Home » Archives for November 2010
2010 is coming to an end, and, in terms of consumer technology, this was the year of the Tablet. Voucher Codes made an infographic showing the state of the so called Tablet Wars. The Apple vs Microsoft Christmas Sales Showdown comes from Promotional Codes, and Fabernovel shows us the 7 cards to beat Microsoft and Google. Android was also a big winner this year, as we can see on Mob Clix’s design, and, to close this up, the amusing Geek 1.0 vs Geek 2.0, found on Terainfo.
Read more…
Graphics, Science design, economy, environment, infographic, infoviz, Visual Loop, visualizations
ISGTW has an article about the rise in popularity of various virtual world platforms like Second Life to replace current virtual classrooms that typically consist of little more than powerpoint slides and web forums. The ‘virtual reality’ environments of Second Life and World of Warcraft offer significantly improved interactivity and realism, which greatly improve the student’s reactions.
“Extensive research shows that visual imagery can play a powerful role in accelerating learning. Evidence suggests that use of visual media can enhance problem-solving, motivation, understanding and the expression of ideas,” said Roger Murphy of the Visual Learning Lab at the University of Nottingham, UK.
Part of the “Immersive Education” initiative and the “Media Grid” standards group, they’re working to create a standard infrastructure to combine media delivery, storage, and networking into a unified environment for both educators and students.
via Feature – Teaching gets a Second Life.
Science education, second life, virtual worlds
A great article in The Linux Journal discusses the creation of an OpenGL-based Image Processing system that can analyze video captured from an attached camera in real-time.
This article discusses using OpenGL shaders to perform image processing. The images are obtained from a device using the Video4Linux 2 (V4L2) interface. Using horsepower from the graphics card to do some of the image processing reduces the load on the CPU and may result in better throughput. The article describes the Glutcam program, which I developed, and the pieces behind it.
In the end, he has it running a single edge-detection kernel, but it could easily be modified to do much much more.
via Image Processing with OpenGL and Shaders | Linux Journal.
Science howto, imageprocessing, opengl, tutorial
A few more black Friday/Cyber Monday deals hit my inbox today.
Hardware sale
A while back NVidia was busted for tweaking their drivers to behave in special ways during popular benchmarks like 3DMark, yielding higher benchmark results that had actually no benefits on real usage. Now, NVidia is turning around and pointing similar blame at AMD for recent tweaks in their drivers.
NVIDIA’s own driver team has verified specific behaviors in AMD’s drivers that tend to affect certain anisotropic testing tools. Specifically, AMD drivers appear to disable texture filtering optimizations when smaller window sizes are detected, like the AF Tester tool uses, and they enable their optimizations for larger window sizes. The definition of “larger” and “smaller” varies depending on the API and hardware used. For example with DX10 and 68xx boards, it seems they disable optimizations with window sizes smaller than 500 pixels on a side. For DX9 apps like the AF Tester, the limit is higher, on the order of 1000 pixels per side. Our driver team also noticed that the optimizations are more aggressive on RV840/940 than RV870, with optimizations performed across a larger range of LODs for the RV840/940.
via Nvidia Points Finger at AMD’s Image Quality Cheat.
Science amd, nvidia
In the new Harry Potter movie, there’s a great sequence that explains the origin of the “Deathly Hallows”, three enchanted objects given to three brothers in a deal with death. The sequence is a great piece of animation, expertly woven into the tale and the live-action movie, presenting some fantastic detail and style to the wizarding fairy tale.
fxg: The detail in the characters is quite amazing, but what I liked is that you don’t actually see it at first because I think initially you notice them only as silhouettes.
Newton: Yes, it was actually a key thought to make things appear very clearly just by using tonality from light and shade, but we were still conscious of the fact that we didn’t want it to look simple. One of the things we worked out very early on was whether it should be a true three-dimensional production or whether it was to have a fake two-dimensionality to it. A few years back we did a sequence for The Tale of Despereaux, where we created this very interesting flat storybook sequence. We built flat rigs but played with perspective. So we were toying with doing a similar thing here.
via fxguide – vfx knowledge – Framestore: Deathly Hallows Animation.
Graphics animation, framestory, harry potter, vfx
We begin this Daily Viz edition with Voxy‘s popular infographic about the English speaking countries and population, followed by a look at America’s funniest small Town names, by Travel Insurance. We then move on to three different designs about travel and aviation: Fork Party‘s overview of TSA’s security measures, Travel Sort compares Economy and First Class, and Flight Center compiled some Airbus A380 extraordinary facts.
Read more…
Graphics, Science design, economy, environment, infographic, infoviz, Visual Loop, visualizations
Digital Domain has acquired “In-Three” in order to add 2D-to-3D post-conversion to their portfolio of offerings. In-Three did the work for Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland”, a box-office success that raked in over $1 billion worldwide, but was cited as not being the best example of 3D in the theater. That doesn’t deter Digital Domain CEO Cliff Plumer, tho:
“3D stereo movies exploded on the market this year,” added Digital Domain CEO Cliff Plumer. “Alice in Wonderland was a visually amazing 3D immersive experience, and TRON: Legacy will end the year with another dazzling 3D entertainment event. I have known Neil and the talented artists and technologists at In-Three for a long time. We will collaborate to provide the highest quality 3D stereo solutions to filmmakers.”
via Digital Domain Holdings Acquires In-Three.
Graphics 3d, digitaldomain, in three
Another big chunk of deals are gearing up at TigerDirect.com. Many of them won’t officially be available until 11/26 at midnight, but some are already underway. You may notice that they’re actually doing a “Pink” Friday, advocating their donation of $100,000 to the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation to find a cure for Breast Cancer. Some things to see:
- 55″ 1080p LCD Television for $999.99
- 2TB Seagate Barracuda Drive for $99.99
- Quad-Core AMD Phenom X4 (2.5Ghz CPU) for $89.99
- D-Link 2-Bay SATA Network Attached Storage (no drives) for $59.99
- Lots of other networking equipment, monitors, television, computers, and much more.
TigerDirect.com.
Hardware sale
Everything changes with time, and a clever visualization of this comes from William Huber who took every cover of Popular Science from 1882 to 2007 and plotted them in this massive graphic.
By arranging thousands of magazine pages into single high resolution images, we are able to reveal gradual temporal changes over long historical periods.
Data:
Popular Science magazine – one issue per every five years from the beginning of magazine publication.
Timescale:
1882 to 2007.
Mapping:
The issues are arranged in the order of publication (left to right, top to bottom).
via Popular_Science_1882-2007_5_yr_intervals | Flickr – Photo Sharing!.
Graphics magazine
VizWorld.com 
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