VizWorld.com

A group of 100 scientists, engineers, and developers are working together for a bid at Google’s Lunar X Prize, a $30 million award to the first private funded team to land a rover on the moon.  Any bid will require tons of work in computations, hardware, and physics, but the German team is beefing up their systems with the power of NVidia Tesla GPU’s.

The PTS team will benefit from the Tesla GPUs at all stages of the mission. During preparation and planning, GPUs will be used to simulate millions of different mission scenarios. This will enable the team to improve launch and landing techniques by, for example, adjusting the timing and duration of thruster burns for course corrections, while minimizing the margin of error.

Once Asimov has reached its destination, the PTS team will use the computational power of Tesla GPUs to navigate and monitor the rover’s activities and generate highly detailed lunar maps from the transmitted stereoscopic 3D images.

via NVIDIA Helps Power Bid for 2015 Moon Mission — and $30 Million in Prizes – NVIDIA Newsroom.

Hardware, Science google, gpgpu, nvidia, tesla

Another entry in the PIPA/SOPA protests comes from what is probably the biggest Internet company around, Google.  They’ve blacked out the logo on their main page, and they’re showing off this interesting PDF infographic of the many people in opposition of this legislation.

End Piracy, Not Liberty – Google.

Website google, pipa, sopa

Jeffrey Breen has some nice one-liners for R that show how you can use the popular statistics package with the “Google Visualization API” to create some great interactive graphs, specifically the famous “Motion Chart” shown by Hans Rosling at TED2006.

First up: the googleVis package by Markus Gesmann and Diego de Castillo which makes it easy — often with just one-line of R — to harness the Google Visualization API. Annotated timelines, gauges, maps, org charts, tree maps, and more are suddenly at your command.

via One-liners which make me love R: Make your data dance (Hans Rosling style) with googleVis #rstats « Things I tend to forget.

Science google, interactive, R

With all the fancy tools and graphics at our disposal, we tend to miss one of the big features of communication today:  Making it easily searchable and indexable.  In a post over at Poynter.org, they show how to use Google Charts and a few other tools to create nice HTML-based interactive charts and graphs, both widening the experience to multiple platforms and making it search engine-friendly.

The actual data in your graph is embedded in a Web page’s code. This makes it easier to search for your graph because numbers, labels and even your graph’s title become part of your Web page’s metadata. Selecting well-chosen words for your graph helps make it more SEO-friendly.

Graphics of the Web work across platforms. The resolution of images doesn’t appear as grainy on the iPhone, for instance, and folks on mobile devices can zoom and interact with graphics of the Web more naturally.

via How to make searchable, Web-based Google charts | Poynter..

Graphics google, interactive, seo

NASA & Google Celebrate Milestones in Space Travel [INFOGRAPHIC].

Click for Fullsize

infographics google, history, nasa

Yesterday, we talked about Social Media, but even not being a dominant force in that world – c’mon, how many of you have an Orkut account, seriously? – , Google is still thedominant force of the internet. Today we bring several recent infographics about the Mountain View giant, starting with Level 343‘s roundup of the search engine’s significant algorithm changes. After that, we have the battle against Content Farms, from Focus, and the SEO cat & mouse game, presented by SEO Book, followed by the funny Google Helmet, made by Get Satisfaction. And to close, a look at the rivalry between Google and Bing, as seen by iCrossing.

Read more…

Graphics, Science design, economy, environment, google, infographic, infoviz, Visual Loop, visualizations

Kitware’s VTK was one of the lucky selections in this year’s “Google Summer of Code”, and they’re now accepting applications for lots of different little projects in everyone’s favorite visualization API.  A few of them so far (check out the full list here)

• iPad/iPhone Support for ParaView
• WebGL Volume Rendering
• Protovis in C++
• IEEE VisWeek2010 Algorithms
• AMR Volume Rendering

And lots more..

Kitware – News: Visualization Toolkit Selected for Google Summer of Code.

Science google, kitware, vtk

Google has just announced their acquisition of Green Parrot Pictures, a video post-production company that’s developed some fancy algorithms for fixing blurry and jerky video footage through advanced motion-prediction systems.  Already in use by some major motion studios in films like Lord of the Rings and X-Men, hopefully google will now be making this available to anyone uploading YouTube footage, raising the bar on their massive video library.

But some of YouTube’s most popular or moving videos are shot using low-quality mobile phones and video cameras. Take, for example, videos of recent protests in Libya. Although emotionally captivating, they can be jerky, blurry or unsteady. What if there was a technology that could improve the quality of such videos — sharpening the image, reducing visual noise and rendering a higher-quality, steadier video — all while your video is simply being uploaded to the site? You can imagine how excited we were when we discovered a small, ambitious company based in Ireland that can do exactly this.

Not sure what the terms of the acquisition are, or when we’ll be able to see some results, but hopefully soon!

YouTube Blog: Steady, as she goes: better video processing with Green Parrot Pictures.

Science google, youtube

Taxes are probably one of the most stressful and depressing times of year, am I right?  In an attempt to gleam a bit of useful and, dare I say, Interesting information from the annual mundane task, Google has partnered up with Eyebeam to create the “Data Viz Challenge”

To make that happen, we’ve teamed up with Eyebeam, a not-for-profit art and technology center, to host what we’re calling the Data Viz Challenge. Andrew and Louis have built an API to let anyone access the data, so now you can choose how to display it. Could you create a better animated chart? Something in 3D? An interactive website? A physical display somewhere in the real world? We want you to show everyone how data visualization can be a powerful tool for turning information into understanding.

The challenge ends March 27th, 2011 and is open to U.S. entries only, but the lucky winner will get a nice $5,000 prize.

The Challenge: Visualize Your Taxes | DataVizChallenge.org.

Science contest, eyebeam, google, taxes

Photographers are always in search of that magic time they call “Twilight” or “Magic Hour”.  Not the fancy glittery vampire kind, but rather that magic time where the Sun and Moon align to give some truly spectacular lighting opportunities for photographs.  Now you can predict your own Twilight times with a great Google Maps mashup online.

Simply select your location on the map, and pick a Month and year.  Click Submit and then be presented with a slew of information on sunrise/sunset, moonrise/moonset, and much more.  A great tool for any photographer.

Twilight Calculator – “Blue Hour / Golden Hour Table” | JeKoPhoto – Jens Kossmagk Photography | Event-, Natur- and Sport-Photos.

Graphics google, photography