We’ve discussed the impressive capabilities and uses of Forensic Animation in a few previous articles, but a new post up on EzineMark discussed the double-edged sword of some of the higher-end graphics. As television shows like CSI and Bones keep pushing the envelope with high-end high-budget CG effects and videos, real animators find themselves struggling to keep up with juror expectations.
Thanks to the wide spread use of 3D animated computer graphics in television, film, video gaming, etc. jurors today will likely have expectations of a higher degree of realism. Crudely created animations will not be appealing or credible to an audience of jurors today. Poorly rendered animations by inexperienced animators have given this visual tool a bad reputation in some instances.
Then again, if a movie looks “too good” people will think it’s completely a conceptual piece meant to warp their view of the facts.
Because of our movie going experience with special effects, there is a pre-conceived notion that 3D animations are largely products of the animator’s imagination. However, trained forensic animators spends as much as 70% of their project hours on tracking down and verifying the data they are using to re-create the scene. At each and every phase, from building the models and objects to the planned movement of those objects, and the environment they are shown in, every detail must relate and correspond directly with the investigative facts, eyewitness reports, photographs, and expert testimony.
To celebrate the 10th birthday of everyone’s favorite online encyclopedia, JESS3 was brought in to create a short infographic video narrated by Jimmy Wales himself on the creation and growth of the site.
The State of Wikipedia not only explores the rich history and inner-workings of the web-based encyclopedia, but it’s also a celebration of its 10th anniversary. With more than 17 million articles in over 270 languages, Wikipedia has undoubtedly become one of the most visited and relied upon sites on the web today.
The fourth video in our the “State of” series, JESS3 is proud to release The State of Wikipedia as our first video of 2011. And, as if it weren’t good enough, the video features none other than one of the co-founders himself, Jimmy Wales, as the narrator.
At Solidworks World this week, a company presented a new CAD viewing and collaboration tool called ‘CADFaster’. Not too impressive sounding, I know, until you realize it works on the iPad.
CadFaster|Collaborate was specifically developed to dramatically increase collaboration, productivity and effectiveness for Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC), mechanical and plant design firms seeking the fast reading and smooth handling of complex and large CAD data files. The tool is distinguished by its ability to allow distribution, annotation, and real-time co-viewing of diverse 3D designs using portable executable files that include CadFaster’s popular and reliable 3D engine, the fastest and most efficient 3D viewer on the market.
Great deal for those of you looking for storage: Amazon has a sale for the next few hours on a Hitachi 1TB 7200RPM SATAII drive for only $59.96, down from the regular $100 or more. Great for use in something like a Drobo (a 4TB Drobo for only $240!) or just in your workstation. Go get it quick!
The deal’s been going for 45 minutes already, and only 3% are claimed. So they must have a MASSIVE inventory of these things. Either way, the sale ends at 10am Pacific.
The Orion Nebula, also known as Messier 42, is one of the most easily recognisable and best-studied celestial objects. It is a huge complex of gas and dust where massive stars are forming and is the closest such region to the Earth. The glowing gas is so bright that it can be seen with the unaided eye and is a fascinating sight through a telescope. Despite its familiarity and closeness there is still much to learn about this stellar nursery. It was only in 2007, for instance, that the nebula was shown to be closer to us than previously thought: 1350 light-years, rather than about 1500 light-years.
Astronomers have used the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile to observe the stars within Messier 42. They found that the faint red dwarfs in the star cluster associated with the glowing gas radiate much more light than had previously been thought, giving us further insights into this famous object and the stars that it hosts. The data collected for this science project, with no original intention to make a colour image, have now been reused to create the richly detailed picture of Messier 42 shown here.
The image is a composite of several exposures taken through a total of five different filters. Light that passed through a red filter as well as light from a filter that shows the glowing hydrogen gas, were coloured red. Light in the yellow–green part of the spectrum is coloured green, blue light is coloured blue and light that passed through an ultraviolet filter has been coloured purple. The exposure times were about 52 minutes through each filter.
