A new report from Slate takes a look at the last year of 3D theater revenues and finds them not just down, but actually doing worse than their 2D counterparts. The list of reasons is a long one including the higher cost of 3D tickets, the poor selection of movies, low quality conversions, and the significant percentage of the population that is unable or unwilling to view 3D content. All of these together have have created a dangerous perception of 3D as “low-quality”.
A larger problem appears to be that the quality of 3-D films is, on average, lower than the quality of 2-D movies. This is perhaps the most dangerous explanation–if true, it implies that consumers may have begun to link “3-D” and “lower-quality”, even if the link isn’t concious. From 2004-2010, the average Rotten Tomato rating of a 3-D film was 57 percent. From 2010-2011, it’s dropped to 41 percent. That includes the impact of all the extremely well-rated films also released on 3-D.
There’s always the possibility of 3D gaming, but even that doesn’t seem to have really done much to save 3D.
An interesting bit intelligent software from IMAX and Janro Imaging Labs tries to assign 3d stereoscopic depth information to classic 2D cell animation processes with surprising success.
As you move the Wand, the Sandde system tracks its position and orientation. Sandde then interprets the Wand’s coordinate data to create and display 3D stereoscopic lines that correspond to your real-world movements. And all of this outputs in real-time to any 3D display, so that you can see your work in 3D as you draw it.
If you’ve had the chance to work with a 3D Camera rig then you probably take the lens for granted, not realizing the huge amounts of effort and skill that go into creating it. In a new article on Broadcast Engineering world they go in-depth into the creation of stereo 3D lenses, and the article will give you a newfound respect for the engineers that create them.
It takes many man-hours to handcraft a single stereo 3-D telephoto lens, with technicians who are experts in optics handcrafting them. Most of the time is devoted to repeated analysis and testing of the lenses, and then putting them back on the workbench for further refinement until tight tolerances have been met.
A new plugin for Autodesk SoftImage adds in some much improved simulation and physics simulation support. Created by Exocortex Technologies, the Momentum Software v3 adds fracturing, quality rendering, and offline plot support.
The new fracture engine was developed from the ground up by well-known DCC developer Helge Mathee. It is designed around providing Softimage artists with full control over where and when objects will fracture. The fracturing engine supports dynamic collision-based fracturing, static user-specified pre-fracturing, real-time shatter filtering as well as self-shattering. The process of fracturing as well as the results are both controlled and queryable via Softimage ICE (Interactive Creative Environment) nodes.
The results are impressive. Check out their demo trailer below.
Both the Iraqi and Afghanistan wars have been filled with controversies, especially since the Wikileaks releases, and the human cost has far surpassed the economical one. Today, we bring, from Visualizing.org and Graphic.is, two visualizations about the Iraqi conflict, followed by the look at the war in Afghanistan by AP, Tableau and the National Post.
This Friday the US State Department will be hosting a data visualization conference at “Tech@State”, and the event is free and open to the public. Why might you care? Check out the impressive speaker list, with a Keynote from Edward Tufte himself.
The first day of the event, Friday, September 23 from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., will be held in the Atrium and Foyers at the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, 2700 F Street NW, Washington, DC 20566. It will feature government and non-government speakers and data visualization experts assembled from throughout the nation. The second day, Saturday, September 24 from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., will take place at the Microsoft Innovation and Policy Center, 901 K Street NW, Washington, DC 20001, and will feature an all-day “unconference,” at which attendees will generate their own agenda based on the interests and expertise of the crowd.
While the event is free & open, it is a limited number of attendees so registration is required. If you’ll be in the DC area this weekend, check it out!
NVidia has really put a lot of emphasis on their upcoming ARM Tegra system codenamed “Kal-El”, and has slowly been leaking technical details over the last few months. The latest tidbit came out earlier today: Details of the “fifth core” of the new design.
“Our next-generation Tegra processor, codenamed “Project Kal-El,” is widely known as the world’s first quad-core mobile chip. Today, we’re unveiling Kal-El’s little-known fifth core in two new whitepapers that detail its “Variable SMP” architecture.” said NVIDIA’s Matt Wuebbling on a blog post on the company’s website. “This extra core – which we call the “companion core” – runs at a lower frequency and operates at exceptionally low power. During less power-hungry tasks like web reading, music playback and video playback, Kal-El completely powers down its four performance-tuned cores and instead uses its fifth companion core. For higher performance tasks, Kal-El disables its companion core and turns on its four performance cores, one at a time, as the work load increases.”
