VizWorld.com

If you’ll be in the Portland, Oregon area this March, maybe you should consider stopping by the Marquam Hill Campus of the Oregon Health & Science Universith for the IEEE Virtual World Symposium where they’ll be demonstrating the use of 3D virtual environments in a variety of areas.

The purpose of this symposium is introduce 1) present tutorials and examples of usage of a selected virtual social environment, Second Life®, which is being used by the IEEE® professional organization to educate, communicate, and promote membership collaboration, present examples of Second Life and other virtual worlds being used in a wider range of engineering fields such as architecture, mechanical design, corporate group meetings, 2) present a keynote address by an IEEE Instrumentation & Measurement Society Distinguished Lecturer on research topics in the area of virtual social environments and multi-player gaming, and, 3) host a “geekfest” event with presentations demonstrating wide-ranging universe of virtual worlds, applications, tools, and situations.

Update 1/26 10am: An eagle-eyed commenter pointed out my inability to parse dates, this is actually last year’s Virtual World Symposium.  This year’s symposium is in Southern California, details here.

via Virtual World Symposium.

Graphics conference, ieee, secondlife

An interesting visualization tool presented this week at IEEE InfoViz adds another datapoint for the “Death to the Rainbow Colormap” club and backs it up with an impressive increase in accuracy from 39% to 91%.

“Our goal was to design a visual representation of the data that was as accurate and efficient for patient diagnosis as possible,” says lead author Michelle Borkin, a doctoral candidate at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). “What we found is that the prettiest, most popular visualization is not always the most effective.”

via To diagnose heart disease, visualization experts recommend a simpler approach.

Science biomed, conference, ieee

If SIGGRAPH isn’t technical enough for you, then you’re in for a treat as Visweek2011 has just opened Registration.  Visweek is the new combination of IEEE Visualization, IEEE InfoVis, and IEEE VAST, all in one week-long visualization extravaganza.

They have all the usual hotel rates, visa assistance, and travel options on their site as well.

Welcome | Visweek 2011.

Science conference, ieee, visweek

Both Wired and the NYTimes have small galleries up of the winning entries in the 2010 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge.  A bit heavy on the biological visualizations this year (several virus entries and such), the resulting pictures and videos truly are beautiful to behold.

Gallery: 10 Stunning Science Visualizations | Wired Science | Wired.com and Visualizing Science | NYTimes.com

Science contest, ieee, scientific visualization

There’s a new viz conference on this horizon this year, Sponsored by IEEE and co-located with IEEE VisWeek.  This year will mark the 1st IEEE Symposium on Biological Data Visualization.

BioVis 2011 – the 1st IEEE Symposium on Biological Data Visualization – aims at bringing together researchers from the visualization, bioinformatics, and biology communities to establish an interdisciplinary dialogue and to promote the sharing of expertise, between both meeting participants and the communities at large. The meeting is intended to educate, inspire, and engage visualization researchers in problems in biological data visualization, as well as bioinformatics and biology researchers in state-of-the-art visualization research.

Looks like VisWeek is gonna be a doozy this year, bringing BioVis, InfoVis, VAST, and IEEE Vis alltogether in one place (along with the usual surrounding mini-conferences).

Submission deadline for papers is April 30th.  Full details are on their site.

via BioVis 2011.

Science biovis, conference, ieee, visweek

At next month’s IEEE VR2010 conference in Waltham MA, the Senior Vice President of Customer Applications at Linden Labs Howard Look will be giving a keynote presentation entitled “Breaking Down the Walls: The Future of Second Life”.  His abstract:

Is it possible for 3D Virtual Worlds to be as ubiquitous and relevant as the 2D Internet? Will a broad consumer audience find as much social connection and value in a 3D world as it does in the 2D experiences of Twitter and Facebook? Will conducting business in virtual meeting rooms or attending virtual conferences be as natural and valuable as in real life? Will consuming virtual goods be as commonplace as commerce on Amazon or Ebay? Will standards emerge that enable scalable and interoperable experiences between Virtual Worlds?

At Linden Lab, we certainly think that all this, and more, will happen. In this talk, I'll describe what we’re doing to make the vision a reality. From our humble startup beginnings a decade ago, through a hype-fueled expansion, Second Life continues to grow. We’re now undergoing a substantial transformation, renovating our platform and experience as we grow beyond our early adopter roots. I’ll take you behind the scenes and describe what we’re up to, the technology that we’re banking on, and hopefully inspire you with some of the incredible experiences our residents have created.

Sounds interesting!  Second Life is getting some great press again recently, let’s hope the momentum continues to grow.

via Program | Keynote.

Science conference, ieee, secondlife, virtual reality

The military has been experimenting augmented reality for a while, but a new project called ARMAR, Augmented Reality for for Maintenance and Repair, from Columbia University shows some great potential at reducing routine mantenance time.

ARMAR is the project of Prof. Steven Feiner and his student Steve Henderson at Columbia University. In the Marine Corps tests, the pair of researchers used 10 cameras in the vehicle to track three IR lights on the head mounted display (HMD). This tracking allows ARMAR to lead users to the target area and demonstrate the appropriate repairs needed in the current field of vision. ARMAR improved the efficiency of repairs when compared to an untracked HMD (56% faster) and a stationary LCD screen (47% faster) which provided similar information. The ARMAR team is looking to improve future models of the device by incorporating the viewing cameras onto the HMD, allowing it to function autonomously and with less setup.

The results of their experiment have been published by the IEEE, and also implements an interaction system called ‘Opportunistic Tangible Interfaces’.

See some videos of the system after the break.

via Augmented Reality To Help Military Mechanics Fix Vehicles (Video) | Singularity Hub.

Read more…

Hardware, Science armar, augmented reality, ieee

The latest issue of the IEEE Spectrum is dedicated to Mars: Getting there, what do do once we’re there, and why we aren’t there already.  The part most interesting to me is their graphic visualizing the various missions to Mars from 1960 to present.

I never knew there were so many, and that the success rate was so low.

IEEE Spectrum: Special Report: Why Mars? Why Now?.

Graphics, Science ieee, infographic, mars, nasa

VisWeek is the annual Visualization conference where researchers, users and enthusiasts of data visualization meet to present their work and discuss new ideas. This year the conference will be in Atlantic City, NJ from October 11th-16th and promises to be a very exciting event.

In this post, I focus more on a preview from the ‘Vis‘ side of things for VisWeek. I have previously posted previews for the InfoVis conference and for the VAST conference.

There are so many events that instead of listing all of them, I have categorized them by day. It includes Workshops, Panels, Tutorials and Paper talks.

Read Alark’s recommended events after the break.

Read more…

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Are you ready for VisWeek 2009?  The premiere conference for scientific visualization is a mere 31 days away, but there’s still time to register!

IEEE VisWeek 2009 is the premier forum for visualization advances in science and engineering for academia, government, and industry. This event brings together researchers and practitioners with a shared interest in techniques, tools, and technology. Visualization has become an integral part in a wide array of application areas, and papers are solicited both for original visualization research and for the application of visualization towards the understanding of domain-specific data.

Have you registered yet?  I have.  Who wants to meet up?

via Welcome to VisWeek 2009!.

Science conference, ieee, visweek