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Darth Vader and his Stormtroopers invaded Panasonic’s booth at CES 2011 and have made the following announcement. Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox will be releasing the complete Star Wars saga, that is all 6 Star Wars films, to BluRay in September 2011. This will be billed as the 35th anniversary collection, since the first film was originally released on May 25, 1977. You might think that the six films will come on six BluRay disks. You would be wrong. Instead it will come on nine disks and feature more than 30 hours of extras. The cost for the entire six films is $139.99. The cost for either the original trilogy or the prequel trilogy is about $70. Right now on Amazon they have the original trilogy on BluRay for $44.99 with the prequel trilogy at the same price. Amazon has the complete saga for $89.99.

Don’t forget, that in 2012 we will also be treated to seeing Star Wars in 3-D at the movie theaters. The first film to be released will be Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.

via : The Digital Bits

Press Release after the break:

Read more…

Graphics lucas, lucasfilm, star wars

If you’ve ever been to one of Edward Tufte’s seminars, you were probably caught off guard when the whitecoats begin moving through the aisles, carrying ancient manuscripts from the likes of Galileo and Playfair that are the original books of what he’s showing on overhead slides.  It’s a powerful experience that amazing everyone in the room.

However, on December 2nd, Edward Tufte put his impressive collection of historical books and art up for auction at Christies.  Bioephemera describes the auction:

There appear to be 160 lots; Tufte’s website describes it as “200 rare books, including major works in the history of science, statistical graphics, 20th-century artists books, ET artworks, Sidereus Nuncius (1610), Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499).” Apparently Tufte intends to use the proceeds to fund his gallery ET Modern, among other art projects.

Unfortunately, I didn’t know about this earlier.  You can view the “Catalog” of the auction at this link.

ET went on his own website to discuss why he put these masterpieces up for auction:

Great books foster, transmit, and preserve forever knowledge. The books in my research library were always meant to be used: read, skimmed, read aloud, exhibited, photographed, scanned, shared, treasured. And thus my library, which I thought of as The Museum of Cognitive Art, participated intensely in my research, scholarship, writing, teaching, design, artwork. For 30 years, the workaday presence of these wonderful books in my life was inspiring and challenging.

If you want to know what they went for, hit this link at Christies.  In total, it looks like he made a smooth $1.8Mil, with Galileo’s ‘Sidereus nuncius magna, longeque admirabilia’ bringing in $662,500.

via Edward Tufte auctions off his library : bioephemera.

Science auction, books, historic, tufte

One of the problems with the whole 3-D fad that I mentioned in 2010 was the fact that there as a lack of 3-D content available. Specifically, there is a lack of 3-D movies. What good is a 3-D high definition television set if there is nothing to watch on it. Now, if there was only a way to convert regular 2-D movies into 3-D, then that would be a selling point. Imagine taking the new Star Wars BluRay collection, which is in 2-D, and watching it in 3-D.

The Digital Bits is reporting that Panasonic has done just that. Panasonic is releasing three new full 3-D BluRay player models. The DMP-BDT310, DMP-BDT210 and DMP-BDT110 will all be able to convert 2-D content from DVDs and BluRay into 3-D by using “natural depth perception”. This is a user adjustable effect which will allow you to increase or decrease the amount of depth in the movie.

Each model also includes the usual VIERA CAST Internet options (Netflix, Amazon VOD, You Tube, Pandora, twitter, Bloomberg News and weather info), which now feature Skype (a Skype button has now been added to the players’ remotes). All have ultra-quick playback and the two two models, the DMP-BDT310 and DMP-BDT210, have built-in WiFi and a Touch-Free sensor to open and close the disc tray in a dark room.

Prices and availability are unknown at this point.

via : The Digital Bits

Hardware 3d, bluray, panasonic

To generate some buzz for the 4th Ice Age Movie “Continental Drift”, 20th Century Fox and Blue Sky Studios created a new short with everyone’s favorite little squirrel Scrat who remains in pursuit of that same acorn.  Shown first along with Gulliver’s Travels, it’s now online for all to view.

See it embedded below.

Ice Age Short Scrat’s Continental Crack-Up Now Online – ComingSoon.net.

Graphics animation, blue sky studios, short

Today’s selection of 2010 infographics recaps will be focusing on some companies and services that released recently some interesting numbers. Such is the case of Add This, Mashable, Shopify and Flattr. And the last one is a surprisingly piece about the milestones of Open Source in Jordan, during 2010, brought by The Jordan Open Source Association.

