VizWorld.com

Princeton University is having a new “Art of Science” competition, allowing students and researchs to contribute scientific visualizations of their work in art-gallery form, competing for (rather meager, unfortunately) prizes.

The three prize-winners will share $500, divided into shares of $250, $154.51 and $95.49 in accordance with the aesthetically pleasing golden ratio. Another 40 images are included in Princeton’s Art of Science 2013 exhibit, which opened on Friday in the atrium of Princeton’s Friend Center. The works were chosen from 170 images submitted from 24 different departments across campus.

The theme was of “Connections”, focusing on cross-disciplinary research.  Follow the link to the full gallery of some of the best work.

via ‘Art of Science’ exhibit makes the connection between truth and beauty – Cosmic Log.

Science art, contest, princeton, visualization

Amidst the turmoil of closures and bankruptcies plaguing the VFX industry, it seems newsworthy to hear that Shade VFX in Santa Monica, CA is actually thriving and just moved into a new space doubling their size.  What are they doing differently?  Easy: Making good business deals.

Godwin admits that in some cases Shade has been outbid by firms in London or Vancouver that offer tax breaks for studios, but he said that being in California has its advantages. Producers have told him that they prefer being able to meet with artists in person instead of needing to have conference calls with visual-effects teams working in far-flung locations around the globe.

via Shade VFX Expanding Despite Visual-Effects Industry Troubles | The Wrap Movies.

Graphics shade, vfx

One of the big nail-biting scenes of the new Iron Man 3 is the “barrel of monkeys” freefall, where Iron Man has only seconds to save a crew of 13 freefalling from a now-crashing Air Force 1.  At first glance, you may think it’s some amazing CG and bluescreen work, but the reality is far more impressive.  Involving a full team of parachuters and multiple jumps, the entire scene was actually done in-air and then touched-up for final results.

“I’ve worked on movies in the past where we’ve done fake free fall sequences, with vertical wind tunnels, people on wires, but by actually shooting it, you get the visceral, kinetic camera work that comes with actual free fall photography,” said Digital Domain VFX supervisor Erik Nash, who is an experienced sky diver himself. “It’s something that’s incredibly difficult to fake — the high-frequency camera shake that’s inherent to free fall photography. If you start with something photographed, it’s real, it’s believable and even if you change everything about it you’ve got a foundation.”

via ‘Iron Man 3′: The VFX that made the ‘barrel of monkeys’ scene soar [videos] | Hero Complex – movies, comics, pop culture – Los Angeles Times.

Graphics digitaldomain, ironman, movie, vfx

If you’re going to SIGGRAPH2013, then head on over to the website and check out the Advance Program.  In the Anaheim convention Center this July, they’ve got lots going on this year including the celebration of the 40th year of the Computer Animation Festival, the new SIGGRAPH university, the usual collection of wild and amazing stuff in the Emerging Technologies groups, and more production sessions packed into 5 days than anyone could ever absorb.

Check it out below in PDF or ePUB.

Advance Program | SIGGRAPH 2013.

Graphics siggraph, siggraph2013

AMD has announced their newest GPU , the HD7990.

The HD 7990 combines two GPUs and can deliver 8.2 (peak) TFLOPS single precision, and 2 TFLOPS (peak) double) precision. AMD claims they can run Tomb Raider with their new TressFX Hair technology enabled, or Crysis3 in 4K resolution. However, remember: 4K monitors are currently limited to 30 fps. The HD 7990 comes with 6 GB GDDR5, so it has the mem­ory to double or even triple buffer a 4K display. The HD7990 supports 4K through its DisplayPort ports, and they in turn can generate an HDMI via a dongle cable.

Definitely sounds impressive, and in addition they’ve added a new “Eyefinity 5″ mode perfect for gaming.  I’ve recently run into this myself where the Eyefinity setup runs great with 4 or 6 monitors, but 5 seems to be a weird “unknown” set.  In this card, 5 monitors create a long 5×1 line of monitors, with the Center of the display in the center of the 3rd monitor.

The card is expected to retail for $999.

via AMD claims new HD7990 graphics board is the world’s fastest.

Hardware amd, ati, eyefinity

A new press release from Kitware, makers of CMake, ParaView, VTK, ITK, and lots of popular scientific visualization toolkits, announces that they just got a grant from the NIH to push forward in the biomedical space.

