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via Discover which apocalyptic nightmare is right for you in this flowchart.

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infographics

I must confess, I’ve loved the recent seasons of Doctor Who.  While David Tennant left some huge shoes to fill, Matt Smith has really stepped up and I found this most recent season just fantastic to watch.  Culminating in the epic story of the Opening of Pandorica, the season was helped along with some expert VFX work done by “The Mill”.  In a new video on It’s Art, they discuss how they created some of the iconic shots.

I couldn’t figure out how to embed the video, so click the link below to go check it out.

VFX : The Making of Doctor Who series 5 by The Mill.

Graphics makingof, television, the mill, vfx

via Treadmill workouts infographics.

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infographics biomed

NVidia is happy to announce to day that the “professional” Version of their popular 3DVision system is now available for purchase.  Replacing their existing shutter glasses with RF-powered shutter glasses, it opens their use to massive auditoriums, eliminating line-of-sight issues and enables multiple displays to be used in a single area via careful pairing of each pair of glasses to a single display.

3D Vision Pro glasses and Quadro graphics provide an easy to use, robust solution for driving 3D visualizations on a range of display options, from a single desktop panel to massive, multi-projector power wall or CAVE.

This unique 3D solution combines 3D Vision Pro active shutter glasses and a robust radio-based control hub with 120Hz panels and projectors. Professionals can design, create and explore in stereoscopic 3D enabling collaborative workflows that dramatically speed up time to insight.

I’ve had the chance to try these at SC10 and SIGGRAPH2010, and they really are much better than the IR alternative.  They had 3 or 4 stations set up side by side, and the glasses were synced to only work with a single monitor.  That’s really not possible with IR glasses.

However, they’re a bit pricey.  Each pair of glasses will set you back $349 USD, and the RF Hub (a required part for each station) is $399, leading to deals like this PNY Hub+Glasses offer for $750.

via 3D Vision Pro for Professionals.

Hardware 3d vision, nvidia, stereoscopic

It’s been almost 18 months, but the animated short ‘Cat Shit One’, the epic tale of two bunnies in wartime, is now coming to English audiences for free viewing on YouTube this February.

A group of desert terrorists kidnap civilians. A team of rabbit commandos, Packy and Botasky, from the Carrot Military Service, a private military company, witness a murder of an escaping hostage. Afraid that the rest of the hostages will undergo the same situation, the team demands backup. However, the backup arrival time will be too late for the hostages. ‘Their lives are in our hands!’  Without any other options, the rabbit commandos charge for the enemy line on their own.

The film hasn’t performed as well as hoped in it’s native country of Japan, but seems it could do quite well here stateside.  Check out the new english trailer below, and you’ll be able to see it on Youtube and buy it on BluRay and DVD via Amazon next week.  The animation is good, but the lip-syncing is a bit off (probably due to the translation). Skip to the 1:20 mark to bypass the opening promo for some action figures.

Graphics animation, short

We all know that big companies make the big investments, when it comes to advertising, but with GOOD‘s infographic it becomes pretty clear which ones ruled 2010. Hubspot breaks down the numbers behind Social Media Marketing , and Site Jabber answers an intriguing question: does age affect Web use? From The Grasshopper Group comes the history of the internet, and Zone Alarm advises everyone not to use any of the passwords shown on their latest infographic.

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

Here is a cute 3-D film from Indiana University. Break out your red/cyan glasses and take a look at it.

A grumpy old couple go to a park for an enjoyable afternoon only to encounter unexpected interruptions.

This 3D stereoscopic film is from the first round of projects from Indiana University’s debut Stereoscopic Digital Production workshop, offered through the Department of Telecommunications.

Directed by Jon Stante, produced by Joseph Toth, stereography by Derek Quinn, and edited by Sophie Parkison. Special thanks to Kate Braun, Greg Ellis, Frank Buczolich, and the Bloomington Cutters soccer team.

Graphics 3d

The Nintendo 3DS will be released over the next couple of months. The beauty of this Nintendo 3DS is that it requires no glasses to use, and you still get the 3-D effect while playing games.

As we have reported in the past, the Nintendo 3DS will be available in Japan on February 26th at a price of ¥25,000 (Japanese Yen). The Nintendo 3DS consoles will be available in Europe on March 25th with a price of €249.99 (Euro). Just two days later, on March 27th, the North American market will get the Nintendo 3DS for $249.99 USD.

The Nintendo 3DS system will come with two screens. The lower screen will be touch sensitive. The upper screen will use autostereoscopic 3-D. One interesting feature of the upper screen is that there will be a physical slider that a person can use to adjust the depth of the images in 3-D mode. In addition, the Nintendo 3DS will come with dual cameras allowing you to take photos in 3-D. You can already preorder the Nintendo 3DS from Amazon.

Hardware 3d, nintendo

General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) is very popular right now, and NVIDIA has the lead in this arena with their Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). While in the future, it looks like people will be moving from CUDA, which is proprietary to NVIDIA, to OpenCL, which should be available from a variety of vendors including NVIDIA. Right now, NVIDIA has the lead over rivals with CUDA.

However, there is a serious security bug in the NVIDIA CUDA Linux drivers that allows one user to read the files of another user. NVIDIA already knows about it, and has a patch available for it. It looks like the 270.18 beta drivers will have the patch, but you should want to check just to make sure.

We have recently found serious security breach in CUDA Linux drivers. The problem is related to cudaHostAlloc/cuMemHostAlloc API calls. In brief, driver maps pinned memory to user space but does not initialize it to zero. As an example, our simplest “proof of concept” program was able to read large fragments of files being written or read by other users.

via : Serious security issue with CUDA on Linux Serious security issue with CUDA on Linux

Hardware cuda, gpgpu, nvidia

Last year, NVIDIA told the world about its upcoming GPUs in 2011 and 2013. These GPUs are codenamed Kepler and Maxwell, respectively. Kepler will be released sometime in 2011, and will be manufactured on a 28nm process. Kepler would be approximately 2.7 times faster than the Fermi C2070.

The follow-on GPU to Kepler will be the Maxwell. Maxwell will be released sometime in 2013, and will be manufactured on a 22nm process. Maxwell is approximately 7.6 times faster than the Fermi C2070.

NVIDIA has also told us about Project Denver, which combines a GPU and an ARM CPU in one. The question is, when will that be available? Will it be on Kepler, or will it be on Maxwell? Hexus.net has provided the answer in an interview with NVIDIA’s Tegra General Manager, Mike Rayfield .

Lastly we asked about Project Denver: the surprising announcement that NVIDIA will be designing a CPU in partnership with ARM, with a view to using it in high-end computers. We asked Rayfield to elaborate.

“As well as licensing Cortex A15, we also have an architectural license with ARM to produce an extremely high performance ARM CPU, which be combined with NVIDA GPUs for super-computing,” he said. When we asked for timescales, Rayfield revealed: “The Maxwell generation will be the first end-product using Project Denver. This is a far greater resource investment for us than just licensing a design.”

Hexus also speculates that NVIDIA may launch Tegra 3 at Mobile World Congress next month. Tegra is, of course, a system-on-a-chip developed for mobile devices such as smartphones

via : Exclusive: NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 primed for MWC launch @ Hexus.net

Hardware arm, cpu, denver, gpgpu, gpu, hpc, maxwell, nvidia