Popular Mechanics has compiled their list of the 10 best VFX scenes this year, including subtle work in The Adjustment Bureau to complete CG constructions in Harry Potter.
There’s a backlash building in Hollywood against the overuse of computer-generated imagery (CGI). For the most part, though, 2011′s popcorn blockbusters still leaned heavily on green screens and render farms to produce the most spectacular visual effects (VFX) of the year. Here are our picks for the scenes that proved that pixels can still impress us (even when the movies they populate don’t).
If you’re looking for VFX work and done mind the sunny beaches of South Florida, maybe you should consider Digital Domain who just reporting an additional $11Million in incentives, bringing their total to an impressive $135M in total incentives from the State of Florida & the cities of Port Saint Lucie and West Pam Beach.
”This recent award brings the total funding that we have received from our government partners to approximately $135.1 million in support of our business expansion,” said John Textor, CEO of Digital Domain Media Group. “As we deliver on the job creation promises we have made to the communities that support our growth, we benefit from a unique business model that utilizes these grants and economic incentives to greatly minimize the financial risk of such growth.”
Next month is CES so the press releases of exotic hardware that will probably never actually come to consumers is in full-swing. LG is first out of the gate with the announcement of their huge new 84-inch “Ultra Definition” TV capable of 3840×2160 and 3D viewing.
“LG is pushing the limits of home entertainment innovation with this 3D UD TV,” said Havis Kwon, President and CEO of LG Electronics Home Entertainment Company. “We are bringing together all our Smart TV and 3D knowledge in the 3D UD TV in order to demonstrate to the CES audience that LG is committed to being the world’s leading brand for immersive home entertainment in 2012 and beyond.”
This is the “get them in the booth” item so you can see their real 55-inch OLED TV and new “Smart TV Ecosystem” products.
Bungie is very well known for their Halo franchise, but that doesn’t stop them from constantly looking forward to new technology and algorithms to improve their games. When asked about what they want to improve in 2012, they of course mentioned improved character AI and realistic worlds, but number one on their list is a classic problem well known to anyone who write graphics code:
“Number one is removing digital artifacts… removing all the jaggies, having very clean foliage edges, and awesome looking hair with no artifacts. Removing these digital artifacts that remind people you are staring at a computer screen is one of our top priorities.”
FastCo has published their selection of the 22 best infographics of the year, and adds some bold flavor text to match.
As infographics go mainstream, infographic designers grow bolder. Some of the most tantalizing projects we came across this past year stretched our understanding of what a data visualization can be: It can be a set of interactive commuter-train maps plotted not according to distance but time. It can be a metaphorical chart of how water flows from the source to the consumer. It can be the spikes and dips of the Dow Jones Industrial Average rendered as notes on a musical scale. Infographics have clearly evolved into something greater than just a way to make raw numbers more enticing. They’re a full-blown art form.
Of course, 2011 is also the year that Infographics “Jumped the Shark“, flooding the internet with garbage bit-sucking images that blow 4 sentences of information into a 4Meg graphic.
PhysOrg has a short article about a company called “Imec” that hopes to make holographic TV a reality in 2012 through an interesting nanoscale silicon processes.
In their nanoscale system, they work with chips made by growing a layer of silicon oxide on to silicon wafer. They etch square patches of the silicon oxide. The result is a checkerboard-like pattern where etched-away pixels are nanometers lower than their neighbors. A reflective aluminum coating tops the chip. When laser light shines on the chip, it bounces off of the boundary between adjacent pixels at an angle. Diffracted light interferes constructively and destructively to create a 3-D picture where small mirrored platforms are moving up and down, many times a second, to create a moving projection.
They hope to have their first “proof of concept” designs in 2012, although I imagine a marketable version of the tech is a good 4-5 years away. Check out their demo video from IEEE Spectrum below.
Here’s a fun new toy to try for the holidays: Holographium for iOS devices. Find yourself a decent digital camera capable of long exposures, load up some cute text on your iOS device, and then watch as you magically turn it into 3D Extruded text floating in physical space.
Magically transform text and graphics into thousands of luminous 3D cross section scans, and extrude them in a long exposure photograph.
