Three-dimensional Graffiti – Illusion
11:06 am
It might be hard to believe, but there’s nothing computer generated in these amazing street-art graffiti installations.
Daily Viz from Visual Loop – 24/03/2011
7:00 am
Space, the last frontier…. Personally, I love when Mankind decides to move forward in Space exploration, and today’s Daily Viz from Visual Loop will look at some recent infographics about that. Last week we had the “Supermoon”, and Space.com explains the science behind it, while Ria Novosti brings some insights about the Messenger’s Mercury mission.Space.com puts the Solar System to scale, and the folks at GOOD published a great infographic about space waste. Finally, although not directly related to space but extremely important in Math – and therefore relevant -, the piece created by Online Schooling about the Pi Number.
A Day of Los Angeles traffic
2:30 pm
FlowingData brings us a neat animation created by Waze, Gray Area Foundation, and Nik Hanselmann showing 24-hours of traffic in Los Angeles.
It starts at 5pm, right in the middle of rush hour, slows down in the late hours, and then of course picks up again around 7am, as people commute to work. Red dots indicate high levels of traffic and green dots indicate hazards, which I assume are accidents. Watch the day unfold in the video below.
I assume most of this data comes from Waze’s mobile app for navigation. They allow users to contribute information on accidents and hazards, as well as tracking traffic usage and merging in other external sources. I’m not sure what the “flashing” roads mean in the visualization tho. Ideas?
Paul: Double Negative’s alien adventure
2:14 pm
In the new SciFi film “Paul”, Double Negative got the fun job of bringing a classic “grey” alien to live as a rag-tag group travels the desert in a rusty RV. Voiced by Seth Rogen, complications with his schedule and a fully-CG character in a live action movie proved a challenge, documented in a new article on fxguide.
Although Seth Rogen lent his voice to Paul, the actor was not available during shooting of principal photography in New Mexico. Instead, Double Negative used a number of sources of reference for Paul’s speech, mannerisms and general behavior. Firstly, Rogen attended a rehearsal period in May 2009 on the Culver City soundstage. “Seth was there with the other actors and they did a dry run-through of all the lines,” explains Beer. “We had a number of witness cameras and facial cameras on him and we also got him into a Xsens MVN suit for motion capture.”
Using the mo-cap data and video footage as a baseline, Double Negative could immediately attach that to the Paul rig and use it as reference for the entire animation process. “It also allowed the editor to cut the film with footage of Seth dropped into the picture,” adds Couzens. “And it provided us with a great library of Seth-isms. By referring back to these nuances we were able to make Paul seem Seth-like.”
ASUS GTX 590
9:00 am
NVIDIA is releasing a the dual-GPU GeForce GTX 590 at 9 am (EDT) on Thursday, March 24th. Rumor is that the GTX 590 will have 1024 cores (512 per GPU), 128 texture units (64 per GPU), 96 ROPS (48 per GPU), and 3 GB of GDDR5 memory (1.5 GB per GPU). The memory bus width is 384 bits. 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. Rumor is that it will draw 375 Watts, just like the Radeon HD 6990.
PCInLife has posted some pictures of the ASUS GTX 590 which provide some additional details. The ASUS GTX 590 has 3 DVI outputs and 1 Mini DisplayPort output. Ozone3D fills in some more missing details by saying that the GPU will be clocked at 613 MHz (slower than the 580′s 722 MHz), the memory will be clocked at 855 MHz (slower than the 580′s 1.004 GHz) and the shaders will be clocked at 1.225 GHz (slower than the 580′s 1.544 GHz). The memory bandwidth will be 164.2 GB/second. The Pixel fillrate is 29.4 billion pixels per second. The Texture fillrate is 39.2 billion texels per second. TechPowerUp has a picture showing that the ASUS GTX 590 is shorter than the Radeon HD 6990.
The Nvidia GeForce GTX is rumored to cost $799. Rumors on the benchmarks show that it is slower than the Radeon HD 6990. Given the clock speeds, it will be slower than two 580′s in SLI. Tomorrow we will find out for sure what the benchmarks really are.
via : ASUS GTX590 @ PCInLife
via : Ozone3D
via : TechPowerUp
Daily Viz from Visual Loop – 23/03/2011
7:00 am
One of the most iconic dates, among the Irish community all over the World, it’s St. Patricks Day, and in America, this date is celebrated with a lot of enthusiasm. Our roundup for today includes some infographics recently made about St. Patricks Day, starting with the History of this date, by Cash for Gold. Then, Degree Search colected some “lucky” facts, while Mint preferred to look at the alcohol spending by city, and the folks at Lab 42 researched about what do Social Networkers think of St. Patrick’s Day. To close, 411 shows us what’s St. Patrick’s Day in Canada.
Samsung Shows Off 55in Glasses-Free 3D Display
11:00 am
One of the reasons that consumers have not adopted 3-D televisions as quickly as some people might have expected is that they do not like wearing the clunky 3-D glasses. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone developed a television that showed 3-D content and you did not need the glasses at all? We have covered such televisions in the past, such as one that was on display at SC10. Trusted Reviews has posted an article on a 55 inch Samsung TV that does not require glasses to see the images in 3-D.
Samsung has displayed a 55in panel at FPD in China which has nine sweet spots and an optimum viewing distance between 2.5m and 6m. The LCD TV also allows users to switch between 3D and 2D modes. The TV is comprised of two LCD panels with the first acting as a lens and showing different images to the left and right eye to produce the 3D effect without glasses. The second LCD panel on top can have the optical refraction index changed depending on whether or not you want the 3D effect or not.
via : Samsung Shows Off 55in Glasses-Free 3D Display @ Trusted Reviews
Rising Sun Pictures finds The Way Back
10:30 am
Rising Sun Pictures did lots of the VFX work in World War II prisoner escape movie “The Way Back”, ranging from bush removal to entire CG reconstructions. In an article on fxguide, they discuss the project.
At one point there were nearly 400 shots because of things like bush removal and green suppression on desert plates. We managed to convince them that DI could handle that equally as well, so that’s where the DI house picked up a bunch of that work. So we ended up with about 200 shots in total, with about 50 being quite complex shots.
The $175m flop so bad it could end the 3D boom
10:00 am
I am not a huge fan of 3-D for one simple reason: the lack of good content. Sure I love movies with good scripts like Toy Story 3, but in those cases, the 3-D effects are an addition to the good storytelling. All that it is going to take to end this round of 3-D is for several movies to be made the fail badly at the box office. The Independent argues that Mars needs Moms is just that sort of movie. I would have argued that Clash of the Titans was just that sort of movie, but apparently it made $163 Million in the U.S. with a budget of $125 Million.
via : The $175m flop so bad it could end the 3D boom @ The Independent
Japan Researchers demonstrate 3D Volumetric Fog Display
9:30 am
In a scene straight out of Star Wars, researchers at Osaka University in Japan have demonstrated a working 3D Projector that projects onto a column of fog, for full 360-degree 3D viewing.
Researchers at Osaka University in Japan have made a 3D and 360-degree display that projects from a variety of different angles onto a cylindrical fog display. This combination of multiple-point of view projectors and the cylinder allows for a display that is 3D no matter what side you view it from, though in order to get a holodeck style of projection a much larger set of projectors, and a lot more fog, would need to be on hand. In order to project into the one cylinder of fog, it took three projectors
VizWorld.com 
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