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New press release from Vicon today, announcing three new products they’ll be demonstrating on the floor of SIGGRAPH next week.. First off is their new Blade2 software (shown to the right) that offers real-time motion capture with a new engine called “Axiom” that can handle multiple characters in realtime.  Also, they’ll be demonstration two new tools : A handheld interaction device, and a new head-mounted facial tracking system named “Cara”.

Imogen Moorhouse, COO at Vicon says, “The product line-up we’re showing at Siggraph this year is the result of years of research and development. Feedback from customers during our Alpha project for Blade has been invaluable to developing a product that, we think, will set a new industry standard for real time motion capture.”

Get all the details after the break, or at Booth #729 next week.

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Hardware "motion capture", vicon

A new company called “Oculus” has turned to popular website Kickstarter for their first round of funding.  They’re currently looking to raise $250,000 USD for development of the “Rift VR” head-mounted immersive 3D display.  If boasts a 110-degree FOV diagonally, and they claim to already have a nice stable of gaming companies working with them to build it.

 ”I’m a believer,” said Cliff Bleszinski, design director at Epic Games. “We’re extremely excited here at Epic Games to get the Unreal Engine integrated with Oculus!”

“I think this will be the coolest way to experience games in the future. It will simply be that big,” offered David Helgason, CEO of Unity.

“It looks incredibly exciting. If anybody’s going to tackle this set of hard problems, we think that Palmer’s going to do it. So we’d strongly encourage gamers to support this Kickstarter,” said Gabe Newell, president and owner of Valve.

So far, their kickstarter is already past the goal and holding at $338k.  It’s funny to see something like this get so much press so quickly, given that head-mounted displays have been around for other a decade but they all suffer from the same problems: Weight, low resolution, and framerate problems.  Who knows if Oculus can get it right.  Get the full release after the break.

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Hardware oculus, vr

Today, european company Zero Creative is launching what they call the world’s brightest 46″ Glasses-Free 3D Display.  Lots of nice features there in the title, but the numbers seem to bear it out with an impressive 3000cd/m2 and an included software platform “3dZignage” to help users get 3D content started.  Aimed firmly at marketing and advertising, it looks like a promising product for anyone interested in glasses-free 3D.

“Current digital signage (DOOH) solutions almost all still use traditional 2D displays and poor content. This way they are more and more losing the attention of the target audience. Introducing this new level of extreme brightness combined with glasses-free 3D image is a giant step forward for the DOOH market.”, says Jean-Pierre van Maasakker, CEO of Zero Creative, “This new type of innovative high performance xyZ 3D Displays will simply command attention of anyone near.”

Get the full release after the break, or visit their website.

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Hardware display, stereoscopic, zero creative

Next week at SIGGRAPH, OptiTrack will be on-site demonstrating their usual motion tracking cameras.  But this year, they’ll be announcing a new series of cameras specifically designed for large-volume full-scale productions.  The press release doesn’t include many details (but instead choosed to name-drop a few dozen companies and films that used their equipment), and I don’t see anything about it on their website yet.  Guess we’ll just have to wait.

At SIGGRAPH 2012, OptiTrack will launch a brand new series of motion capture cameras specifically tailored to large-volume, full-scale productions. Mocap demos will be conducted in booth #610, and will also include a look at the Flex 13, which debuted in March 2012 and is OptiTrack’s solution for high precision, small and medium-volume tracking applications. Autodesk, Halon Entertainment, Fabric Engine and Oblong Industries will join OptiTrack on stage to demonstrate how OptiTrack virtual and motion capture cameras can be painlessly integrated into both established and custom-made pipelines.

Get the rest of the release after the break.

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Hardware "motion capture", optitrack

SIGGRAPH is coming soon (next week!) and the announcements are already rolling in.  Today MAXON has just announced the newest version of their CINEMA4D package, Release 14.