Read more…

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

TrueVision, a company that makes stereoscopic 3D visualization systems for operating and surgical uses, has just received 510k clearance on it’s newest 3D Visualization and Guidance System.  The 510k is the final step in making the product usable in widespread medical environments in the US, marking a huge step:  3d Stereoscopic Imagery is now accepted and approved by the US as a suitable means of visualizing human anatomy in the OR.

“This groundbreaking innovation is the first of its kind representing a new generation of computer guidance tools for interactive surgery,” Forrest Fleming, CEO of TrueVision, said in the release. “We are very encouraged by what our initial clinical studies have shown using on-screen guidance for several important aspects of refractive cataract surgery.”

TrueVision receives 510(k) clearance to market 3-D visualization system.

Hardware biomed, stereoscopic, truevision

Enrico Bertini’s blog “Fell in Love with Data” (if you don’t read it, GO NOW it’s fantastic you’ll thank me later) has an article up about the two disciplines Data Mining and Data Visualization.  Frequently at odds over methods and practices, he postulates that in fact the two are necessarily interrelated, in fact two sides of the same coin.

I think it’s no mystery that in some way or another visualization and data mining have always been, and still are, somewhat in competition. The way I see it is that from the one hand dataminers see visualization as a too soft discipline, lacking of enough formalism and with the big original sin of having very poor evaluation methods in its toolbox. From the other hand visualizers think data mining is too rigid and narrowly focussed on a plethora of insignificant small deltas to algorithms that nobody will ever understand.

It makes perfect sense once you think of it.  The first step in any Data Visualization is to Get and Clean the data: a perfect Data Mining task.  When you’re cleaning the data, the easiest way to do so is typically visually: A perfect Data Visualization task.

via Why Visualization Cannot Afford Ignoring Data Mining and Vice Versa — Fell in Love with Data.

Science data mining, visualization

NVidia has today announced a new project codenamed “Project Denver” that looks to steal back a bit of the mojo Intel and AMD have packed into their Sandy Bridge and Fusion products.  Combining their previous Tegra expertise with ARM processors, they’re looking to develop their own compute core that can work on anything from Mobile Phones to Supercomputers.

This new processor stems from a strategic partnership, also announced today, in which NVIDIA has obtained rights to develop its own high performance CPU cores based on ARM’s future processor architecture. In addition, NVIDIA licensed ARM’s current Cortex™-A15 processor for its future-generation Tegra® mobile processors.

It’s an ambition gamble, but they are sharing a mindset with Steve Jobs here:  The future of computers isn’t in desktops, but rather in “the cloud”: High-speed access from small portable devices to bigger computational assets elsewhere.

Now, if they can just convince all those “clouds” to run ARM.. You know, the clouds made of lots of computers.  hrm..

via NVIDIA Newsroom.

Hardware arm, nvidia, tegra

ArtVPS has a new promotional competition out for their Shaderlight for SketchUp tool.  Simply model a “3D Winter Wonderland” with SketchUp and render it with ShaderLight, and you could win a $150 Amazon Voucher with a free copy of ShaderLight and Sketchup Pro.

Get creative and visualize your very own Winter Wonderland in Google SketchUp and render it with Shaderlight – and you could win yourself some cracking Christmas gifts!

So whether you’re dreaming of a white Christmas or love the festive lights, let your imagination ride with Santa’s sleigh and create your very own interpretation of this festive theme. It can be anything you like – architectural, product or just picture postcard!

Get the full Rules and Details at their site.

Graphics artvps, contest, shaderlight, sketchup

Fast Company posts the (they call it “Controversial”, but I think it’s pretty obvious to anyone in the Visualization space) stance that “Infographics have jumped the shark”.  Speaking about the recent deluge of beautiful pictures that combines lots of information, but in the end leave you wondering what you were supposed to be learning from it.

It seems to me that that’s exactly what an infographic does best: Wrap a bunch of not-so-interesting content in a bow that’s pretty enough that you take your attention off what’s inside and instead focus on the pretty bow. Oooohh … Pretty. Look at that chart. Look how big they made that number. Which makes me wonder what the real content of an infographic is. I suspect it’s something like: “Hey, we’re smart and with it and super in touch with what’s going on on the web, that’s how we knew all the kids were doing data viz.” That’s what the big companies who are throwing them up on the web are doing

via Infographics Have Jumped the Shark | Fast Company.

Graphics infographic