VizWorld.com

One of the most controversial decisions, concerning media, lately, in the U.S. is the one involving the cancellation of public service television and radio. PBS makes a good point with it’s infographic titled “Why save PBS”, and them we move to a couple of analysis on the media consuming habits: the state of internet TV, by Deals.com, and where Americans are getting their news, from AZ Now Biz. Finishing the week, a nice comparison between New York and Chicago, presented by City Pass, and Home Away‘s guide to choose between vacation home rentals or hotels.

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

SolidSmack gives us the heads-up that SolidWorks has published all of the presentations and video on their website, available for watching and downloading at your leisure.

Maybe you didn’t make it to SolidWorks World 2011. Maybe you’re still wandering the streets of San Antonio after days of drinking Riverwalk water and salsa picante. No worries for you. If you missed a few sessions due to work or inebriation a busy schedule, you have the option of catching up.

via Download All the SolidWorks World 2011 Sessions You Can Handle – SolidSmack.com.

Graphics conference, solidworks

Mac Sketchup modelers have a new tool at their disposal, as Shaderlight for Sketchup is now coming to the Mac!  The interactive high-quality rendering plugin for Google Sketchup has been around for Windows users since October 2010, and just now comes to both Windows and Mac.

Kate Marshall commented: “This latest release now makes Shaderlight rendering available to every SketchUp user.  We have a waiting list of enthusiastic Mac users who can’t wait to try the software so we’re excited about seeing the results!”

Shaderlight’s interactive renderer for Google SketchUp allows the user to watch their image ‘develop’ on screen as they continue to refine their SketchUp model.

You can get a free 14-day trial and then buy it for $199 at their website, or through the rest of this month you can buy it with a discount code for only $149. Full details after the break.

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Graphics shaderlight, sketchup

A new case study from Nvidia reveals the impact of adding a few NVidia Quadro’s to the rendering pipeline of Tigar Hare, creators of games like “Call of Duty: Black Ops” and “Project Gotham Racing”.  A long-time user of V-Ray, they used the new V-Ray RT technology and Quadro Fermi GPU’s to take their renders from hours to real-time.

To compare GPU-based ray tracing, Hare benchmarked a wide range of hardware configurations, rendering the same scene using V-Ray RT 2.0 on each system.

The scene was set up to use a 3ds Max render time of two minutes. In that timeframe, a 12-core CPU processed just 100 samples — while a combination of three NVIDIA Quadro and Tesla GPUs handled a whopping 1,056 samples – a more that 10X improvement. This same GPU combination in one machine was also 3.8X faster than distributing the job across 80 CPU cores. The NVIDIA Fermi architecture incorporated into the company’s new GPUs also demonstrated a dramatic improvement over earlier GPUs, with the Quadro 5000 yielding 5.5X the speed of the older Quadro FX 5600. It also showed great multi-GPU scaling when combining three new GPU’s: nearly tripling the performance of a single Quadro GPU.

Of course, a Quadro and 2 Tesla’s isn’t cheap, but it’s an impressive statistic when (as stated above) it comes in almost 4x faster than an 80-core system.

Get the full details after the break.

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Graphics, Hardware case study, nvidia, tiger hare, vray

If you couldn’t make it to GDC this year, then head on over to  NVidia’s website where they already have streaming video of their biggest announcements and presentations online.  Already up Chris Doran’s presentations on porting Enlighten to CUDA, the Turbulenz Engine presentations, NVidia’s presentation on Parallel NSight, and details of the new NVidia PhysX integrations in 3dsMax2011.

NVIDIA @ GDC 2011 San Francisco, CA.

Science conference, gdc, nvidia

NewScientist has a piece on “Synoptic Vision”, or presenting a perfectly identical image to both eyes in an attempt to fool the brain into creating artificial 3D effects.  A psychologist at the University of Liverpool, UK named Rob Black has build some special glasses he calls “The I” to replicate this effect.

The device works in the opposite way to the 3D systems employed in cinemas. There, images on the screen are filtered so that each eye sees a slightly different perspective – known as binocular disparity – fooling the brain into perceiving depth. “The I” ensures that both eyes see an image or computer screen from exactly the same perspective. With none of the depth cues associated with binocular disparity, the brain assumes it must be viewing a distant 3D object instead of looking at a 2D image. As a result, the image is perceived as if it were a window the viewer is looking through, and details in the image are interpreted as objects scattered across a landscape.

