There’s a new iPhone/iPad app out that enables visualization of large 3D models in several popular formats like STL, OBJ, and PLY. From a LinkedIn Post:
The application has been developed by the Visual Computing Lab a research group of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) , the same team that has developed MeshLab, the leading open source mesh processing system. We are going to add, in the next versions, more and more advanced and innovative features to make it become a powerful tool for the presentation, inspection, analysis and review of 3D objects.
It’s an impressive app, similar to Kitware’s KiwiViewer, although this supports more model formats (PLY being my personal favorite addition) and much larger models (up to 2million faces). A free download for both iPhone and iPad.
Like we mentioned last week, we’ll be featuring until Friday some of the many visualizations (both interactive and static) made as a tribute to the late Steve Jobs. Some of this resources come from other countries, but the message af all of them is basically the same: the world will miss Mr. Jobs, much more that any other “executive” in history. Our first picks go to Wired, The New York Times, Spanish La Informacion, Twitter and Brazilian MuchBeta, showing, among other things, words used in Twitter tributes to Steve Jobs, in this massive global tribute.
With the sudden passing of Apple founder Steve Jobs, the internet has been awash with stories of his great ideas and the many amazing products he brought to life at Apple during his tenure. What has been largely overlooked is his similar guidance of a little computer graphics company named Pixar, brought from a dying division of LucasFilm into the animation powerhouse we all know now.
It’s also clear that without Jobs’ stewardship, Pixar would never have given us RenderMan, either. It would have likely remained an amazing but proprietary render engine owned by the wrong corporate parent. Astonishingly, before Jobs came along, Lucas considered selling to divisions of General Motors and Philips. It was Jobs who encouraged the team to develop and sell its own software (after divesting the limping Pixar hardware business to Viacom). RenderMan sales helped fund Toy Story‘s extended production schedule.
A new case study from NVidia covers the creation of an impressive 3D Display wall 25 JVC monitors driven by 13 NVidia Quadroplex systems. The result is an amazing synchronized display driven by a handful of workstations, offering up 52 million pixels of scientific data in a beautiful stereoscopic interactive display.
“Most of what people see on the display is the output of an interactive application. It’s not pre-rendered but rather interactively drawn on the screen,” he explained. “For a protein crystal structure, for example, it’s just a PDB file converted into a mesh, and this software knows how to render it. For volumetric data like an MRI [magnetic resonance imaging], it’s a Z-stack of images. What this means is that instead of a clinician having to cycle through a series of single grayscale images one at a time, if we write the right tools, people can visualize the MRI in stereo 3D as a continuous surface and see things like lesions more clearly.”
I’ve seen similar displays built on a smaller scale, but this is quite possibly the largest and highest resolution 3D display built to date. Now that it’s up and running, more and more schools are coming to them to try it out.
“It’s really one of those things where the sky’s the limit,” said McCrory. “We have astronomers doing incredible work with simulating the evolution of star systems. The Business School has shown an interest in visualizing economic data to show trends. We have requests coming from every school.”
Friday’s here, and it’s time to close another week of Daily Viz from Visual Loop, this one dedicated to Social Media. Our picks for today include a visual history of Twitter, from Mashable, a minimalist comparison between the micro-blog and Faceboook, made by Vincos, and a closer look at the “photo-phenomenon” on Facebook – the largest image repository of the World, as we can see trough Business Insider‘s and Pixable‘s infographics. Finally, Marketing Tech Blogx shows how Consumers and Businesses behave in Social Media.
Next week we’ll be remembering the importance of the late Steve Jobs, not only to the world technology, but in the way he tought every single one of us to simply.. think different.
If you’re an R user, you may want to check out the 2-part series at R-bloggers on visualizing spatiotemporal datasets.
There are many visual methods used to identify patterns in space and time. I’ve discussed some in prior threads and will show a few others briefly here. One of the most difficult questions I often hear from others regarding markov type approaches, is how to identify states to be processed.
It’s a pretty technical article full of some great information. I’ve never used R myself, but I can tell I’m going to have to learn.
Here’s an impressive offering from Powercolor, a new Radeon HD 6970 that sports an external “Red Button”. What does it do?