It’s been roughly a year since the earthquake in Haiti, arguably last year’s major catastrophe, and the Knight Foundation shows us the tech used to help in the country’s recovery. We move on to a couple of infographics about Africa: a look at the continent’s main Ethnolinguistic groups, from The New York Times, and GOOD‘s piece on the quest to bring energy to the African countries. To close this round-up, all about LTE, by Gigaom, and the look at the life cycle of a tire Environmental Effect, brought by Rubberecycle.
Venkatraman.S has a new prototype visualization technique he calls ‘ChronoDrop’, an interesting combination of timelines and spatial maps to represent the timing of certain events across various timelines.
I always liked Subway Maps – they are easy to understand and also look visually pleasing. And then i stumbled on the following visualization wherein Subway Maps are used to show the Acquisitions that Google had made over the past few years. The graph does look good, and shows the domain of the firm by color coding the ‘route’.
But this graph suffers from a BIG defect : it does not show the ‘time’ factor; as in, we do not know the sequence in which Google acquired the companies. Also, it does not show the amount shelled out by Google in acquiring each of the firms. And I wanted to rectify this by choosing a better medium.
Robert Kosara has a great piece on what he thinks will happen in the field of Information Visualization this year, and it’s a bit of a surprise. It won’t be algorithms, it won’t be The Cloud, it won’t even be open data: It will be Microsoft’s IE9.
But another development will actually be much more important: Internet Explorer 9. What has held back visualization so far is that no version of IE supports SVG or Canvas. Later this year, IE 9 will be released, which not only includes that support, but also has a hardware-supported implementation of Canvas. Practically all other browsers already support Canvas, but some are still behind on the performance part. That is likely to change very soon.
CoolInfographics brings us this great chart of RottenTomatoes scores of several movies and their sequels, trying to determine which movies have Great sequels vs garbage sequels. I also agree with this comment on the design:
I especially like turning the chart 45°, which puts the best score possible for a sequel to improve on the original at the top center of the chart. If both the original and the sequel scored high, the bubbles are located towards the right instead of the top. I’ve done this with a number of 2×2 quadrant charts for clients.
Every visualization scientist knows that while we enjoy creating the visualizations, the bulk of our time is spent in finding, processing, and formatting the data into some usable form. Over at ProPublica they have a nice comprehensive series on various tools, applications, and SDK’s for handling data in a wide variety of formats.
These recipes may be most helpful to journalists who are trying to learn programming and already know the basics. If you’re already an experienced programmer, you might learn about a new library or tool you haven’t tried yet.
If you are a complete novice and have no short-term plan to learn how to code, it may still be worth your time to find out about what it takes to gather data by scraping web sites — so you know what you’re asking for if you end up hiring someone to do the technical work for you.
We’ve discussed the impressive capabilities and uses of Forensic Animation in a few previous articles, but a new post up on EzineMark discussed the double-edged sword of some of the higher-end graphics. As television shows like CSI and Bones keep pushing the envelope with high-end high-budget CG effects and videos, real animators find themselves struggling to keep up with juror expectations.
To celebrate the 10th birthday of everyone’s favorite online encyclopedia, JESS3 was brought in to create a short infographic video narrated by Jimmy Wales himself on the creation and growth of the site.
At Solidworks World this week, a company presented a new CAD viewing and collaboration tool called ‘CADFaster’. Not too impressive sounding, I know, until you realize it works on the iPad.
Great deal for those of you looking for storage: Amazon has a sale for the next few hours on a Hitachi 1TB 7200RPM SATAII drive for only $59.96, down from the regular $100 or more. Great for use in something like a Drobo (a 4TB Drobo for only $240!) or just in your workstation. Go get it quick!
It’s been roughly a year since the earthquake in Haiti, arguably last year’s major catastrophe, and the 
CoolInfographics brings us this great chart of RottenTomatoes scores of several movies and their sequels, trying to determine which movies have Great sequels vs garbage sequels. I also agree with this comment on the design:
Every visualization scientist knows that while we enjoy creating the visualizations, the bulk of our time is spent in finding, processing, and formatting the data into some usable form. Over at ProPublica they have a nice comprehensive series on various tools, applications, and SDK’s for handling data in a wide variety of formats.
VizWorld.com 
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