Last week Microsoft made waves with claims that WebGL was an insecure and dangerous standard that could bring us a whole new level of web-based malware, exposing millions of systems to new threats. I personally found their claims overblown, but Jon Peddie (as usual) has a great balanced writeup on the real story behind Microsoft’s claims based primarily on a report from Context Security which found two possible problems. One problem is just a classic Denial of Service, that exposing the video card to the browser makes it easy for someone to simply hang the card. The more interesting attack, IMO, is this cross-domain glitch:
Context demonstrated that a shader program could implement a loop that could be used to approximately reconstruct an image from another domain—a serious potential security hole. Khronos had previously debated on its open mailing list whether this was a real-world possibility and once the exploit was demonstrated by Context, Khronos worked swiftly with the WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) to mandate the CORS spec (Cross Origin Resource Sharing) in both the HTML and WebGL specs to make sure servers have to explicitly allow access to media assets across domains.
So yes, as with any new technology there are a few glitches in the early version that will get ironed out with time and more-eyes.
It’s very rare to see a week going by without new data – and infographics – about Social Media being published. Credit Loan takes a look at some of those widdely spread stats, and Webs shows some of the trends for small businesses, when it comes to Social media use. Next, we move on to the importance of creating good content for Social Media, with three infographics from Eloqua, Marketo and My Cube.
NVidia has just announced the newest entrant into the ever-growing CUDA Center of Excellence program, Stanford University. Stanford already has a CUDA architecture and parallel computing program, so adding them to the Center of Excellence program is really a mere formality.
“It’s vitally important that our faculty be at the forefront of computing technology so that we can continue developing state-of-the-art computational algorithms that drive innovation in the sciences and engineering,” said Margot Gerritsen, director, Institute for Computational & Mathematical Engineering, and associate professor, Department of Energy Resources Engineering, at Stanford University. “This award allows us to broadly expand parallel computing education and research programs to large numbers of researchers and students from a wide variety of disciplines.”
The grants provided by NVidia as part of the program will be used to support some new research programs on mesh-based solvers for partial differential equations and probability and uncertainty quantification work.
Toshiba is bringing recent advances in their glasses-free 3D TV’s to the Laptop space with their new Qosmio F750 laptop, going on sale next month for around 1300 €.
It will feature a 120Hz, 15.6-inch screen that uses “a lenticular lens sheet to send different images to the left and right eyes.” The effect is said to vary, depending on how close you are to the screen, but is said to have a more pronounced effect than the Nintendo 3DS for example. If you’re wondering why that sounds familiar, it’s because Toshiba has already used that very same technology in their glasses-free 3D TV – the Regza GL1.
Also packing an Intel Core i&, GeForce 540M, and Blue-ray XL Drive, it could make a nice little 3D BluRay viewing system. That is, if the effect doesn’t suffer from some of the common problems of lenticular lens (viewing angle dependence). Toshiba is overcoming some of these shortcomings with a cleverly integrated HD webcam that incorporates eye-tracking to adjust for the viewer’s angle.
In an effort to educate the world, specifically the VFX world, on the details of 3D cinematography, the SMPTE has begun publishing short 60s videos on popular topics such as 3D standards, field-previewing of 3D, and human factors. You can see the videos in their new YouTube channel.
Daden Limited has a new creation online in Second Life, a virtual interactive model of the Library of Birmingham. Using architects images and plans, Daden constructed the library on Centenary Square in second life, and included a warehouse of furniture, objects, and special features to make the environment interactive and interesting. In addition, they trained the Library team to modify and update the space themselves.
“We felt it was important to allow the team to own the building and to be able to make the changes to the floor space and experiment with the internal fit-out rather than be reliant on Daden – and it’s worked well,” says Daden’s Managing Director David Burden. ”Every time we visit the library we notice they have made changes or added more detail.”
In addition to working as a PR piece, visitor’s time in the virtual structure is carefully recorded to be used as reference data in future modifications to the design.
Daden have also built-in sensors providing useful data to the Library team as to the routes people take and where visitors decide to explore within the Virtual Library of Birmingham. By creating a virtual model and letting users explore it we can start to get answers to the very practical questions of how a building will be used, which appear to be missed by more current techniques.
Get the full details in the Press Release after the break.
The visualization competition conceived of through a collaboration between David McCandless and PostGrad.com has come to a close, with the winner announced: Raphael Halloran with a fantastic interactive HTML5 entry. You can view his entry, the runners up, and several of the other offerings at the PostGrad.com site.
6 weeks ago, we launched a data visualisation competition with David McCandless. The brief was based on some data that David had collected about the ethnicity of student attending elite universities in the UK.
After much deliberation by our expert panel of judges, the votes are now in.
SIGGRAPH has posted their preview video of this year’s Computer Animation Festival, showcasing the best of short films, visual effects, and video games in the last year. I recognize some slips from projects like Portal2 and a few movies, but much of it looks brand new and exciting this year!
Either when using it for personal entertainment or achieving professional goals, privacy is by far the most concerning aspect of Social Media, and the folks at Zone Alarm made a very interesting infographic ranking the most secure Social Networking sites. Social Media can play an important role when it comes to education, as seen in Masters in Education‘s post, but also to improve your personal branding, like Sestyle shows us. More executives are using it, according to Jive, and it’s being used more and more also to get answers – the already well known “Lazyweb”, visualized here by Inbox-q.
Gregor Aisch gave a recent sneak-peek of some OpenSpending visualization work that has resulted in a new visualization method he calls “radial bubble trees”. Built entirely in web-friendly technologies like HTML5 and SVG, it’s a highly-interactive method of diving into the data.
We recently re-implemented the bubble visualisation from WDMMG to make it more re-usable for almost every dataset. Our main aim was to use it in the OpenSpending explorer which lets users explore and analyse government spending in a fun way. We now call the visualisation radial bubble tree, or just bubble tree, because that’s what it actually does: displays tree datasets in a radial layout with bubbles representing the individual nodes. For our purposes, each node represents a budget item.
Last week Microsoft made waves with claims that WebGL was an insecure and dangerous standard that could bring us a whole new level of web-based malware, exposing millions of systems to new threats. I personally found their claims overblown, but Jon Peddie (as usual) has a great balanced writeup on the real story behind Microsoft’s claims based primarily on a report from Context Security which found two possible problems. One problem is just a classic Denial of Service, that exposing the video card to the browser makes it easy for someone to simply hang the card. The more interesting attack, IMO, is this cross-domain glitch:
It’s very rare to see a week going by without new data – and infographics – about Social Media being published. 
NVidia has just announced the newest entrant into the ever-growing CUDA Center of Excellence program, Stanford University. Stanford already has a CUDA architecture and parallel computing program, so adding them to the Center of Excellence program is really a mere formality.
The 
SIGGRAPH has posted their preview video of this year’s Computer Animation Festival, showcasing the best of short films, visual effects, and video games in the last year. I recognize some slips from projects like Portal2 and a few movies, but much of it looks brand new and exciting this year!
Either when using it for personal entertainment or achieving professional goals, privacy is by far the most concerning aspect of Social Media, and the folks at 
Gregor Aisch gave a recent sneak-peek of some OpenSpending visualization work that has resulted in a new visualization method he calls “radial bubble trees”. Built entirely in web-friendly technologies like HTML5 and SVG, it’s a highly-interactive method of diving into the data.
VizWorld.com 
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