This card comes with a dual-bios switch (the red button) that allows to increase the GPU core clock up to 960MHz and the memory (2GB GDDR5) up to 1425MHz. Default clock speeds are 880MHz for the GPU and 1375MHz for the memory.
One thing against passive 3D displays has always been the lowered resolution that comes from the interlaced design. Cutting the vertical resolution in half seems like it would be a bad thing, and has driven many people to use Active displays instead. A new study at DisplayMate however, says that human perception can’t see any difference.
The study finds that passive 3DTVs, which use an alternating raster scan approach, deliver a full-HD resolution 3D experience due to image fusion in human visual perception. The findings are significant as it elevates the impact of human perception of image quality as a measure of the 3D experience, as specs alone seem inadequate.
I have to disagree. Current 3D passive displays have significant artifacts, at least in my experience. Particularly when using them with data visualization tools and seeing 1-pixel wide lines (or even slightly bigger) turn into perforated lines as they cross the screen diagonally.
Personally, I can’t wait for 1920×2160 displays (double 1080 tall), where they can still interlace but leave you with 1080 lines in each eye.
Autodesk has a a nice case study online from Double Negative, discussing how they were able to use Autodesk Maya to create many of the effects in the Harry Potter franchise, focusing heavily on the latest and final chapter.
“We had a Dragon Team and a Hogwarts Team,” says Vickery. “They were almost like 2 separate production facilities in many ways. The complexity of the work on this film was so massive, with this incredible white dragon and a fully CG Hogwarts that had to be destroyed in epic fashion. It was such a big operation, in fact, that the filmmakers held a lot of the work back for the first installment of Deathly Hallows, mainly so we could build a well-oiled machine for the second part. Maya, of course, was a big part of that machine.”
There’s still a lot of questions surrounding Google+. Can it be a true Social Media player? Will it be able to reach Facebook and Twitter, as far as the “regular” user’s preference? Identyme has put together some stats about Google’s newest social endeavour, and, more recently, Peer 1 Hosting showed the differences between Facebook and Google+ privacy settings. From Dr. Rey Junco’s Blog, comes an infographic about Facebook and student engagement, followed by All Facebook‘s tips on how to increase Facebook conversions, using Back At You. Closing our Daily Viz from Visual Loop, e-interactive‘s guide to measure the results of your Social media strategy.
There’s a new iPhone/iPad app out that enables visualization of large 3D models in several popular formats like STL, OBJ, and PLY. From a LinkedIn Post:
Like we mentioned last week, we’ll be featuring until Friday some of the many visualizations (both interactive and static) made as a tribute to the late Steve Jobs. Some of this resources come from other countries, but the message af all of them is basically the same: the world will miss Mr. Jobs, much more that any other “executive” in history. Our first picks go to 
With the sudden passing of Apple founder Steve Jobs, the internet has been awash with stories of his great ideas and the many amazing products he brought to life at Apple during his tenure. What has been largely overlooked is his similar guidance of a little computer graphics company named Pixar, brought from a dying division of LucasFilm into the animation powerhouse we all know now.
Friday’s here, and it’s time to close another week of Daily Viz from Visual Loop, this one dedicated to Social Media. Our picks for today include a visual history of Twitter, from 
If you’re an R user, you may want to check out the 2-part series at R-bloggers on visualizing spatiotemporal datasets.
Here’s an impressive offering from Powercolor, a new Radeon HD 6970 that sports an external “Red Button”. What does it do?
One thing against passive 3D displays has always been the lowered resolution that comes from the interlaced design. Cutting the vertical resolution in half seems like it would be a bad thing, and has driven many people to use Active displays instead. A new study at DisplayMate however, says that human perception can’t see any difference.
Autodesk has a a nice case study online from Double Negative, discussing how they were able to use Autodesk Maya to create many of the effects in the Harry Potter franchise, focusing heavily on the latest and final chapter.
There’s still a lot of questions surrounding Google+. Can it be a true Social Media player? Will it be able to reach Facebook and Twitter, as far as the “regular” user’s preference? 
VizWorld.com 
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