So essentially they’ve added a 5th “idle” core to the system, one that operates at super-low power and has just enough horsepower to keep the system running and able to power up more powerful cores as needed. This will be great for systems with a high idle time (like their mentioned websurfing and email) where the overwhelming bulk of time is just spent waiting for the user to do something.
Toyota has teamed up with junaio and Hatsune Miku to bring the popular vocaloid sensation to life with Augmented Reality. Toyota’s already used Hatsune to advertise their 2011 Corolla, so this is just a continuation of their existing ad campaign.
Hatsune Miku may be a digital construct, but the great thing about Augmented Reality is that we can take digital and 3-D content and breathe life into it by placing it in the physical world. A virtual entity could assume all three dimensions and interact with the real world- and that’s exactly what we did for the beautiful Hatsune Miku in this most recent development for Toyota.
If you’ve always wanted to know more about VTK or Paraview but haven’t had the time, or haven’t been able to convince your management to spring for paid training, Kitware has heard your complaints.
Kitware is pleased to announce the availability of free online courses in support of its open-source communities. The courses, designed to give new and beginning users the skills and knowledge required to effectively use these open-source tools, will provide an introduction to the Visualization Toolkit (VTK), CMake, ParaView, and the Insight Toolkit (ITK). Each 90-minute course will cover one toolkit and be taught by an expert Kitware instructor.
You can hit their Training website and see the “Upcoming Online Courses” to see the list. They’ll be offering at first one class a month, with the first “Intro to VTK” coming up on October 12th.
Intel has a pretty new infographic online showing the explosion of internet connected devices since the first computer came online back 1960.
The time was when the internet was people on their PCs sending email and surfing web content dished up by servers. Sure, it was around before that in its academic/military guise, but as far as the public consciousness was concerned, PCs, laptops, email and the web, was all the internet meant. A few years ago that changed, imperceptibly at first, such that now the recurrent understanding of the internet is far more diverse, feral even. Myriad devices and people creating content in multiple forms, for consumption on an increasing array of devices. And it’s changing industry too- internet-connected combine harvesters, anyone? It has become known as the internet of things, guided by the fact that if something has an on/off switch, it should probably compute, and if it is going to compute, it should also connect to the internet.
I agree with Randy Krum’s take on it, it’s realliy pretty but lacking any true information. OF course, their point was to show address space explosion, but all of the points twist and tangle for apparently no real reason other than to look pretty.
This is one of those graphs that has the illusion of far more information than is actually there.
A new report from Slate takes a look at the last year of 3D theater revenues and finds them not just down, but actually doing worse than their 2D counterparts. The list of reasons is a long one including the higher cost of 3D tickets, the poor selection of movies, low quality conversions, and the significant percentage of the population that is unable or unwilling to view 3D content. All of these together have have created a dangerous perception of 3D as “low-quality”.
An interesting bit intelligent software from IMAX and Janro Imaging Labs tries to assign 3d stereoscopic depth information to classic 2D cell animation processes with surprising success.
If you’ve had the chance to work with a 3D Camera rig then you probably take the lens for granted, not realizing the huge amounts of effort and skill that go into creating it. In a new article on Broadcast Engineering world they go in-depth into the creation of stereo 3D lenses, and the article will give you a newfound respect for the engineers that create them.
A new plugin for Autodesk SoftImage adds in some much improved simulation and physics simulation support. Created by Exocortex Technologies, the Momentum Software v3 adds fracturing, quality rendering, and offline plot support.
Both the Iraqi and Afghanistan wars have been filled with controversies, especially since the Wikileaks releases, and the human cost has far surpassed the economical one. Today, we bring, from 
This Friday the US State Department will be hosting a data visualization conference at “Tech@State”, and the event is free and open to the public. Why might you care? Check out the impressive 
NVidia has really put a lot of emphasis on their upcoming ARM Tegra system codenamed “Kal-El”, and has slowly been leaking technical details over the last few months. The latest tidbit came out earlier today: Details of the “fifth core” of the new design.
Toyota has teamed up with junaio and Hatsune Miku to bring the popular vocaloid sensation to life with Augmented Reality. Toyota’s already used Hatsune to 
If you’ve always wanted to know more about VTK or Paraview but haven’t had the time, or haven’t been able to convince your management to spring for paid training, Kitware has heard your complaints.
Intel has a pretty new infographic online showing the explosion of internet connected devices since the first computer came online back 1960.
VizWorld.com 
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