VizWorld.com

The 7th International Symposium on Visual Computing (ISVC11) is now accepting papers and proposals for their upcoming event in Las Vegas next September.  Covering just about everything visualization, it’s a pretty sizable event that’s pretty competitive.

ISCV seeks papers describing contributions to the state of the art and state of the practice in the  field of visual computing. The symposium is structured around the four central areas of visual computing:  (1) computer vision, (2) computer graphics, (3) virtual reality, and (4) visualization. In particular, we  are interested in papers that combine technologies from two or more of these areas.

Deadline for papers is May 20th, but they also have an opening for “Special Tracks”, but you’ve only got until March 14th (Tax Day!) for that.

International Symposium on Visual Computing.

Science conference, isvc

Quick reminder here, CG animated series ‘Cat Shit One’ is now available on BluRay and DVD, and (for the next 2 weeks only) available for viewing on YouTube.

Dear All,

My name is Junya Okabe, the producer for the film, “CAT SHIT ONE”. Please allow me to deliver this genuine message.
The film has yet to surpass the production cost and we saw more potential for the content in the U.S. than in Japan. We dubbed the entire film in English by casting American voice actors. Even after all the obstacles, we have managed to finalize the English version of our investment.

We must now make this project a huge hit!
We already have countless new projects in line, such as a new character merchandizing project, created by Japanese production companies, to air online for free once this project succeeds. However, we do not have budget for it.

I’m watching it now.  It’s action packed, and the animation is pretty well done.  The dubbing is pretty bad (not the best voice actors, and the lip-syncing is all off) but it’s a fun 22-minute watch. Even though it is bunnies, it’s not for kids as the bullets, blood, and violence is pretty serious. If you want to support a great independent project, then buy it via one of Amazon links.

Cat Shit One “DVD・Blu-ray”.

Science cg, short

NASA’s twin STEREO probes have finally moved into position around the sun, giving us real-time complete coverage of what’s going on both the visible and hidden side of our closest star.

“With data like these, we can fly around the sun to see what’s happening over the horizon—without ever leaving our desks,” says STEREO program scientist Lika Guhathakurta at NASA headquarters. “I expect great advances in theoretical solar physics and space weather forecasting.”

The information so far has been impressive, and promises lots of new insight into how the sun works and its effects on various earth systems like tsunamis and magnetics.

via NASA – First Ever STEREO Images of the Entire Sun.

Science nasa, space, stereo

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) collaborated with the Department of Energy Nanoscale Science Research Centers and MIT to create some new hardware and software for imaging nanoscale structures smaller than the wavelength of light.

In parallel with Schuck’s experimental findings, Jeff Neaton, Director of the Molecular Foundry ’s Theory of Nanostructured Materials Facility and Alex McLeod, an undergraduate student working at the Foundry, developed a web-based toolkit, designed to calculate images of plasmonic devices with open-source software developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For this study, the researchers simulated adjusting the structure of a double bowtie antenna by a few nanometers to study how changing the size and symmetry of a plasmonic antenna affects its optical properties.

The article is a bit light on any more details, but they’ve created an interesting looking web-based visualization tool to see the results, combined with some interesting imaging hardware.  They have a paper publishing their results in Physical Review Letters called “Non-perturbative visualization of nanoscale plasmonic field distributions via photon localization microscopy” that you can get here (purchase required).

If you find the paper elsewhere, let me know!

via Berkeley Lab Team Uses New Imaging Concept to Visualize Plasmonic Fields at Nanoscale. and the LBL Website

Science doe, imaging, nanotechnology, research, whitepaper

One of the most important weekends for sports fan has passed, but there was a lot of infographics previewing it, so we bring today some of our favorites – and there were a lot more! Firts, Fixr told us how to throw a great Super Bowl party, then FastCompany showed how much energy was used while watching the broadcast. From Turbo tax came a breakdown of both teams, iStrategy Labs brought the team rivalries according to Facebook, and, to close this round-up, MySpace made a timeline of Super Bowl halftime performances.

Read more…

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

The Ultimate Fans Guide to Super Bowls

Graphics, Science digest, infographics, list

A new whitepaper from Intel brings in some statistics and stories from Luxology, Luxion, and Modo on the power of CPU’s for ray-tracing and how they can smoke any GPU on the market with CPU-only solutions.

