for launch. The Framestore team spent a lot of time in post getting the moment of take-off look believable and epic. The boosters fire, smoke billows from under the can, the ground shakes and we have lift-off.

“The volume of VFX in this spot was huge,” Butler said. “The surrounding environment, the bottle, the billowing smoke, the shot of the bottle traveling through space, they all took 100s of layers to render them realistically. But it was all worth it, we love the epic feeling of this spot.”

You can see the shot on Framestore’s website.  Read the full release after the break.

Read more…

Graphics commercial, framestore, vfx

FlowingData brings us the news of a new website built by NBC News and the Gates Foundation, along with Fathom Design (Ben Fry) that compiles the various standardized test scores and educational statistics for thousands of schools across the US.  From his writeup:

I think most parents will go to the site, look up their children’s school. If it performs better than the norm they’ll smile and be satisfied. If it performs below the norm, they’ll click on the link to find out how they can do something about it. So it doesn’t need to be super exploratory.

I think the other reason for the design choice was because the same data aren’t available for all schools and districts. Under the current design, you can show viewers just what you have instead of providing a view with a bunch of missing data.

I took a look at it, and I have to admit I’m impressed.  It’s simply and clean, yet full of information.  Find a school, and you’re quickly presented with the critical statistics about how it performs related to other schools in the district and state, and how well students perform compared to their grade level.  You get some basic interactivity, but not enough to be overwhelming or seizure-inducing, and a great amount of information in nice bite-sized chunks.

Definitely check it out.

Education Nation Scorecard for Schools.

Science fathom design, interactive, Website

For folks in the BI space, iRise has just announced a new version of their tool called iRise 8.5.  If offers the usually improvements across the board, but of particular interest is a feature called ‘iBlocs’.  Now, you can create your own macros and visualizations and save them as ‘iBlocs’ to share with coworkers and friends, and they even have a complete starter library on their website.

A set of custom UI components and behaviors packaged as iBlocs are now freely available from the iRise Website, enabling customers of iRise 8.5 to quickly import them into their projects and accelerate the simulation of complex behaviors. This initial delivery of iBlocs is the precursor to a commercial iRise marketplace where partners, customers and developers will build, share and sell iBlocs. iBlocs enable visualization authors to intuitively assemble in seconds visualizations that contain complex behaviors. For the novice user, they offer a path to rapid learning and the capability to build visualizations quickly and simply. For the more seasoned user, the reusable components help enforce best practices in design and usability

While this seems trivial, it’s an important feature that’s cropping up all around us.  As data analysis and visualization grows and moves into new arenas, the first question is always about training: How do we get new users up to speed as fast as possible?  A lot goes into training and simplifying the user interface, but the easiest and best solution is usually to provide good starting points so the users can start over halfway to their goal, and then just tweak a few final parameters.  Tools like VisTrails are a good example of an entire company built around just providing those starting points and libraries to integrate it into tools.  Folks like Tableau do the same with Tableau Public, making it faster to get started so novices and get up and running very quickly, while more advanced users can spend their time refining the details.

via iRise Visualizations Now Ten Times Faster and Easier to Assemble – KansasCity.com.

Science bi, irise, software