Daden has thrown another interesting tool into the virtual world space with their “World Finder” application. A nice web-app that allows you to select a combination of aspects you find important (security, configurability, public/private access, etc) and then let it recommend some options.
Which brings us to the ratings allocated to each world characteristics. These aren’t scientific. These are our personal view, BUT reflecting over 10 years of virtual world expertise and the delivery of over 100 virtual world projects to paying commercial clients. We’ve deliberately limited the parameters to 12 (we couldn’t manage 10 and could easily have had 50), but have tried to chose those which we think are the most critical in virtual world selection and which force users down one route or another (eg graphic quality varies only by degrees but in-world building is binary). More than happy to debate if we’ve chosen the right 12 (but only if you say which you’d drop), but we WON’T enter into debate about the ratings, they are just our view.
Jim Blackhurst has a nice writeup on his blog about working with large SQL-based data in Processing and OpenGL for creation of big point clouds and heatmaps.
I’ve been using Processing to create tools that render the heatmaps, but while the logical structure of program is fairly simple, there are significant challenges in working with large datasets. The primary challenge is loading the data into memory. The data is all held in a SQL database, and while I could connect to the DB directly using processing, the DB is optimised for data-in operations, not data-out, so you don’t want to be pulling the data out too often. Instead, I dump the raw spatial data (X,Y,Z coordinates) into a CSV file, one record per row. I usually create heatmaps from datasets in excess of 1 million rows, and most of them are between 5 – 20 million rows (I have one that is 22 million rows!). A CSV file containing 10 million rows of spatial data is about 364MiB in size (the 22.3m row CSV is 802MiB!). In order to create the data structures in memory to hold sets this large, I have to work in 64bit mode to get over the Windows 32bit memory restrictions.
The dataset is a collection of 11.3 Million Player deaths from the game “Just Cause 2″, hopefully showing the most dangerous areas of the game. The project is still in-development and he hopes to transition to the new Deus Ex game for his next effort.
For this week, we picked up a much more lighter topic to bring some infographic “overdose”: Travel. So, without further ado, we start with Ria Novosti‘s interactive view about the world’s most extraordinary attractions, followed by the most insane Roller Coasters in the world, by Term Life Insurance. Infographics Generator lists and compares all U.S airlines with their charges for checked bags, and to close this selection, GOOD maps the favorite relocation spots for youngsters, and Pimsleur Approach shows the Top 10 complaints about American Tourists.
Yet another cool project using the Microsoft Kinect. I am not certain what you can do with it in a snow globe. Perhaps it would be good for viewing the weather around the world all at the same time.
Using a 3D HD projector, two Microsoft Kinect sensors and some additional hardware and software a project at CHI in Vancouver can present a 360 degree view of an object.
We started this series about health with infographics about food and obesity, and we’re going to finish the same way. So, to begin, the deadly impacts of malnutrition, provided by AllTop, and the food price “rollercoaster”, brought by The World Food Programme. After that, a couple of infographics from the folks at GOOD, the first about the Agricultural multiplier effect, the second explaining what’s behind the Label of food products, and, to close the week, a shocking comparison between School Cafeteria food vs. Prison food.
Amongst all the professionals that work in the health care system, nurses are perhaps the most unappreciated, so, our selection’s first picks go the It Thing‘s look at this career, and Online Nursing Schools‘ take on the male nurse – the unsung hero. After that, Ulmer Dermatology teaches everything teenagers should know about acne, Medical Directory shows how to install a Grill, and how Lasik works.
When you reach the level of silicon complexity of the modern GPU, typical simulation tools like PSpice and VHDL don’t cut it anymore. In a new post on the NVidia blog, they show some behind-the-scenes photos and technical specs on their massive Hardware Emulation platforms, giant car-sized machines that emulate a simple chip.
Near the front is Tigris, a snowflake-shape configuration of sixteen chassis that was built to emulate Fermi. It’s physically the biggest emulator in the lab, but no longer the most powerful. That title goes to Indus, a multimillion-dollar steel-blue piece of hardware a little longer than a minivan.
Three and a half years in the making, Indus was designed to handle Kepler, our next-generation chip architecture and the successor to Fermi. According to Nimish Modi, senior vice president for the System and Software Realization Group at Cadence, “Indus is the world’s largest installation of Cadence Verification Computing Platform systems, Palladium XP. It’s great working with a partner like NVIDIA to see how our technologies can work together to advance this industry.”
The Stanford Medical University has a new toy from Anatomage that provides lifelike interactive visuals with a multitude of anatomical datasets.
The new virtual dissection table takes advantage of 20th-century technological advancements in imaging, such as X-rays, ultrasound and MRIs, and combines them for use in a 7-foot by 2.5-foot screen. At Stanford, the table is being tested as a way to further enhance that age-old teaching method — the dissection of human cadavers.
Costing $60,000, it’s part of a new wave of technology that integrates VR, touchscreens, 3d visuals, high-resolution data scals, and more into a realistic educational tool. In addition to simply using it for education, Stanford is working on a “Searchable Digital Anatomical Library” that they can use with it to offer their extensive library of medical scans to other institutions.
Daden has thrown another interesting tool into the virtual world space with their “World Finder” application. A nice web-app that allows you to select a combination of aspects you find important (security, configurability, public/private access, etc) and then let it recommend some options.
Jim Blackhurst has a nice writeup on his blog about working with large SQL-based data in Processing and OpenGL for creation of big point clouds and heatmaps.
For this week, we picked up a much more lighter topic to bring some infographic “overdose”: Travel. So, without further ado, we start with 
We started this series about 
Amongst all the professionals that work in the health care system, nurses are perhaps the most unappreciated, so, our selection’s first picks go the 
When you reach the level of silicon complexity of the modern GPU, typical simulation tools like PSpice and VHDL don’t cut it anymore. In a new post on the NVidia blog, they show some behind-the-scenes photos and technical specs on their massive Hardware Emulation platforms, giant car-sized machines that emulate a simple chip.
The Stanford Medical University has a new toy from Anatomage that provides lifelike interactive visuals with a multitude of anatomical datasets.
VizWorld.com 
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