“Modern GPUs offer a brute force solution to ray tracing, but the memory available to GPUs is relatively limited compared to the system memory available to 64-bit CPUs such as Intel Core i7 and Xeon processors. That means that GPUs typically can’t handle the huge scene files required in full-scale production rendering, which may involve tens of millions of polygons and hundreds of high-resolution texture maps. And CPUs offer greater flexibility in terms of shading complexity and plug-in shaders, which may or may not have been ported to run on a GPU.”

These are the same arguments I’ve been hearing for the last year or so.  And I have to admit they’re right, if not a bit short-sighted.  It’s my belief that most of the arguments they use are going to fall apart soon.

• They always talk about the power of Moore’s law in CPU’s.  Well, that same law applies to GPU’s too, they’re going to get faster just like CPU’s will.  Even more so, most likely, as they not only optimize individual cores but add more cores as a rate exponential to CPU’s.
• They always talk about Memory limitations.  There was a time where CPU’s had rather restrictive memory limitations (the fabled “640k is enough for anyone” comment?).  GPU’s will continue to grow in memory.  In fact, Sandy Bridge and Fusion offer the first step towards eliminating the distinction between GPU and CPU memory.
• They always talk about the limited instruction set.  This one isn’t likely to change, and will always be a hindrance to GPU computing.  However, newer algorithms come along at a steady pace showing that you don’t really need the type of complex branching mechanisms of CPU’s, since the GPU has enough horsepower to just compute both sides of the condition and drop the unnecessary one.

In fact, I think within the next 5 years we may see the distinction between CPU and GPU disappear almost entirely, as they both wind up on the same die (similar to how Processor and Math Co-Processor eventually merged several years ago).

It’s a good whitepaper tho, full of some concrete numbers on attempts to GPU-ize code unsuccessfully and benefits achieved from using some of Intel’s newest CPU-optimization technology.

Check it out, and see what you think?

via Why CPU is better than GPU for rendering from Intel with Luxology, Keyshot and Maxwell. – SolidSmack.com.

Science cpu, gpu, intel, luxion, luxology, modo, whitepaper

This week at Strata, Stanford announced a new app called “Data Wrangler” to make cleaning data easier.  Looking very similar to the previously discussed “Google Refine“, it allows you to quickly and easily reformat and clean data for import into Excel, R, Tableau, and Protovis.

You can read about the creation of the tool in this Whitepaper.  Unlike Google Refine’s design of “Search for data, then Clean it as a batch”, DataWrangler seems to work on something called the “Wrangler Transformation Language” which looks a bit like SQL.  Two different methods to achieve the same result, I guess only time will tell which one wins.

Watch the demo below.

Wrangler Demo Video from Stanford Visualization Group on Vimeo.

Data Wrangler.

Science datawrangler, software, stanford, strata

A new competitor to SpeedTree is on the horizon in a tool called “Woody3D”.  Fully animated tree generation and rendering with just a click of a button, and it now comes complete with C++ and SDK code to allow you to link it into any application of your choosing.  The new version even comes with a free license allowing you to “try before you buy”, really giving you no reason not to at least give it a shot.

If you decide to buy, it’s available for $99 with a license that allows 2 PC’s per seat, and an unlimited number of applications (Although a commercial license is required for apps grossing over $250k)

Hit their website for all the details and downloads.

Woody3D – Real-Time 3D Tree Engine.

Graphics sdk, software, woody3d

Over in the GameDev forums, a user has posted some code and a nice technical paper on coding up a Torrance-Sparrow shader for BRDF lighting calculation.  Many people opt for the simple Lambertian models due to their speed and simplicity, but the Torrance-Sparrow model has some nice features that make it attractive.

Many game developers fail at getting their implementation to behave well because the model has some nasty divisions by terms which tend toward zero. In the theoretical model this is not supposed to happen but in computer graphics it does for various reasons. For instance the GPU will back-face cull a primitive in a way which gives results similar to using the face normal for culling. However, we don’t shade using the face normal. This means v_dot_n in the denominator will in practice become zero when using normal maps (and even interpolated vertex normals). Simply checking if the term is close to zero and then setting it to something else isn’t going to work either because this makes the lighting behave in a discontinuous fashion which is bad too. So care must be taken to get the right limit value.

via Finally nailing the Torrance-Sparrow shader once and for all. – GameDev.net.

Science algorithm, lighting