Indie software company Kickstand is trying to take their popular skin manipulation tools “Stretchmesh” and make it an open-source community project, hoping it will help with some of the delays in bringing it to new software packages. However, before they’ll do it they want $15k to help maintain it and prove that people really want it. They’ve started a project on IndieGoGo to raise the funds, which currently sits at only $450 donated.
So, if you’ve found Stretchmesh to be useful, maybe you should consider adding some into it so help bring it to the new 2012 products (and beyond). If you’re not familiar with it, check out their demo videos below.
VentureBeat’s Chikodi Chima throws his name into the many people claiming that the infographics bubble is bursting thanks to the overwhelming number of “junk infographics” flooding the internet. Infographics, or visualizing data, is still useful tho:
We live in an era of big data, where our every action spins off gigabits of information, both meaningful and mundane. Our computers, phones, and browsing habits leave behind trails of data exhaust that can be sifted and recombined to give us better search results, improved movie recommendations, or ways for marketers to serve up more relevant advertisements. But at the end of the day, it’s still just data. For those of us who don’t actually enjoy gazing at columns of digits, we need someone to make sense of it all, preferably in soothing colors and with non-threatening images. That’s why data visualization can be so comforting, and why it has become so popular of late.
Unfortunately, so few of them actually do this:
The most egregious examples of bad infographics are simply pictures with a few numbers attached, or a chronology of events peppered with commentary. They’re disappointing, contain minimal insight, and offer little that you couldn’t get from a simple text timeline. They are also hard to avoid. And this is why many feel the Internet infographics trend has run amok.
They also have some good quotes from Nathan Yau, describing how infographics have moved from actual data visualization tools to just SEO tools replacing blog posts, hence the many narrow-but-extremely-long images that are becoming so common.
3dWorld is hosting an “advent calendar” this year, giving away something special every day from now til Christmas. Today’s offering is a good one, a free HDRI set from the folks behind the popular Dutch Skies package.
The set includes an 8K spherical background, a 4K spherical HDR for reflections, a spherical lightmap and a reference document to link everything together using the popular sIBL system. You also get a sequence of 11K exposures for post-production work.
The set works with any 3D package capable of reading HDR files, including 3ds Max, Maya, Softimage, LightWave 3D and modo.
SecViz has the details on a new visualization contest that attempts to bring graphical order to the typical chaos of network traces, following a reference dataset of internet attacks against a host.
The Challenge:
Design and build a visualization that describes the attacks that were analyzed in FC5. Use the three prize winners’ solutions as references and to give you a head start on the data analysis. Use the FC5 dataset to create your FC10 visualization.
As an example, the visualization may have a geographic element, represented as a map, link graphs, histogram, or parallel coordinates, that sheds light on the following:
Where the attacks came from
The volumes of attacks originating from various locations
The success or failure of these attacks
The nature of the attacks. For example which are “primary” and which are the “secondary” phases.
Can the attacks be color coded to describe groups of attacks/attackers?
Use external data sources such as the many freely available geomapping databases.
The output can be anything that you like – from a still image, to interactive flash/java, dynamically updating, dashboard style, magazine infographic, holograms are also accepted.
To close our week dedicated to holiday online shopping, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday infographics, we’ll take a look at some of the major e-commerce trends. With a help from Social Vibe, Volusion, Derby, Credit Donkey and Blue Kai, today’s Daily Viz from Visual Loop will also show the logistics of the Holiday Season, how consumers are getting more worried in getting real value from their shopping, and some of the most popular products sold dur5ing this season.
NVidia’s Cyril Crassin has a great post on their Developer Blog talking about his in-depth research into realistic lighting in computer rendering. Discussing realtime vs offline, along with many algorithms and physics effects, it’s a great-read.
The key to our approach lies in a new algorithm and data structure that allow much faster computation. Instead of working on triangles (the traditional way of rendering graphics), we’re using voxels. Each voxel is one value in a 3D grid. The voxels are stored in an octree structure (a tree structure in which each node has eight children), with voxels as the nodes on the tree. Octree structures effectively compact the information stored in large amounts of graphics data. Octree structures use less memory, making them faster and more efficient at rendering tasks such as ray tracing.
The latest update for the 2011 Xperia phones contains one subtle little feature that’s actually a huge one for web developers: Integrated and native support for the WebGL standard. A possible first-step toward unifying the 3d experience on mobile devices, Xperia and Android get the title of being the first to bring it to reality. Over at SonyEricsson’s website, they have a developer article on how it all works.
In this article, Anders Isberg from Sony Ericsson’s Technology Reseach department explains more about WebGL and what to think of when you develop 3D web applications for touch-enabled devices. If you scroll down, you will also find three WebGL examples that you can browse to from the Android browser, if you have the latest software on your 2011 Xperia™ phone. You can also check out how it looks in the video above.
We start today’s selection with another overview on the Black Friday consumer “euphoria”, made by BlackFriday 2011, followed by two infographics about the Social Media “buzz”, more specifically on Foursquare and Twitter, provided by the Foursquare team and Mashwork. After that, a breakdown of Black Friday TV Sales, by Black Friday.info, and we close our Daily Viz from Visual Loop with Symbian Tweet‘s take on mobile shopping.
Indie software company Kickstand is trying to take their popular skin manipulation tools “Stretchmesh” and make it an open-source community project, hoping it will help with some of the delays in bringing it to new software packages. However, before they’ll do it they want $15k to help maintain it and prove that people really want it. They’ve started a project on IndieGoGo to raise the funds, which currently sits at only $450 donated.
VentureBeat’s Chikodi Chima throws his name into the many people claiming that the infographics bubble is bursting thanks to the overwhelming number of “junk infographics” flooding the internet. Infographics, or visualizing data, is still useful tho:
3dWorld is hosting an “advent calendar” this year, giving away something special every day from now til Christmas. Today’s offering is a good one, a free HDRI set from the folks behind the popular Dutch Skies package.
To close our week dedicated to holiday online shopping, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday infographics, we’ll take a look at some of the major e-commerce trends. With a help from 
NVidia’s Cyril Crassin has a great post on their Developer Blog talking about his in-depth research into realistic lighting in computer rendering. Discussing realtime vs offline, along with many algorithms and physics effects, it’s a great-read.
The latest update for the 2011 Xperia phones contains one subtle little feature that’s actually a huge one for web developers: Integrated and native support for the WebGL standard. A possible first-step toward unifying the 3d experience on mobile devices, Xperia and Android get the title of being the first to bring it to reality. Over at SonyEricsson’s website, they have a developer article on how it all works.
We start today’s selection with another overview on the Black Friday consumer “euphoria”, made by 
VizWorld.com 
Comments