Got a digital camera which is capable of taking long exposure photographs of at least 3 seconds? Then you will love Holographium!
Next month at CES, LG will be demonstrating some new monitors. One that really caught my eye is a new offering called the “DM92″ which offers mere 1mm bezels on the top and sides, making it an ideal candidate for multi-screen setups like NVidia’s 3-monitor 3D Vision gaming setup.
The DM92 series showcases a premium design by employing the slim bezel of LG’s technology- and design-driven CINEMA SCREEN whose aesthetic superiority is accompanied by the lustrous chrome stand. During the monitor TV’s attractive 27-inch display, users can access files on their PC, play games or just chill and watch theirfavorite TV show
I can’t find any mention of the 1mm bezel in the Press Release, and no mention of price either. Guess we’ll have to wait until next month to see what really materializes.
The Autodesk Research team has just published “Citeology” on their website. It’s a java applet for visualizing a large collection of technical research papers. As you can see from the image above, the end result combines both the text of the papers along with a timeline and information on a chosen topic and where it appears within.
Citeology looks at the relationship between research publications through their use of citations. The names of each of the 3,502 papers published at the CHI and UIST Human Computer Interaction (HCI) conferences between 1982 and 2010 are listed by year and sorted with the most cited papers in the middle. In total, 11,699 citations were made from one article to another within this collection. These citations are represented by the curved lines in the graphic, linking each paper to those that it referenced.
I’m surprised to see this coming from Autodesk Research, not what I would typically expect from them. Nonetheless it’s an impressive visualization that’s both beautiful and functional.
Over at the HPC-CH blog, they’ve got an interview with Argonne’s Venkartram Vishwanath on how he’s dealing with some extremely large simulation datasets. They’ve found that the visualization isn’t just good for finding insight in their data, but also a great workaround for IO bottlenecks that arise from the huge filesizes.
Venkartram agrees that one challenge of next generation simulations is that I/O will not keep up with the growth rate of computing capability. In his group at Argonne they are now working on efficient infrastructure and software to reduce the amount of data being written to storage to perform analysis, as well as in-situ visualization while the simulation is progress. This will facilitate the transformation of the data into insight.
Popular Mechanics has compiled their list of the 10 best VFX scenes this year, including subtle work in The Adjustment Bureau to complete CG constructions in Harry Potter.
If you’re looking for VFX work and done mind the sunny beaches of South Florida, maybe you should consider Digital Domain who just reporting an additional $11Million in incentives, bringing their total to an impressive $135M in total incentives from the State of Florida & the cities of Port Saint Lucie and West Pam Beach.
Next month is CES so the press releases of exotic hardware that will probably never actually come to consumers is in full-swing. LG is first out of the gate with the announcement of their huge new 84-inch “Ultra Definition” TV capable of 3840×2160 and 3D viewing.
Bungie is very well known for their Halo franchise, but that doesn’t stop them from constantly looking forward to new technology and algorithms to improve their games. When asked about what they want to improve in 2012, they of course mentioned improved character AI and realistic worlds, but number one on their list is a classic problem well known to anyone who write graphics code:
FastCo has published their selection of the 22 best infographics of the year, and adds some bold flavor text to match.
PhysOrg has a short article about a company called “Imec” that hopes to make holographic TV a reality in 2012 through an interesting nanoscale silicon processes.
Here’s a fun new toy to try for the holidays: Holographium for iOS devices. Find yourself a decent digital camera capable of long exposures, load up some cute text on your iOS device, and then watch as you magically turn it into 3D Extruded text floating in physical space.
Next month at CES, LG will be demonstrating some new monitors. One that really caught my eye is a new offering called the “DM92″ which offers mere 1mm bezels on the top and sides, making it an ideal candidate for multi-screen setups like NVidia’s 3-monitor 3D Vision gaming setup.
Over at the HPC-CH blog, they’ve got an interview with Argonne’s Venkartram Vishwanath on how he’s dealing with some extremely large simulation datasets. They’ve found that the visualization isn’t just good for finding insight in their data, but also a great workaround for IO bottlenecks that arise from the huge filesizes.
VizWorld.com 
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