Review: OnLive
Podcast: Back in Action!
BitCoins: An Experiment in GPGPU
Interactive Visualization TechniquesInfographics Summary for 2013-05-20
10:30 pm
Recent VizWorld Features
Kitware’s Hospital Costs Visualizer
12:18 pm
Kitware has taken their recently developed web-visualization tools and pointed them squarely at the newly available hospital procedure cost database released by the US government, and created a nice interactive tool for visualizing various procedure costs by region.
The federal government recently released data about what hospitals charge for procedures, and how much Medicare reimburses them. We have visualized some of this data, along with publicly available data about mortality rates under these same procedures. How does your hospital stack up against national averages?
NodeBox – Data Visualizations for Curious Creatives
8:00 am
If you’ve always wanted to try your hand at scientific data visualization, but don’t have a data science or computer programming background, try out NodeBox. It’s a tool suite from Experimental Media Research Group in Antwerp, Belgium and offers 2D and 3D visualizations (with animations and interactivity) via a nice and simple drag-and-drop interface.
Using our open-source tools we enable designers to automate boring production challenges, visualize large sets of data and access the raw power of the computer without thinking in ones and zeroes. Our tools integrate with traditional design applications and run on many platforms.
via NodeBox | NodeBox.
Cast AR hands-on with Jeri Ellsworth at Maker Faire 2013
7:00 am
Reminiscent of the beginnings of the Oculus Rift, there’s now a new Augmented Reality headwear coming to Kickstarter from some old Valve employees and Jeri Ellsworth. They had some rough prototypes at the recent Maker Faire 2013, and the folks from engadget were there to get pics and an interview.
We interacted with a variety of environments, from a flying tour over a digital landscape to shooting up zombies with hooked up Xbox controllers, and was amazed at how intuitive and natural the controls felt. We also waved a LED-equipped wand around to throw a wrecking ball into a Jenga-style tower, which delighted us to no end. Not once did we feel nauseous or disoriented even as we bobbed and weaved.
Different from many other AR systems I’ve seen, the Cast works by mounting the projectors on your head thanks to new picoprojector technology. This offers many benefits like the ability to tightly couple a projector’s display to shutter glasses in hardware, allowing the projectors to display the left and right eye-frames in sync with active shutter glasses. This limits the augmented reality experience to a small projection area, but you could imagine a modified AR/VR scenario similar to working in a CAVE where you only render the portion of the screen you are looking at.
via Cast AR hands-on with Jeri Ellsworth at Maker Faire 2013 (update: video interview).
NVIDIA Shield available for Pre-Order, $349
6:42 am
The NVidia Shield handheld gaming console is now available for preorder at $349, with delivery by the end of the next month. For the $349, you get the package shown above: The console, and 2 games.
The desktop streaming feature, which allows you to use the Shield as a “remote” for Steam games on your PC, will be available as a “Beta” feature at launch. I’m not sure exactly what that means, except that it will be unsupported.
Remote Visualization with NICE EnginFrame2013
8:33 am
Another entry in the growing HPC Remote Visualization space comes from “NICE” software, who has just announced a new version of their EnginFrame2013 product that offers tools for creating and managing remote visualization resources.
Designed for technical computing users in a broad range of markets (Oil&Gas, Automotive, Aerospace, Medical, Finance, Research, and more), EnginFrame simplifies engineers’ and scientists’ workflows through its intuitive, self-documenting interfaces, increasing productivity and streamlining data and resource management.
Leveraging all the major HPC job schedulers and remote visualization technologies, EnginFrame translates user clicks into the appropriate actions to submit HPC jobs, create remote visualization sessions, monitor workloads on distributed resources, manage data and many more.
How MapBox Aims to Make the World’s ‘Most Beautiful Map’
11:00 am
If you’ve ever wondered how these giant world-wide high-resolution maps come together, Wired has a great new article with the creators of “MapBox”. MapBox is taking continuous streams of satellite data from the likes of NASA to construct giant near-realtime images of the entire globe at staggering resolutions.
