VizWorld.com

id Software’s highly anticipated title “Rage” has finally shipped, to mediocre reviews from most gaming sites.  While they criticize the story and gameplay, nobody can complain about the amazing graphics.  Luxology has just issued a new press release giving a bit of insight behind the graphics, revealing that modo was one of the primary design tools.

“Modeling in modo is faster than using a level editor application, and we really enjoy the precise control we get over our level work, which would be impossible to do with only brushes or modular models,” says Seneca Menard, lead technical artist at Dallas, Texas-based id Software. “Plus, most of the tools needed for game design and development are already in modo, and that’s what we love about it.”

via Luxology.com :: id Software Employs modo to Model Assets for Highly Anticipated Game “Rage”.

Graphics id software, luxology, modo, rage

The growth of Social Networks can be seen as a part of the natural evolution of communication. Atlassian made a nice retrospective of the history of communication that really helps us to understand that. In fact, Social media has been used more and more in situations like emergencies and natural disasters, like Eton shows us. As far as the use for business, Restaurant App Engines, Mark Fidelman and designer Derri Hasmi made a few infographics illustrating how some companies are making the most of Facebook, Twitter and others.

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Graphics, Science design, infographic, infoviz, Visual Loop, visualizations

GraphicsSpeak brings us the news that ClearEdge just won a nice NSF grant to be used to enhance their impressive laser scanning technology.  The tech is amazing enough already, but thanks to this new funding they hope to make it even more so, letting you take your LIDAR/Laser scans and convert them automatically to 3D models with a minimum of fuss.

“Our focus has always been to develop software that can complete a 3D model in minutes with only a few mouse clicks,” said Chris Scotton, ClearEdge president and CEO. “This research grant brings the prospect of accurate city-wide 3D models one step closer to reality,”

via GraphicSpeak » ClearEdge3D wins National Science Foundation grant.

Science clearedge, lidar, nsf

In a statement similar to Panasonic’s exclusive deal with Avatar on release, Sony has setup a deal with Harry Potter to be the exclusive source of the new “Harry Potter 3D Experience” pack, including Harry Potter #7 Part 1 in 3D.

This exclusive “Harry Potter 3D Experience” will be available to consumers who purchase Sony’s BDP-S780 Blu-ray Disc player with 3D or BDV-E580 Blu-ray 3D home theater system. Additionally, the same Harry Potter 3D titles will be bundled with two pairs of Sony active 3D glasses, TDG-BR250/DBL, as a “3D starter kit.”

Harry Potter 7: The Deathly Hallows was originally supposed to appear in theaters in 3D, but they had to release it 2D only because the conversion was taking longer than expected.  I don’t think it ever actually came to theaters, so it seems this BluRay pack will be the only way to get see it in 3D for a while.

The new discs should be hitting Amazon soon.

via Harry Potter 3D Blu-rays.

Graphics 3d, bluray, harrypotter, stereoscopic

Robert Kosara is celebrating five years of his fantastic “Eagereyes” website, discussing some of the biggest hits and flops during that time.

In dog years, this website is now (almost) as old as I am. Over the years, it has changed both its direction and design several times; there have been times when I was overwhelmed with my readers’ reactions and times when nobody seemed to read the stuff I wrote. While I generally hate “best of” postings and indulging in nostalgia, I want to look back at a few of the things that I believe have shaped this site and how I think about what I’m doing, and revisit a few of the more interesting and/or successful things I’ve managed to do and write over the years.

He mentions that there is still a startling lack of good visualization products, citing Tableau and Visual.ly as exceptions that have stood out.  I always take issue with folks that forget about great apps and tools like VTK, ParaView, VisIt, VAPOR, and CEI’s EnSight, but I suppose he has a point if you’re limiting yourself to basic user-level applications targeted at people with no knowledge of data visualization techniques.

via Five Years of EagerEyes | eagereyes.

Science history, kosara

Nobody denies the profound impact Social media has on our modern society, and The Knight Foundation shows the true measure of that impact in our education. After that, W Promote looks at the use of Social Media for humanitarian causes, and Greatist teaches us how to track health and fitness online, trough web 2.0 services. But nothing is perfect: according to Impermium‘s infographic, 40% of Online IDs are fakes, and Pingdom shows some the social networks of past, and how they’ve been outranked by Facebook, Twitter and others.

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Graphics, Science design, infographic, infoviz, Visual Loop, visualizations

Nathan Yau (FlowingData) and Robert Kosara (Eagereyes) have opened up an interesting dialogue of the many terms behind the field of visualization.  Terms like Infographics, Visualization, Charts, and Analytics all have different meanings to different groups so they each chime in with their own insights.

I was glad to see Robert point out one striking omission (striking to me anyway):

It’s interesting to see Nathan completely ignore scientific visualization, though it’s also not surprising: he is not a product of the academic visualization community. His focus is on statistical graphics and more information graphics-style things than visualization in general.

I can also think of a few other terms like Visual Analytics (which Robert ties in with Information Visualization) and the ever-popular “Data Porn”: Real data visualized to be “pretty”, without any real regard for making it useful.

via The Many Names of Visualization | eagereyes.

Science list

The Topogun mesh re-topologization and map baking tool is about to hit version 2.0 for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX.  Max Underground has a nice look at the beta, showing what you can expect in the full release when it comes out.

Topogun offers almost a full pipeline for retopologization and map baking, with the exception of UV creation tools (which might not be a minor issue for some users). You can also use Topogun 2.0 for retopologizing your concept sculpt and then use subdivision tools to create a hi-res, wrapped mesh that captures the details automatically and then continue sculpting on the cleaned up hi-res mesh in your sculpting application.

via Topogun 2.0 beta review – Max Underground.

Graphics software, topogun

Remember last summer when the eastern hemisphere kept getting knocked offline by severed undersea cables?  TeleGeography has a beautiful interactive map showing the many undersea cables that keep the world connected, and it’s far more than I ever expected.

Cables shown include international and US domestic submarine cables with a maximum upgradeable capacity of at least 5 Gbps. Cable routes are stylized to improve readability, and do not reflect the physical cable location. Similarly, cable landing stations do not show the precise coordinates of the building, and are meant to serve as a general guide to where a cable system lands.

via Submarine Cable Map.

Graphics interactive, internet, map

You may look at the image above and think it’s a classic visualization from the mid 1800′s. You’ld be wrong, as it’s actually a recreation of an old visualization done by Jim Vallandingham using d3 and Coffeescript for a native HTML5 version.

I choose to try out d3.js for this experiment. This is a javascript framework that is the official successor to the popular Protovis visualization toolkit. d3 allows you to represent your data with native svg elements, which provides a lot of power in terms of layout and style. Furthermore, to make writing javascript more fun, I wrote the visualizations in coffeescript – a language that compiles down to javascript.

via Jim Vallandingham.

Science coffeescript, d3, html5