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The SIGGRAPH2011 committee has announced the first Keynote Speaker of the 2011 event in Vancouver, and it’s writer and creative-commons advocate Cory Doctorow.

“As an author, scholar, future-thinker, and creator, Cory Doctorow brings a lot to the table that should be of immense interest to the SIGGRAPH audience,” said Peter Braccio, SIGGRAPH 2011 Conference Chair from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. “His dynamic vision and creativity are certain to be interspersed throughout his presentation and will be a conference highlight for everyone.”

Now, I’m a bit puzzled about this choice, and frankly a bit disappointed. I love Cory’s writing, I loved Little Brother, but I don’t know of anything in his past or present related to Computer Graphics, Visual Effects, or Animation.  His choice as a Keynote speaker seems to reflect a growing trend in the SIGGRAPH community towards “all the stuff around graphics and movies” (Sound, story, distribution) rather than any core development of the art and technology.

Or maybe I’m just getting cranky in my old age. What do you think?

via CGSociety – SIGGRAPH 2011.

Graphics siggraph2011

We all know dogs are men best friends. But everyone was surprised how that relation is translated in Social media, as seen in Lab42‘s infographic. KissMetrics tells us how Online Marketing drives Offline success, and Design Soap teaches us how to improve SEO with Social Media links. These lessons are important, especially because, according to Alterian, 70% of companies aren’t getting Social Media. It’s hard to believe, when we look at Ria Novosti‘s recent world map of social networks, but unfortunately it’s true, because there are so many terrible examples out there…

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

The latest issue of IEEE Spectrum has a short article about ‘Ricky Langer’, a techie at ESPN who went from Sports Fan to 3D Guru with ESPN’s recent rollout of ESPN 3D.

The initial plan for ESPN 3D, first announced a year ago, called for baby steps, says Pagano. Games would be presented in 3-D, but commercials and promotional elements would not. “But at the last minute, we were asked to pull a rabbit out of the hat,” Pagano says. That rabbit was the master control system, which integrates the sports programming with commercial and promotional segments—all in 3-D. No such system existed, so it was up to Langer and another engineer on the project to figure out how to pull it off.

Unlike with audio-video synchronization, where a little lag in the audio is hardly noticeable, viewers can pick up on even a single frame’s difference between the left and right eye in a 3-D signal. And even when the eyes are timed correctly, the signals can end up inverted, switching the foreground and the background. In that case, the viewer perceives what ought to be the foreground as appearing behind the intended background, which is out of focus.

via Dream Jobs 2011: At Work at ESPN’s Hidden Sports-Tech Paradise – IEEE Spectrum.

Hardware, Science 3d, espn, stereoscopic

Most of you probably never even noticed, but if you did, it’s fixed now.  In the upgrade to WordPress 3.1, it seems that my Categories & Tags quit working.  If you clicked on the “NVidia” Tag, you’ld get a single NVidia story instead of the list of stories.  Some tags would lead to 404 pages.

It’s all fixed now, so click away!

Website Website, wordpress

The CG_GL engine, available here, has got some nice new features like portals (similar to the “Portal” game), bokeh rendering, and PhysX support, to go with all the old features like scattering, particles, volumetric fog, and more.  While you may not want to actually use it for a game, it’s a great educational tool on how to implement these effects in your own projects.

CG_GL engine is OpenGL API-based open source engine for creating and managing effects. The newest version of the engine adds features like movable and scalable portals (like in the “Portal” game) working with NVidia PhysX, improved bokeh depth of field, more realistic fog, particles, fake raytrace using cube maps and many improvements. It now works both on Windows and Linux. There is also simple game created using the engine.

via CG_GL engine adds new features like portals, bokeh depth of field and particles – opengl.org news.

Science engine, opensource, video game

Sony has won the gig to shoot and show this year’s Wimbleton Tennis matches in 3D, with the finals to be shown in Theaters in glorious HD.

“High Definition 3D is… as close to the atmosphere and excitement of Centre Court as actually being there,” the head of Sony Europe, Fujio Nishida, enthused.

If you’re a tennis fan it sounds like a nice deal, similar to last year’s World Cup games.  Not sure how well Tennis will stand up to 3D, as the camera is typically a wide shot standard.  What will be the focus plane?  The net? The near player? the far player?  Guess we’ll find out.

Image from Vincent Laforet

via Sony to serve up Wimbledon in 3D • reghardware.

Graphics 3d, sony, sports, stereoscopic

Tiago Veloso, curator at Visual Loop and contributor here at VizWorld, has taken Visual Loop to the next level with custom infographics.  The first one is up, featuring the work of Flavia Marinho.

