VizWorld.com

For most of us, blogging its just a way of sharing our opinions and interests, knowing new people, and by no means, making money out of it should be a priority, because it’s no easy task, as we can see on Famous Bloggers infographic. The role of Social Media in the Event World is analyzed by Echelon Design, and from Oh My Gov comes the threat of a Growing Cyber, faced by the U.S. Government. We close with the history of tornadoes in America, by Home Owners Insurance, and a look at the Near Earth Objects, by designer Zachary Vabolis.

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

At the recent 3D Film Festival in Hollywood, Germany’s FullFeedback Productions and PassmoreLab took home the top prize in the “3D Narrative Feature Film (Conversion)” Category for their film “Iron Doors”.

“We are honored to accept this award from 3DFF, and we also want to thank Stephen for trusting and allowing us the creative freedom to use stereoscopy as a gentle storytelling tool. The best part is that this award confirms the validity of this approach to the film,” said Greg Passmore, president of PassmoreLab. “We chose to use depth as a tool and not a gimmick. Iron Doors is a film that uses 3D, rather than it being a ‘3D film’. In the early days of computer graphics, there were a whole slew of CGI films. Eventually, those using CGI stopped being referred to as “CGI films” — for example, District 9 — an effects film where the effects are not the point. That’s what we did with Iron Doors – not poke the viewer in the eye or throw things at the camera – but use 3D to help provide a sense of presence for the viewer.”

Glad to see more talk of using 3D as a storytelling device, not just a gimmick.  It definitely won’t be easy, but that’s what will have to happen to keep 3D in Cinema’s alive: Finding useful ways to use it to advance and further the story in ways 2D can’t, rather than just taking every single movie and shooting it with a stereo camera, just because they can.

The movie is a psychological thriller of a man locked in an iron vault, who must escape before he dies of dehydration.  It will also make an appearance at the Raindance Film Festival in London.

via “Iron Doors 3D Wins Best 3D Feature Award”.

Graphics award, contest, movie, stereoscopic

Microsoft’s Fuse Labs has released their collection of “Social Gadgets”, a few interactive widgets that analyze Twitter Streams.  Above, see their “Tag Cloud” visualization of a search for “VizWorld”.

FUSE Labs’ SocialGadgets are a set of embeddable widgets that visualize Twitter real-time data. Each gadget focuses on a given keyword and displays its volume of usage over time. Mentioned entities such as people, locations, companies and noun phrases are identified and visually represented. The gadgets are interactive, letting users explore the relationships between topics publically shared on Twitter. By focusing on patterns and trends, the gadgets can extrapolate what people find important, and provide a succinct yet effective way to look at events as they are unfolding.

Now, I’ll cut them some slack because 1) it’s new, and 2) it’s still kinda beta.. But I easily see several issues:

1. What is that bottom graph?  The axis goes from 0 to 1.. Is that some count of tweets? Retweets?  some statistical percentage?  I don’t know.  A search for “vizworld” at search.twitter.com fills the entire front page and only goes back 20 hours, so I obviously have more than 1 search result.
2. For a “tag” cloud, it’s pulling up more usernames than hashtags.
3. Where is it getting this data?  I don’t see any of those accounts in my research search history for “vizworld”.  And it leaves out the most common users who retweet my stuff like ebruhwiler and tssveloso.

My only guess is that they are unable to really keep up with all the data coming out of Twitter, so they must be missing large chunks.  That or their algorithms are completely hosed.

Either way, go check out their gadgets and see what your results are, and share in the comments!  Is “vizworld” an isolated case?

via SocialGadgets | Projects | Fuse Labs.

Graphics, Science interactive, microsoft, social media

Cristian Pop has a great tutorial ongoing at CGTuts where he shows various ways to create a Condensation effect in 3dsMax.  It’s a two-parter with only the first part online, but it covers using 3dsMax’s Scatter oject, the PArray system, and a more powerful Particle Flow effect.

In this first part, we’ll take a look at the Scatter compound object, the easy-to-use PArray particle system and finish up by looking at how to manually paint on the condensation using the powerful ParticleFlow particle system.

Part two, due out next week, looks like it’ll cover Thinking Particles, Object Paint, and fR Wet Shaders.

via Six ways to create Condensation in 3DsMax – Scatter, PArray & PFlow.

Graphics 3dsmax, tutorial

While at GTC, I managed to slip off the grid for a few hours and head to the other camp, the realm where GPU’s do not reign supreme and companies dedicate themselves to squeezing every clock cycle of performance from their algorithms.  In a nondescript office building, I met with Fovia‘s CEO Kenneth Fineman and President & CTO George Buyanovsky for a demonstration of their ‘High Definition Volume Rendering®’ product, and I have to admit I’m impressed.

The product is essentially an SDK or Library for integrating high-speed and high quality volume rendering into other applications, and as such they’ve already got an impressive customer list including biomedical imaging companies like GE and Pfizer, dental imaging companies like 3M and iDent, along with some classic standbys of such technology like NASA and the US Military.  Running entirely on the CPU, I was privy to a demonstration of their test bed application running on an 8-core system (with Hyperthreading enabled for 16 logical cores) showing various biomedical datasets on a 1920×1080 display, nearly fullscreen.  The visuals were beautiful, and easily operating from 8 to 30 fps depending on number of concurrently running clients and rendering complexity.

