Folks closer to the “tech” world understand perfectly well the importance of such dates as Black Friday or Cyber Monday. But is it really that big for small businesses? Today’s selection will be focusing precisely on that, starting with the works of Black Friday Sales and Credit Donkey. After that, Mint, Fat Wallet and Savings.com look at the consumer’s online shopping behavior during this season.
I have to admit, I’ve never been a big fan of TecPlot. However, a new demo video from them of their “Tecplot Chorus” tool shows an amazing capability of taking a suite of simulation runs (over 100) and quickly loading them into a single tool for easy comparison processing, all in under 2 minutes.
There are lots of tools for analyzing and processing individual simulation runs, but handling large suite runs like this (where perhaps you vary an angle of attack across 45-degrees in half-degree increments, each of the 90 runs generating a few thousand timesteps of simulation data) are often forgotten but essential in large scale analysis. Got to give credit to TecPlot for this one, it’s impressive. Check out the video below.
3Dconnexion has just launched their newest 6DOF input device at the Autodesk University event in Las Vegas. The new SpaceMouse pro combines their usual 6DOF sensors and ergonomics with a nice on-screen display and a nice arrangement of quick-keys (15 buttons, 5 quickview keys, 4 function keys, and 4 keyboard modifiers) all from 1 hand.
“3D mice revolutionize the way people interact with digital 3D content,” said Antonio Pascucci, vice president of products, 3Dconnexion. “We are committed to developing products that meet the needs of 3D users. SpaceMouse Pro provides a professional 3D navigation experience, enabling users to better understand their 3D content, while its new advanced ergonomic design ensures a comfortable working experience.”
It’s available now for $299 for pretty much every OS in mainstream use. Get the full details after the break.
Logically, one of the biggest concerns for consumers, when it comes to online shopping, is security. We’ve covered that topic extensively for the past weeks here on the Daily Viz from Visual Loop, so today we’re just going to leave some additional “survival” tips, that are applicable for pretty much all our internet shopping, and not only for Black Friday. The infographics come from Milo, Credit Loan, Zaarly and Identity Hawk.
This actually broke over the summer but apparently I never covered it here. Over in Japan there was a huge splash over a new TV star named “Aimi Eguchi”, appearing in a few commercials and TV ads. Later, it was found that the girl was actually a CG-construction, a composite of the faces of the 6 members of the popular japanese pop band “AKB48″.
Confectionery company Ezaki Glico Co., which features the character named Aimi Eguchi along with a few other AKB48 members in the commercial for its Ice no Mi (Fruit of Ice) product, confirmed Monday that she is a composite image of six members of the group.
The six members are Atsuko Maeda (eyes), Tomomi Itano (nose), Yuko Oshima (hairstyle), Mariko Shinoda (mouth), Minami Takahashi (face outline), and Mayu Watanabe (eyebrows), according to a TV ad by Glico.
It looks like they made heavy use of both modern 3D and traditional 2D compositing techniques, combining tricks like Facial Tracking for 3d mesh blending along with outline and image morphing.
Watch the video below for a quick overview of what they did.
Reminds me of the movie Sim0ne
The Making of Japan virtual character AKB48′s idol “Aimi Eguchi” & Link to make your own AKB48 – YouTube.
Graphics Programmers have a new toy to play with thanks to John Carmack and id software, who have just released the source code to their amazing game engine Doom 3. Unfortunately, some of the best parts are missing.
No game data is contained, as it’s of course still covered under EULA, and the original engine’s shadow rendering trick known as Carmack’s reverse has been replaced for legal reasons.
Presumably, this is due to the issue with the Patent, awarded to Creative Labs. The technique itself isn’t a secret anymore, but will be part of a legal entanglement similar to the old “Marching Cubes” problems of yester-year. Hopefully it’ll all pass soon.
Get the code on Github.
The holiday season has begun, you can see it – and feel it – all around you. Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas, and, culminating it all, a new year. So, how about we dedicate the last few weeks of this year’s Daily Viz from Visual loop looking at this season? Let’s start with a week of infographics about online shopping, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Today’s works come from SEO.com, Buy Sight, Cheap Sally, Today I Found Out and You Never Lose.
For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been showing infographics about important issues like online privacy and security, hacking and computer breaches, and the rise of the Big Data Age. Today, we close this series, with contributions from Pragmatrix, Bolt Insurance, Carbonite, Dell and BackBlaze. And after next week, we’ll move on to take a look at all the infographics being produced for this holiday season.
Medical imaging company Sectra is demonstrating a new interactive touchscreen visualization tale at RSNA2011, merging automatic 3d segmentation algorithms with new high-resolution touchscreen displays.
With powerful algorithms, Sectra Visualization Table identifies a bone or a bone fragment, according to the user’s touch interaction, and removes it from the image. Accordingly, orthopaedic surgeons can gain an overview of the joints, thereby facilitating pre-operative planning specifically in orthopaedic surgery. As with the rest of the functionality, the new segmentation tool is operated using the fingertips.
I love technology like this, even though it’s reminiscent of Immersadesk displays. However, a nice visualization method is only half the problem: Convincing doctors to do a lengthy & expensive CT or MRI instead of a cheap & quick x-ray is the bigger hurdle.
via Sectra Visualization Table to support real-time bone segmentation | Cision Wire.
Like we’ve seen so far in this week’s Daily Viz from Visual Loop, the information “explosion” opened new chalenges when it comes to data storage, and nothing illustrates that evolution as well as the rise of Cloud Storage. The infographic made by Wikibon shows that co-relation, followed by the CIO Market Pulse Survey results, presented by Comvault. After that, Wikibon also explains the importance of Real-Time Compression, and finally, from CXO and Zone Alarm, a number of tips and recommendation to choose an effective password – because, let’s face it, what’s the point of having a lot of data being stored, if anyone can crack it open, right?
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