R14 delivers breakthrough performance including a new, fully integrated sculpting system, camera matching functionality, exchange plugins to two key applications – The Foundry NUKE and Adobe Photoshop Extended – and improved integration with Adobe After Effects. Motion graphics/VFX artists and visualization designers will benefit from features that accelerate productivity to produce spectacular 3D content more fluidly and collaborate with increased efficiency.

The new digital sculpting is a big addition in this release, and the new support for NUKE as a compositor is a huge addition for those in professional VFX shops.  Get all the details after the break.

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Graphics cinema4d, maxon

The internet lit up yesterday with news of the LHC and CERN’s big discovery of the possible Higgs Boson discovery.  Some beautiful imagery and science was discussed, and then the head of the project Fabiola Gianotti got up to discuss it.  And what was shown was simply nauseating to look at, as shown above.  Multiple Colors, incomprehensible graphs, and Comic Sans.

Does anyone up there have basic computer graphics knowledge?  Quite possibly the most important scientific discovery of the decade, and they fill the presentation with purple slides and comic sans?

Thanks to a Facebook friend for posting this atrocity.

Science boson, cern, higgs, lhc

ISGTW has a nice writeup on five big research projects using supercomputing computation to predict and mitigate damages from natural disasters.

In 2011, 302 natural disasters were recorded, which claimed over 29,782 lives and caused $366 billion (€295 billion) of economic damages. Today, five promising research projects are using the latest computational methods to predict or forecast – depending on your point of view – disastrous events or their effects.

Of the millions of dollars spend on the numerical simulations tho, look at the poor state of their visualizations.  Traditional isosurfaces, flow glyphs, and rainbow colormaps litter the graphics.  With the massive amount of compute power available, almost none of it is spent on actually processing the data for visualization, leaving that to tools and algorithms typically untouched in a decade.

via Five ways to anticipate natural disasters | iSGTW.

Science hpc, scivis

This week Kitware announced a new partner library for ITK and VTK that brings tubular segmentation and registration support to the community at large.

A guiding premise of TubeTK is that by focusing on 1D and 2D manifolds we can devise methods that are insensitive to the modality, noise, contrast, and scale of the images being analyzed and to the arrangement and deformations of the objects in them.  In particular, we propose that TubeTK’s manifold methods offer improved performance for many applications, compared to methods involving the analysis of independent geometric measures (e.g., edges and corners) or requiring complete shape models.

Tubular segmentation is big-business in the biomedical space, isolated out blood vessels and other organs within larger structures.  Surely they’ll be the first big users of this library, but eventually it could come to a huge variety of fields.

via TubeTK.

Science itk, kitware, tubetk, vtk

Here’s a surprising move, Sony has just announced a finalized agreement to acquire cloud gaming service Gaikai for a whopping $380Million USD.

With this acquisition, SCE will establish a cloud service and expand its network business by taking full advantage of Gaikai’s revolutionary technology and infrastructure including data centers servicing dozens of countries and key partners around the world.

Personally I still prefer the service of OnLive, but this is a huge step toward acknowledging the power of Cloud Gaming services.  I can’t help but expect an upcoming revision of Sony televisions and BluRay players with Gaikai support integrated.

via Sony Acquires Cloud Gaming Company Gaikai – Expreview.com.

Graphics, Hardware gaikai, sony

Eurovis is underway over in Vienna, and Robert Kosara (@eagereyes) is there posting daily recaps of some of the best papers and events.  He offers up authors, details, and links to available resources and papers, making it a great way to keep up with the event.

Wolfgang Aigner presented to papers, Bertin was Right: An Empirical Evaluation of Indexing to Compare Multivariate Time-Series Data Using Line Plots by Wolfgang Aigner, Christian Kainz, Rui Ma, and Silvia Miksch, and Comparative Evaluation of an Interactive Time-Series Visualization that Combines Quantitative Data with Qualitative Abstractions by Wolfgang Aigner, Alexander Rind, and Stephan Hoffmann. Both describe interesting studies of visualization ideas. But more than that, the authors provide not only the tools used, but also the log data produced in the study on their website

Hit his site for full details and links.

via EuroVis 2012, Day 2 | eagereyes.

Science conference, eurovis