VizWorld.com

I’ve been watching Bunkspeed closely ever since I first saw them demonstrate their iRay rendering capabilities at an NVidia event.  The incremental rendering capabilities from iRay seemed a perfect fit for their product, and now they’ve taken it to the next level with their new Shot Pro.  Shown above is a beautiful rendering after only five minutes of rendering, done on a laptop with a Core i7 1.73Ghz processor and an NVidia 5000m GPU.

And this is the result after another five minutes of adding a new environment and adjusting the camera. Done while the previous image was rendering, made the process go a bit faster, even though you could definitely feel the lag while the adjusting the camera and adding new environments. Adding new cameras makes it simple to have multiple views of the model and additional lighting settings bring options to the environment that will make a huge difference in final render. Play with them. Learn them. It makes the results worth it. Now this is an image engaging enough to show someone. And with it done on a larger assembly all within the time of 30 minutes proves it’s worth in creating a more realistic image.

via Bunkspeed Steps it Up a Notch with Shot Pro [Review] – SolidSmack.com.

Graphics bunkspeed, iray

GE’s Visualizing.org contest to visualize the 2010 US Census data has come to a close, and the lucky winner is Jan Willem Tulp with some truly beautiful visualizations like the one above.

Check out the images below, of winner Jan Willem Tulp’s visualization, “Ghost Counties,” which focuses on homeowner data from the Census to create an arresting perspective on the subprime mortgage crisis. Like the best data visualizations, they have an artistic beauty separate from any informational utility. To learn how the striking forms below illustrate housing data by county and by state, click here.

Hit their website for some more impressive graphics.

via Behold the Winning Entry in GE’s Visualizing.org Census Data Challenge | GE Reports.

Graphics, Science census, contest, ge

AMD has a new press release out touting more OpenCL offerings, but includes a nice list of OpenCL applications.  It’s not as extensive as NVidia’s CUDA lists, but has some big names like ArcSoft, Corel, Sony Vegas Pro, and Rovi.

“Today’s creative professional needs a complete solution that delivers clear, crisp and stutter-free visuals that will allow them to edit, process and create content quickly and without interruption,” said Dave Chaimson, vice president of global marketing, Sony Creative Software. “New support has been added to Vegas Pro 10.0d for accelerated OpenCL based video rendering. We see this as a solid first step towards a faster production workflow for video professionals, and we are strongly committed to the OpenCL standard.”

Also of interest is a rather impressive list of Engineering software using OpenCL for simulation acceration.  Dassault, Altair, and ESI are all in the list, along with a few others.

If you want to know more, they’ve got a conference (The AMD Fusion Developer Summit) coming up next week in Bellevue, Washington where they’ll be demonstrating them.

via AMD and Leading Software Vendors Continue to Expand Offerings Optimized for OpenCL™ Standard.

Science amd, gpgpu, opencl

The VLT Survey Telescope (VST), the latest addition to ESO’s Paranal Observatory, has made its first release of impressive images of the southern sky. The VST is a state-of-the-art 2.6-metre telescope, with the huge 268-megapixel camera OmegaCAM at its heart, which is designed to map the sky both quickly and with very fine image quality. It is a visible-light telescope that perfectly complements ESO’s VISTA infrared survey telescope. New images of the Omega Nebula and the globular cluster Omega Centauri demonstrate the VST’s power.

A New Telescope and Camera

The VLT Survey Telescope (VST) is the latest telescope to be added to ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. It is housed in an enclosure immediately adjacent to the four VLT Unit Telescopes on the summit of Cerro Paranal under the pristine skies of one of the best observing sites on Earth. The VST is a wide-field survey telescope with a field of view twice as broad as the full Moon. It is the largest telescope in the world designed to exclusively survey the sky in visible light. Over the next few years the VST and its camera OmegaCAM will make several very detailed surveys of the southern sky. All survey data will be made public.