Fovia was founded by Ken and George, both former employees from a high-end computer graphics card manufacturer, back in 2003.  Unsatisfied with the current “put the graphics in hardware” designs from their employer and the likes of NVidia and ATI, they dedicated themselves to demonstrating that the same work can be done in the CPU, and done faster and better.  The result is the HDVR® product they now license.  They make use of the most modern instruction sets for high-speed vector computation and parallelism across cores. Once liberated from the restrictive instruction sets of most current GPU designs, they were able to create vastly more complex visualizations using adaptive ray-sampling, adaptive step sizes, and many other optimizations not easily implemented in GPU algorithms.

Read more about Fovia & HDVR® after the break.

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Science feature, fovia, hdvr

Journalism in the Age of Data from Geoff McGhee on Vimeo.

Stanford has just released this hour long documentary interviewing some of the biggest names of data visualization in journalism, over on Vimeo.

Journalists are coping with the rising information flood by borrowing data visualization techniques from computer scientists, researchers and artists. Some newsrooms are already beginning to retool their staffs and systems to prepare for a future in which data becomes a medium. But how do we communicate with data, how can traditional narratives be fused with sophisticated, interactive information displays?

Definitely worth watching.

via Journalism in the Age of Data on Vimeo.

Science documentary, interview, journalism

Contrary to all of the press out so far, it seems that Warner Brothers has made the bold decision to release the next Harry Potter movie, part 1 of the Deathly Hallows, in 2D only.

Warner Bros Pictures has made the decision to release “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1″ in 2D, in both conventional and IMAX theaters, as we will not have a completed 3D version of the film within our release date window. Despite everyone’s best efforts, we were unable to convert the film in its entirety and meet the highest standards of quality. We do not want to disappoint fans who have long-anticipated the conclusion of this extraordinary journey, and to that end, we are releasing our film day-and-date on November 19, 2010 as planned. We, in alignment with our filmmakers, believe this is the best course to take in order to ensure that our audiences enjoy the consummate “Harry Potter” experience.

Some would say, Mr. Warner’s heart grew 3 sizes today.  I am so happy to see a company like Warner Brothers go for releasing a “high quality” product, instead of a high-grossing one.  Of course, this also means they have have a spectacular re-release of the movie in 3D about 3 months after the initial release.

Part 2 is still on for a simultaneous 2D and 3D release.

via No 3D for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 – ComingSoon.net.

Graphics movie, stereoscopic, warner

AEC Infrastructure management guru at Autodesk and author of Between The Poles, Geoff Zeiss, opines on attracting and retaining design and technology professionals while the existing workforce ages.

The challenge that utilities are facing is how to attract and retain younger workers in what is becoming an increasingly competitive market place.  What I am seeing is that 3D technology can help.  The net generation is conversant with communications, media, and digital technologies and in particular have been brought up with gaming technology, PSPs, XBoxes, and Wiis. Many modern 3D design applications, which use the same 3D visualization tools that were developed for the gaming industry, provide an environment that is much more familiar and stimulating for the millennial generation, who may perceive traditional 2D design as something left over from the dark ages.  In the last few months I have come across several utilities who are finding that for this reason 3D engineering design technology can contribute to attracting and retaining younger workers.

Between The Poles | 3D Is Helping Address the Aging Workforce Challenge

Science 3d, design, education, engineering

Viz Scientists, warm your computers, because IEEE VisWeek has published the 2011 Visualization Contest.  Yes, I said the 2011 contest, and they haven’t even had VisWeek2010 yet.

The Vis Contest 2011 targets the field of fluid dynamics. The goal is to devise a visualization that allows for exploring the stability of a fluid dynamics simulation of a pump with respect to different models of its turbulences. One big challenge is the large amount of the data.

The contest aims at demonstrating how novel visualization and interaction techniques from the fore-front of scientific research can help to solve real-world problems of high relevance – today.

The 2011 contest is sponsored by CEI and others, so no surprise that the data is available in EnSight format.  The datasets are pretty big, so you may want to start your downloads now (three datasets, ranging from 30Gig to 40Gig each).  I’m trying to download them now, but the bandwidth is pretty limited.  I’m looking at 30 hours to download right now.  BitTorrent anyone?

Even the prize is beefed up this year.  If you win, not only will you get the accolades and praise of your peers, but you’ll get a brand new Apple iPad, courtesy of CEI..

via IEEE Visualization Contest 2011.

Science contest, visweek

“Flight And Expulsion” is a nice flash-based interactive visualization of various refugees and arrivals at several countries around the world.  You can view the data in a map form, or (in what is my favorite view) a circular flow diagram showing where people are leaving to or arriving from.  From the Information Aesthetics writeup:

Each visualization view highlights the relationships between the countries that people flee from and migrate to. In the “Flows” view, the countries are connected through a sort of Sankey diagram. The “Connection” displays the same data as a circular network diagram, while the “World Map” provides a classic geographical overview. The “Country Details” dashboard, available when a country is selected, gives more detailed information about the same statistics. The interactive timeline at the bottom allows the exploration of any trends or changes over time.

Flight & Expulsion.

Science interactive, refugee