“For the new release we’re processing two years of imagery, captured from January 1, 2011 through December 31, 2012,” says Loyd, “this amounts to over 339,000 16-megapixel+ satellite images, totaling more than 5,687,476,224,000 pixels. We boil these down to a mere 5 billion or so.”
The first problem is even getting the data. It’s all available in the public domain, but just transferring it over to MapBox’s servers was a major task because of the volume. To do this render, they needed to download two thirds of a terabyte of compressed data. “We’ve got 30 to 40 servers pulling down data from NASA,” says Herwig. “We called them up and said, ‘hey we’re going to hit you hard, what’s the best way we can do it for you?’”
Six startups re-imagining how we consume data
10:00 am
Between smart phones, social media, and the everpresent “cloud”, Humans are creating data at scales previously thought impossible. While great strides have been made in basic processing of this data for advertising and a few other areas, deep value remains buried in these mountains of information. GigaOm takes a look at 6 new startups looking to find newfound gold in these mountains of data.
They are to big data what server and network configurations are to mobile-app development on platforms like Parse. If you’re going to find out new things from massive and highly complex data sets, or going to give new types of people the ability to analyze even simple data, the presentation of that data and the ability to create consumable presentations are critical.
via Visualization is the future: 6 startups re-imagining how we consume data — Tech News and Analysis.
HitFilm for Mac by FXhome on Kickstarter
9:00 am
FXhome’s HitFilm has made good strides into film-editing suites on Windows, but has always been a windows-only application. Lots of reasons (I don’t want to get into “PC Rules, Mac Drools” arguments) exist for this, but with modern equipment and Microsoft’s new “features” like Windows8, they acknowledge that it’s time for a Mac version. They’ve been working on it internally and mostly completed the project, but have opened it to kickstarter for a quick community-infusion of excitement (and cash) to finish it off, to the tune of £25,000.
The vast majority of the Mac version will be funded by FXhome. We’ve already invested heavily in the initial R&D. The challenge is in the immediate cost to equip our developers with the essential hardware, development tools, software licenses and test machines needed to create the Mac version.
That’s where we need your help.
This Kickstarter gives us the boost we need right now to accelerate development. It allows us to keep the software affordable and speed up development so that HitFilm Mac comes out this year.
Understanding Physics and Roulette
7:35 am
Did you know you can hone your roulette strategy by understanding physics?
Most people have always considered roulette to be a game of chance, but some experts beg to differ. Some say that having paid extra attention in your high school physics class may come in handy when playing your next hand of online roulette.
Applying Basic Physics to Your Roulette Strategy
If you are looking for a way to beat the house when playing roulette, look no further, except maybe to brush up on your physics knowledge, particularly the concept of chaos theory. However, most people playing online roulette are not physicists, so let’s break it down to simpler terms.
Using Physics as Roulette Strategy
The main key to the game is to remain focused. Always focus on the location of the ball when the wheel starts spinning as well as the speed of the wheel. When playing roulette, concentrate on a fixed point on the wheel and count to see how long it takes for the ball to pass that point one time. This will essentially determine the velocity of the ball around the wheel. This will only work well if the wheel spins at relatively the same speed every time.
Keep in mind that playing on any European style wheel will give the player a slight advantage than on an American wheel, since the American wheel has the addition of the number 0 on the board. This additional number gives the house the advantage.
Using this strategy does not necessarily mean that you have to guess one specific number over another, simply based on where you think the ball will land. If you have counted and notice a pattern, you can choose from a certain area or even half of the wheel, which will increase your chances of winning by a lot.
It is important to remember that although using physics as a strategy of increasing your odds, it is never a guarantee. Roulette, as any casino game, is about chance. Sometimes you win big though, and using any strategy can help your game. Be a smart player, start concentrating on how long it takes the ball to complete a full turn on the wheel, and start winning big cash prizes right away.
VizWorld.com 
Comments