A pair of new plugins from AR-Media allow you to view your Sketchup & 3dsModels in Augmented Reality space. In addition to simply viewing the models, they’ve added some impressive Object Occluding technology that I’ld like to know more. You use their plugins to convert your models or scenes into their proprietary format, and then you just need their freely available ‘ARMedia Player’ to view the models.
The bundle provides users with an advanced visualization functionality which serves two main purposes in the design life cycle:
Help to study and analyze virtual prototypes in real environments
Communicate 3D projects immersively and astonishingly
All you need to make AR-media™ Plugin work is a personal computer, a webcam and a printed code attached to the software. A wide range of Head Mounted Displays, including the Vuzix® CamAR, eMagin, i-glasses™ are also supported.
For folks in product design this could be a great tool. You can download trial versions of the plugins from their site. See the demonstration video below.
Mashable has posted their “19 Best Infographics of 2010″, focusing heavily (of course) on the ones they’ve commissioned over the last year. Most of these are the same kind of digg-bait we’ve come to hate like “FarmVille vs Real Farms” and such, but it’s some decent eye-candy.
Research can sometimes be a bit of a chore, but when knowledge is wrapped up in charts, cartoons, or even some heart-holding robots, suddenly “information” isn’t such a scary word.
What do Facebook’s 500 million users look like? Who’s suing whom in the mobile world? How does FarmVille stack up against actual farms? These questions and more are answered in the infographics below.
Have a look through the list and let us know which graphics you liked best (or learned the most from) in the comments below.
Michael Ciarlo has a great visual depiction of the internet now and how it could wind up given the current state of Net Neutrality law. Without regulations keeping the internet open and nondiscriminatory, he visualizes the way that ISP’s could suddenly start charging per-pageview or impacting performance on competing services (Eg. Comcast could charge you extra for using Hulu instead of their own Fancast site).
I created TheOpenInter.net to depict a time in the future when ISPs control the Internet and all data is not downloaded equally. While creating the site’s design, I had the idea to bundle Netflix and Hulu as a package ISPs required you to buy. Halfway through development, I questioned the reality of my portrayal. Was I too far off-base? Then to my surprise a Wired article titled “Mobile Carriers Dream of Charging per Page” showed almost the exact same scenario. While there is no documentation within the article to prove wireless carriers have any current plans to implement a similar pricing structure, the fact that evidence exists to suggest its consideration is frightening.
It’s a great visualization, all built on a single very-tall webpage with HTML and CSS.
NVidia’s been pretty vocal over the last year with things like Parallel Nsight for Visual Studio and other impressive tools for debugging GPU and CUDA code under Windows, but OSX has been left out. No more is that the case as NVidia just squeaks under the 2010 timeframe with a beta of ‘cuda-gdb’ for OSX.
cuda-gdb works just like gdb, extending existing gdb commands like thread, print, step, etc. to work naturally with GPGPU programming constructs. Additional GPU specific commands like info cuda threads, info cuda warps and info cuda devices, and more provide deeper insight into how your code is being executed on the GPU. cuda-gdb also works great within Emacs and DDD.
Here’s an interesting paper from IEEE Pacific Graphics 2010 on a new gpu-accelerated real-time Mesh Subdivision algorithm that adds lighting and shading effects along with impressive smoothness.
We propose a new GPU method for synthesizing subdivision meshes with exact adaptive geometry in real time. Our GPU kernel builds upon precomputed tables of basis functions for subdivision surfaces and is therefore supporting all subdivision schemes, either interpolating or approximating, for triangle or quad meshes. We designed our kernel so that it can be integrated seamlessly within a standard tessellation pipeline, exploiting software or hardware (adaptive) tessellation methods. We make use of the tessellator unit as an adaptive mesher for maximum subdivision level, exploiting the linear nature of subdivision surfaces to enable arbitrary level of detail adaptivity and %extend the idea of Subdivision Shading to control the visual smoothness using the same tables as control the visual smoothness using Subdivision Shading by applying the same tables as for geometry. We evaluate our kernel on a variety of dynamic meshes and compare it to subdivision substitutes.
Check out the demo video below, and then hit their site to download the demo or the paper.
Over at the BlenderArtists forums, ‘ndee’ offered up a nice free model for anyone working with Blender and Pirates.
Hey everybody,
I want to introduce Flick. This is my latest work in Blender. I want to publish her under creative commons 3.0.(Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported) Special thanks goes to DennyLindberg for his wonderfull rig Biff. I learned alot from this rig! I hope you will get some use for her.