“I am very pleased to see the impressive first images from the VST and OmegaCAM. The unique combination of the VST and the VISTA infrared survey telescope will allow many interesting objects to be identified for more detailed follow-up observations with the powerful telescopes of the VLT,” says Tim de Zeeuw, the ESO Director General.

“The VST project has overcome many difficulties but it is now repaying, with its excellent image quality, the expectations of the astronomical community and the efforts of the many people at INAF involved in its construction. I am very pleased to see the VST in operation,” adds Tommaso Maccacaro, the President of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF).

The VST programme is a joint venture between the INAF–Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy and ESO. INAF has designed and built the telescope with the collaboration of leading Italian industries and ESO is responsible for the enclosure and the civil engineering works at the site. OmegaCAM, the VST’s camera, was designed and built by a consortium including institutes in the Netherlands, Germany and Italy with major contributions from ESO. The new facility will be operated by ESO, which will also archive and distribute data from the telescope.

The VST is a state-of-the-art 2.6-metre aperture telescope with an active optics system to keep the mirrors perfectly positioned at all times. At its core, behind large lenses that ensure the best possible image quality, lies the 770 kg OmegaCAM camera, built around 32 CCD detectors, sealed in vacuum, that together create 268-megapixel images.

The First Images

Both the telescope and the camera have been designed to fully exploit the high quality skies at Paranal.

“The superb images now coming from VST and OmegaCAM are a tribute to the hard work of many groups around Europe over many years. We are now looking forward to a rich harvest of science and unexpected discoveries from the VST surveys,” adds Massimo Capaccioli, principal investigator of the VST project.

The first released image shows the spectacular star-forming region Messier 17, also known as the Omega Nebula or the Swan Nebula, as it has never been seen before. This dramatic region of gas, dust and hot young stars lies in the heart of the Milky Way in the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer). The VST field of view is so large that the entire nebula, including its fainter outer parts, is captured — and retains its superb sharpness across the entire image.

The second released image may be the best portrait of the globular star cluster Omega Centauri ever made. This is the largest globular cluster in the sky, but the very wide field of view of VST and OmegaCAM can encompass even the faint outer regions of this spectacular object. This view, which includes about 300 000 stars, demonstrates the excellent resolution of VST.

The Surveys

The VST will make three public surveys over the next five years. The KIDS survey will image several regions of the sky away from the Milky Way. It will further the study of dark matter, dark energy and galaxy evolution, and find many new galaxy clusters and high-redshift quasars. The VST ATLAS survey will cover a larger area of sky and focus on understanding dark energy and supporting more detailed studies using the VLT and other telescopes. The third survey, VPHAS+, will image the central plane of the Milky Way to map the structure of the Galactic disc and its star formation history. VPHAS+ will yield a catalogue of around 500 million objects and will discover many new examples of unusual stars at all stages of their evolution.

The data volume produced by OmegaCAM will be large. About 30 terabytes of raw data will be produced per year and will flow back into data centres in Europe for processing. A novel and sophisticated software system has been developed at Groningen and Naples to handle the very large data flow. The end products from the processing will be huge lists of the objects found, as well as images, and these will be made available to astronomers worldwide for scientific analysis.

“The combination of large field of view, excellent image quality, and the very efficient operations scheme of the VST will produce an enormous wealth of information that will advance many fields of astrophysics,” concludes Konrad Kuijken, head of the OmegaCAM consortium.

Science astronomy, eso

As far as our ability to improve the Environment, there’s nothing like starting in our homes. One Block of the Grid and Planet Save show us the energy consumption in our daily activities, and Angie List gives some precious tips for making a green home. The folks at GOOD explain what’s a LED, and, from Love the Garden, comes the Grow your own Garden infographic. As we can see, It’s all a matter of everyone doing their part….