After so much time collecting thousands of data visualizations from all around the globe, we finally decided to take it to the next level, and start producing some infographics as well – after all, looks like everyone’s doing it, these days!!

So, we teamed up with talented Brazilian Designer Flávia Marinho – you should definitively check out her portfolio here – , and, starting this month, we’ll be bringing to all our beloved readers some exclusive works, that we hope you’ll find amusing, interesting and informative.

via Visual Loop – Press Facts – Our First Infographic!!.

Graphics infographic

It is March 8th, and as we reported last week, the AMD Radeon HD 6990 is being released today. The Radeon HD 6990 has two Caymen GPUs. This is the same GPU found in the Radeon HD 6970. Essentially, the 6990 is running on-board CrossFire between the two GPUs. This gives it 3072 stream processors (2 x 1536), 192 texture units (2 x 96), and 4GB of GDDR5 (2 x 2 GB).

The 6990 will have a core speed of 830 MHz and an effective memory clock of 5.0 GHz. This makes the 6990 a tad slower than the single GPU 6970 which had clock speeds of 880 MHz on the core, and 5.5 GHz for the memory. Since this is the only difference between the 6990 and the 6970, one would expect that a 6990 would perform similarly to a pair of 6970′s in CrossFire.

The 6990 is very interesting in one respect. While the card idles at 37 Watts, when the graphics card is fully loaded, it consumes 375 Watts. This is outside the PCIe specifications. It makes the 6990 the most power hungry graphics card to date. To handle that heat, AMD has redesigned the heat sink. On the 6990, the fan is located in the middle of the graphics card, and each GPU on the 6990 has its own heat sink that is isolated from the other one. This allows the 6990 to dissipate over 450 Watts of thermal energy.

As mentioned, the 6990 is outside the PCIe specifications. It has two 8 pin power connectors, each of which can deliver 150 Watts. It can also draw up to 75 Watts from the PCIe connector. This means that it can, and will, draw 375 Watts. But that is not quite the whole story. Remember PowerTune? It allows AMD to control how much power the graphics card consumes. If the graphics card tries to draw too much power, PowerTune will throttle back the clock speeds to keep the card within specifications. In this case, PowerTune keeps the 6990 at 375 Watts. Most games will not be throttle back. However, there may be some games that are.

Did I mention that the 6990 is outside the PCIe specifications? To help the graphics card meet its energy budget, AMD is using cherry picked GPUs that run at a lower default clock voltage. Also to help reduce power consumption, AMD is using less expensive 5 GHz GDDR5 memory. This memory runs at a lower memory voltage than the 6 GHZ GDDR5 memory found on the 6970.

But who wants to run a stock 6990. Literally with the flick of a switch, you can run the 6990 at the same default clock speeds as the 6970. The 6990 comes with a physical switch that allows you to switch between the default BIOS that has a 830 MHz core speed, and a performance BIOS that comes at 880 MHz core speed. This will, of course, consume more power than 375 Watts. Fortunately the cooler can handle it. The question remains to whether or not the power supply in your system can handle it, as well as the increased thermal loads on the rest of the components in your system.

Anandtech has posted an in-depth review of the 6990. Here is what they thought of it:

Dual-GPU cards have always been a niche product, but the 6990 really takes this and runs with it. There’s no significant power/noise savings to be found by consolidating 2 GPUs on to a single card, and as we said earlier with the dual-exhaust cooler the 6990 is effectively 2 video cards on one PCB. This isn’t a bad thing – the 6990 is the world’s fastest video card after all – but it drives the card in to some very specific niches. If you fall in to these niches, then the 6990 is certainly the card for you.

The launch price for the 6990 is $699. This is going to be one expensive graphics card.

via : AMD’s Radeon HD 6990: The New Single Card King @ Anandtech

Hardware 6990, amd, radeon

America’s debt has been much more than a simple problem for quite sometime now. Americans Dumping Debt is presented by Bill Shrink, while designer Brooks Hassig breaks down the 2012 US Budget with a nice visualization, followed by an historical view at the Debt issue throughout the different Presidencies, presented by Credit Sesame. Online Accounting Classes shows which CEOs are part of the One Dollar Salary Club, and again from Bill Shrink, a great question: is it possible to live on $190 a month?

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

Last week, Apple unveiled the iPad 2, with a lot of buzz surrounding it, as usual. Invest in Tech brings the full iPad2 Specs, comparing it with the Competition. Next, an overview on the year of the tablet, as On Swipe is calling 2011, and from X-Cube Labs comes a nice visualization on the Evolution of Mobile Operating Systems until the present days, and then we can see the updated version of the Mobile Market Share, presented by iCrossing. To close the first selection of the week, iPass brings some interesting data about what kind of gadgets the Mobile Worker uses.

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