At the recent I/ITSEC 2010 conference in Orlando, Virginia-based NVIS virtual reality display manufacturer was demonstrating their wares when they were visited by Michael Bosworth of VR Solutions. VR Solutions creates training tools for the Australian army and several other training facilities across Asia, and took the new nVisor ST50 that was developed for the US Army (shown).
“As a supplier to partners working for the Australian army and various training facilities across Asia, we are always looking to work closely with innovative manufacturers such as NVIS who are able to tailor or deliver products for their intended purpose.”
Read the full press release after the break. (Note: It’s mostly a fluff piece, but worth knowing a few companies if you’re into HMD’s).
NVidia has opened their new 3D Vision Videos website hosting promotional videos, product demos, movie trailers, and lots more all for those lucky folks with the NVidia 3D Vision setup. Requires Silverlight, but it’s a nice offering for those looking to demo 3D content to friends.
Ah, Christmas…. Honestly, is there another season as good as this one? well, I hope you enjoy it as much as I do, here in Brazil – a tropical Christmas is something a bit different, bur surely as fun as a snowy one. So, I collected some recent infographics about the Season, starting with a closer look at the Christmas Tree Industry, from Intuit. After that, the Power of the Holiday Consumer is analyzed by GOOd, and All Culinary Schools‘s history of Christmas cookies. And a couple of funny ones to close this selection: Santa’s insurance costs, by Credit Loan, and Savings.com‘s simulation of Santa’s big saves if he used the system.
Over at Autodesk’s “The Area” they’ve got an article from Bill Ennis on color grading with Flame, Lustre, and Smoke. The result is almost 90 minutes of background on the entire process of using the tools for a complete product.
I call this series “Something for Everyone” because if you’re thinking about cross-grading to Flame Premium – or just want to know more about how it works, you gotta check these out. I worked with my old friend Marc Hamaker to put the videos together with the goal of introducing the benefits of Flame Premium in familiar terms.
Now here’s an interesting announcement right before Christmas. Linden Labs, the company behind Second Life, has just announced a new CEO, and the selection might surprise you: Format EA executive and man behind the scenes of EverQuest and The Sims Rod Humble.
“Rod is a great new leader for Linden Lab,” said Philip Rosedale, Founder of Second Life. “Second Life has become a consistently large and profitable business with a thriving virtual economy built together with its passionate Resident community. This has always been a big, long-term vision, it is still early and there is enormous opportunity for growth. With Rod’s fresh insights and deep experience in creating and leading the development of fun, intuitive, immersive entertainment experiences that have attracted massive audiences of loyal users, he’s the right leader to understand what makes us special and bring the next level of growth to Second Life.”
“Joining Linden Lab is a very exciting opportunity,” said Humble. “I have a long standing interest in the how the boundaries of society and economics change as communications evolve in new ways. Second Life is unique: it sits at the intersection of virtual worlds, avatars, and human contact. The Residents and developers of Second Life have built something very special, I am honored to join the talented team at Linden Lab to help expand this new frontier.”
While I’m glad to see someone with some experience come to the job, I’m a bit nervous that Second Life may turn into a type of open-area Arcade. All in all, I suppose that wouldn’t be all bad but I hope they don’t begin to sacrifice features for the sake of ‘gameplay’.
A group of researchers demonstrated a powerful Stereoscopic 3D photo editor at SIGGRAPH2010 Asia, and the demonstration video is now available online. In the video, they show first a nice object classification system that works on stereo pairs, and then show some amazing cut-n-paste tools they’ve created. The tools can properly correct perspective as you move the objects around, properly handle depth and occlusion, and even add shadows via a real-time ambient occlusion algorithm.
The results are impressive, and really have to be seen to be believed. (PS: You’ll want some Anaglyph glasses handy to really appreciate the later half of the video). Read their paper here.
Eric Alba has a nice roundup of various links and podcasts across the internet that discuss what went right and what went wrong in the VFX industry of 2010.
I’m just gonna say it. If you read the most relevant articles about the visual effects industry this year, it was almost all bad news. That is to say the articles with the most traction seemed to talk about what was commonly known by us in the industry but rarely talked about online. But let me link to something a bit older first, an article by David S. Cohen regarding the state of Visual Effects shops.
I saw this on Twitter today, in my hometown, and had to share. If you don’t see the picture then it’s the sad story of a lonely kid dodging rush hour traffic in downtown Jackson, MS, belonging to a huge family of 9 kids ranging from 5 months to 14 years, in a broken home missing basic utilities like Gas. The guy trying to help has contacts in real estate willing to fix the place up, but they need money for supplies and basic equipment.
So take that little bit of coffee money or Dirty Santa cash and instead use it to help a family that really needs it this holiday season. It gets down to freezing tonight, so time is of the essence here. Give them a call at 601-573-9728 and see how you can help.
2010 is coming to an end, so we’ve selected some retrospective infographics for today. First, Pew Internet‘s summary of Generations online, showing the popularity of internet activities among users of different generations, followed by the 2010 look at Twitter, brought by Flowtown. Then, the State of Cloud Computing, as seen on Daily Infographic, and a fun overview at the best internet memes of the year, by My Space. And, to close this up, a peek at the big games that will be launched next year, from IGN.
Paul Butler got a lot of popularity from his beautiful Facebook Relationship graph, but surprised many people when he let it slip that he made the whole thing using R. Known as a statistics and analysis package, the thought that it could create graphs like that was unexpected. In a new blog post, he covers how he did it.
The solution was to manipulate the drawing order of the lines. I used a simple loop over my data to draw the lines, so it was easy to control which lines are drawn first using order(). I created an ordering based on the length of the lines, so that longer lines were drawn “behind” the shorter, more local lines. Then I used colorRampPalette() to generate a color palette from black to blue to white, and colored the lines according to order they were drawn.
At the recent I/ITSEC 2010 conference in Orlando, Virginia-based NVIS virtual reality display manufacturer was demonstrating their wares when they were visited by Michael Bosworth of VR Solutions. VR Solutions creates training tools for the Australian army and several other training facilities across Asia, and took the new nVisor ST50 that was developed for the US Army (shown).
NVidia has opened their new 3D Vision Videos website hosting promotional videos, product demos, movie trailers, and lots more all for those lucky folks with the 
Ah, Christmas…. Honestly, is there another season as good as this one? well, I hope you enjoy it as much as I do, here in Brazil – a tropical Christmas is something a bit different, bur surely as fun as a snowy one. So, I collected some recent infographics about the Season, starting with a closer look at the Christmas Tree Industry, from 
Over at Autodesk’s “The Area” they’ve got an article from Bill Ennis on color grading with Flame, Lustre, and Smoke. The result is almost 90 minutes of background on the entire process of using the tools for a complete product.
Now here’s an interesting announcement right before Christmas. Linden Labs, the company behind Second Life, has just announced a new CEO, and the selection might surprise you: Format EA executive and man behind the scenes of EverQuest and The Sims Rod Humble.
A group of researchers demonstrated a powerful Stereoscopic 3D photo editor at SIGGRAPH2010 Asia, and the demonstration video is now available online. In the video, they show first a nice object classification system that works on stereo pairs, and then show some amazing cut-n-paste tools they’ve created. The tools can properly correct perspective as you move the objects around, properly handle depth and occlusion, and even add shadows via a real-time ambient occlusion algorithm.
2010 is coming to an end, so we’ve selected some retrospective infographics for today. First, 
Paul Butler got a lot of popularity from 
VizWorld.com 
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