Fully posable, and even with an articulated FaceRig, it’s worth checking out. Get it here.
Earlier this year we told you that a La Niña event was starting to occur. A La Niña event is when the water is cool across the equatorial Pacific Ocean. An El Niño event is when the water is warm across the equatorial Pacific Ocean, and is the opposite of a La Niña. These two events are important because both the La Niña and El Niño can affect weather systems across the Pacific Rim and beyond. Both events are commonly called the El Niño/La Niña-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO.
In the image to the right, we can see where cool water (shown in blue), stretches across the equatorial region of the Pacific Ocean. Earlier this year it is not a uniform deep blue, and instead had pockets of warm water contained within it. Now the image shows a strong, uniform deep blue indicating a strong La Niña event.
La Niña’s cold water signal is strong in the top two images. The left image shows ocean surface temperatures on December 15, 2010, as measured by the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. In December 2010, sea surface temperatures were colder than average across the equatorial Pacific.
TechPowerUp has a great little Christmas gift to all the ATI fans in the community: Through a simply BIOS hack, you can turn your 6950 into a 6970, enabling some of those disabled cores.
Unlocking the additional shaders is done by flashing the card with a HD 6970 BIOS. You can find a few in our VGA BIOS collection. Any of these BIOSes will work on any reference design HD 6950 card. You could use the ASUS BIOS which comes with higher clocks & Overdrive limits and enables voltage changes via SmartDoctor, or stick with one of the reference BIOSes in case you are afraid the clocks might be too high.
They have a pretty comprehensive review of the results, showing a substantial power boost at the cost of overdriving the power a bit. As an added bonus, if you ever want to go back (or accidentally hose the BIOS flash), AMD has a great new feature onboard to let you revert to the previous version!
Hope you all had a great Christmas, and to help you hold onto that Christmas spirit just a little bit longer, watch this impressive Stereoscopic (anaglyphic) video on Youtube of the Magical Starlight Parade at the Universal Studios Japan theme park.
In this3D recording 7-14 mm (14-28 mm 35 mm equivaent) wide zoom lenses were used for better image quality. Original file is of full HD side-by side (3840×1080) and YouTube re-encoded mp4 version is downloadable from Original (top of the Resolution tag of YT3D player.
Cinnafilm, the amazing GPU-accelerated film conversion and cleaning company I first ran into at GTC, has just released a new 4th generation of their products, and now offers them globally through a new network of resellers and distributors. It’s still raking in the accolades, like this:
High profile cinematographers like Shane Hurlbut, ASC, have affirmed the benefits of using Dark Energy Texture Manager to perfect DSLR acquired images. 16mm content can be “cleaned” for high-def cable providers without losing any detail or sharpness. Lance Maurer, President of Cinnafilm, said, “Superb images, no loss of detail, near real-time processing for 2k files, and simplified ease of use. There is simply no faster or more accurate solution for denoise/degrain than Dark Energy Texture Manager.”
A pair of new plugins from AR-Media allow you to view your Sketchup & 3dsModels in Augmented Reality space. In addition to simply viewing the models, they’ve added some impressive Object Occluding technology that I’ld like to know more. You use their plugins to convert your models or scenes into their proprietary format, and then you just need their freely available ‘ARMedia Player’ to view the models.
Mashable has posted their “19 Best Infographics of 2010″, focusing heavily (of course) on the ones they’ve commissioned over the last year. Most of these are the same kind of digg-bait we’ve come to hate like “FarmVille vs Real Farms” and such, but it’s some decent eye-candy.
Michael Ciarlo has a great visual depiction of the internet now and how it could wind up given the current state of Net Neutrality law. Without regulations keeping the internet open and nondiscriminatory, he visualizes the way that ISP’s could suddenly start charging per-pageview or impacting performance on competing services (Eg. Comcast could charge you extra for using Hulu instead of their own Fancast site).
NVidia’s been pretty vocal over the last year with things like Parallel Nsight for Visual Studio and other impressive tools for debugging GPU and CUDA code under Windows, but OSX has been left out. No more is that the case as NVidia just squeaks under the 2010 timeframe with a beta of ‘cuda-gdb’ for OSX.
Over at the BlenderArtists forums, ‘ndee’ offered up a nice free model for anyone working with Blender and Pirates.
Hope you all had a great Christmas, and to help you hold onto that Christmas spirit just a little bit longer, watch this impressive Stereoscopic (anaglyphic) video on Youtube of the Magical Starlight Parade at the Universal Studios Japan theme park.
Cinnafilm, the amazing GPU-accelerated film conversion and cleaning company 
VizWorld.com 
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