Historically, VTK been indirectly funded by the development of related applications such as ParaView. This new award comes after a crescendo of requests from the VTK community to reinvigorate the toolkit as a catalyst for interactive visualization research in medicine. As such, this project will update the graphics infrastructure to support the representation and rendering of large data over the web, on mobile platforms, and with interactive 3D widgets.

I’m excited to see those last few pieces in there: large data over the web and on mobile platforms.  It looks like Kitware could really be positioning themselves as the frontrunner in high-end scientific visualization in almost all industries (Web, Mobile, Desktop, and HPC).

via Kitware – News: Kitware to Enhance the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) to Accelerate Community-Driven Medical Innovation.

Science kitware, medical, nih, vtk

If you’re currently trying to decide between keeping Adobe CS6 or upgrading to the new Creative Cloud offerings, you obviously need to know what you’re going to be getting for your ongoing subscription fee.  CreativeBlog has the most comprehensive list I’ve seen.

So is worth joining the subscription service? We won’t go into the rights and wrongs of Adobe’s business model here – we’re simply going to give you the lowdown on the standout new features in each of the main software titles.

They break it down by app with nicely detailed bullets.  Some things I notice on a quick pass:

• CSS exports from Photoshop and Illustrator for web editors.
• Non-distorting perspective corrections
• Multi-GPU support for accelerations, and support for both CUDA (NVidia) and OpenCL (AMD/ATI)
• a new Mercury engine in Premiere
• Retina display support
• 3D Camera Tracker in After Effects
• lots lots more..

via The ultimate guide to Adobe’s CC software | Adobe | Creative Bloq.

Graphics adobe

Another visualization research has joined the public cry of “Where are the Visualization Success Stories?” .  This time it’s the Fell in Love With Data blog’s Enrico Bertini.

Yes I know, impact could be defined in a million different ways and it may be hard to capture. But why? Why I never stumble into an article or blog post showing, I don’t know, for instance, how visualization helped a group of doctors doing something remarkable with visualization?

In days of shrinking budgets and tighter schedules, visualization researchers find themselves forced to justify their existence regularly when they typically do not operate independently but rather attached to a larger research organization (a government agency, research lab, or data acquisition group).  This typically means their work, outside of pure-research like what you see at IEEE VisWeek and such, is presented and shown by that group, leaving the visualization team out of the loop.

How do you propose this situation change?

via Where are the data visualization success stories? — Fell in Love with Data.

Science stories

Robert Kosara (eagereyes) has written a fun little tool that posts random text from InfoVis papers at major conferences on twitter at the @InfoVis_Ebooks account.

Each tweet contains a reference to the paper the snippet is from. For InfoVis, VAST, and CHI, these are DOIs rather than links. Links get long and distracting, whereas DOIs are much easier to tune out in a tweet. If you want to see the paper, google the DOI string (keep the “doi:” part). You can also take everything but the “doi:” and append it to http://dx.doi.org/ to be redirected to the paper page. For other sources, I will probably have to use links.

It’s more humor than function, at first glance, but you never know when you might find one worthy of digging deeper. For example, the image above pointed me to an interesting paper on visualizing Ice Hockey Analytics, all because I wondered what “SnapShot” was.

via Meet @InfoVis_Ebooks, Your Source for Random InfoVis Paper Snippets | eagereyes.

Science eagereyes, infovis, twitter

In more evidence that the “Makers” revolution is coming, Staples now sells the Cube 3D Printer and associated cartridges and accesories in-store through a partnership with 3DSystems.

You recall Staples teaming up with MCor Technologies for in-house 3D printing. Now, they partner with 3D Systems to bring the 2nd generation Cube 3D Printer to consumers. The printer is available in all of its five fashionable colors–silver, blue, white, magenta and green–at Staples.com with a list price of $1299 USD each. You can, of course, pick up the PLA or ABS print cartridges for $49.99 a pop. It’s no discount off the regular price of the printer at cubify.com and they don’t sell the discounted cartridge packs (yet), but it’s handy if you’re already getting your office supplies, coffee and paper delivered from the store.

I’m not sure what the typical office would have use for a 3D Printer, other than the gimmickry of it.  Some environments tho, particularly engineering houses, would probably love the flexibility of putting one of these on every Mechanical Engineer’s desk for less than the cost of a workstation, and allowing them to rapid prototype parts for demonstration.

via SolidSmack.com – The Cube 3D Printer, Now Available at Staples..

Hardware 3d systems, staples, stl