Read more…

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

Information is Beautiful, but can also be scary.  In a recent project from David McCandless at The Guardian, he takes a look at fish stock data from 1900 to present, seeing the slow but staggering depletion of stocks worldwide.  Why have we never noticed this before?  It’s all due to the narrow span of human existence:

They also help counter the phenomenon of “shifting environment baselines”. This is when each generation views the environment they remember from their youth as “natural” and normal. Today that means our fishing policies and environmental activism is geared to restoring the oceans to the state we remember they were. That’s considered the environmental baseline.

The problem is, the sea was already heavily exploited when we were young.

The charts do tell an incredible story, but as is the case so often with these types of data the inevitable question arises:  How accurate is data from 1900?  Also, how much of the missing stock has been replaced by in-land Fish Farms?

I have to admit I don’t know the answer to these questions, but read his article and see the visualizations over at The Guardian.

via Information is Beautiful: Plenty More Fish In The Sea? | News | guardian.co.uk.

Science fish, guardian, mccandless

Using data taken from the popular Nike+ sensor, students under the guidance of Nicholas Felton tried to parse it out and find some interesting stuff.  What they found was not just interesting patterns, but odd (and often hilarious) bad data showing runners vanishing, teleporting, and traveling through time.

These, of course, are glitches in the technology. As Shaw explains, interference probably knocked the altitude meter off base and the disappearing runners didn’t actually disappear, their Nike+ sensors just ran out of batteries. “Presumably [these are] all problems that the data crunchers at Nike wrestle with,” Felton says. And, as Felton’s students learned, it’s the job of the designer to tell that story, in this case as a cautionary tale: If you think Nike+ is the ultimate measure of your workout, take it from the guy who time traveled, and think again.

While nobody made what could have been an awesome Tardis joke, I’m sure the students got a good crash-course in data cleaning.  Unfortunately the article doesn’t cover it very much.  Nonetheless, it’s some pretty visuals.

via Infographic Of The Day: Nicholas Felton’s Students Hack Nike+ Data |Co.Design.

Graphics felton, nike

VFXSoldier brings the news that Lumiere, the VFX studio that rose from the ashes of the defunct Meteor studios after the calamitous bankruptcy that left dozens of VFX artists unpaid and disheartened, is repeating history by once again filing bankruptcy.

Now just two years later my same friends are being ripped off again. The confidential sum of 1 dollar is hiding the fact that most are owed 15-35 thousand dollars. This time the project left for even cheaper outsourcing and the owners bankrupted the facility after promising that bounced and missed paychecks would never happen again if they all came back to work.

Part of me has to wonder who would go work for a studio like this after knowing how they went down the first round, but the rest of me feels sorry for all the VFX artists who are about to get screwed in this again.  Unlike US artists in Los Angeles, opportunities for VFX in Montreal are few and far between, meaning the only real option is to pack up and move to Vancouver.  I was going to see what information was on their website about this, but it seems their website is already “down for maintenance”, probably of the permanent variety.

Read the official filing here.

via Lumiere/Meteor VFX Bankrupt Again?! « VFX Soldier.

Graphics bankruptcy, lumiere, meteor, vfx

A new open-source software framework is under development that looks like it could do everything from Processing-style visualization to video game development.

Polycode is a free, open-source, cross-platform framework for creative code. You can use it as a C++ API or as a standalone scripting language to get easy and simple access to accelerated 2D and 3D graphics, hardware shaders, sound and network programming, physics engines and more.

Hit their website and you can see some interesting examples of the project used to process LIDAR-style music video data, GIS data, and create a graphical rogue-like game.
via Polycode.

Science api, lua, polycode

One of the main things we should all do to help the Environment is to maximize the Reuse of things. The folks at Green is Universal made a great infographic explaining the importance of reuse, and Reuse This Bag, as well as The Washington Post, take on the problem of plastic bags – something we all use on a constant basis. The question of better package design is analyzed by supply chain firm ModusLink, and Cindy Jones-Hulfachor looks at the problems with landfills, taking the example of what’s happening in Palm Beach and Broward counties.

Read more…

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