This sounds very similar to the “Fresnel Lens” pseudo-3D effect used by several Flight Simulators.

via New gadget promises 3D without the headaches – tech – 07 December 2010 – New Scientist.

Hardware, Science 3d, stereoscopic

The Chandra X-ray Observatory is a satellite launched by NASA on July 23, 1999. Chandra is a space based telescope since the Earth’s atmosphere absorbs the vast majority of X-rays. Chandra is 100 times more sensitive to X-ray sources than previous X-ray telescopes.

Chandra has been observing a supernova remnant called Cassiopeia A for 10 years. This supernova remnant is located approximately 11,000 light years away from Earth. As one might expect it is located in the constellation Cassiopeia. While the supernova occurred 11,000 years ago, its light would have reached earth about 300 years ago. Unfortunately, there are no historical records of anyone observing the supernova.

Scientists believe that the star that exploded into a supernova is now a neutron star. During the time that Cassiopeia A has been under observation, this neutron star has slowly cooled down by about 4%. Why has it cooled down?

Two new papers by independent research teams show that this cooling is likely caused by a neutron superfluid forming in its central regions, the first direct evidence for this bizarre state of matter in the core of a neutron star.

Normally we think of matter as having three states: solid, liquid, and gas. When matter is in a superfluid state, it behaves like a fluid without viscosity and with infinite thermal conductivity. Without friction, a superfluid can easily escape a container it is placed in. In the case of Cassiopeia A, this superfluid is allowing energy to escape the star much more rapidly, and is thus cooling the star.

via : Cassiopeia A: NASA’S Chandra Finds Superfluid in Neutron Star’s Core

Science chandra, nasa

As we stated before, the events in Egypt – compiled on Matt Bango‘s newest infographic – spread to other Middle Eastern and North African nations, especially Libya. The Daily breaksdown Qaddafi’s ruling, and Ria Novosti shows us the important role that the oil exports play in that country. From the Economic Crisis Blog comes a staggering infographic about the many nations on the verge of bankruptcy, and finally, we take a look the child poverty map of Britain, with a help from The Guardian.

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

If James Franco’s iPhone habit just didn’t give you the Oscar-worthy performance you hoped from this weekend’s annual awards show, then check out Tiago Veloso’s great list of Oscar-themed Infographics over at Inspired Magazine.

This year’s edition of the Oscars has passed, but we thought that it would be nice if we selected some of the most interesting infographics about the wonderful world of cinema.

And that’s a huge task, especially if we consider that some sagas – like Star Wars or Harry Potter – have so many infographics about them, that we could make an entire post just with them – just for you to have an idea, we have over 400 on Visual Loop!!!.

Even so, we selected some from all over the world, so we hope you enjoy it!

via Celebrating The 83rd Oscar Awards With 83 Amazing Infographics | Inspired Magazine.

Graphics academy awards, infographics, list, oscar

Phytoplankton are small organisms that live in both fresh and salt water, and many of them are single-celled plants. That makes them too small to be seen individually with the naked eye. However, when there are enough of them in the water, it can give the water a green color. Large enough concentrations can even be seen by satellite.

Phytoplankton are important because they are responsible for half of the total amount of oxygen produced by all plant life. They are eaten by krill, which in turn are eaten by whales. Thus they are also important in the food chain.

NASA has used their MODIS satellite to look at the chlorophyll concentration, as well as the sea surface temperature from the coast of Maine up to Nova Scotia. The images show that more Phytoplankton are growing to the north in the cooler waters, rather than the warmer waters of the Gulf Stream. It is interesting to see that in both images, you can see the eddies formed by the Gulf Stream as it heads towards Europe.

These images show one of those rich mixing basins: the northwest Atlantic Ocean. Based on data collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite, these maps show the concentration of chlorophyll (top) and sea surface temperatures (bottom) in the region from August 29 to September 5, 2010.

via : Ocean Crossroads @ NASA Earth Observatory Image of the Day

Science nasa, scientific visualization