VizWorld.com

Pixar’s recent “Toy Story 3″ is just the latest in an unprecedented string of 11 hit films in a row that have earned over $5.7Billion.  To celebrate this unfathomable success and show the heart that lies at the center of Pixar, the Oakland Museum of California is hosting “Pixar: 25 Years of Animation”.

The 500 pieces of art on display here illustrate the history of Pixar, and the process that this studio’s artists & animators go through in creating their films. The process itself is all not much different from the way that animation was created back in Walt Disney’s day. Concept art is created using oils, pastels, and other mixed media, but now it includes digital graphics. With all these tools characters must be created, as well as a story and the world they inhabit.

The exhibition runs through January.

via “Pixar: 25 Years of Animation” reveals the art at the heart of all those hits – Jon Nadelberg – Contributors – JimHillMedia: Walt Disney Company news, reviews, history & commentary, Jim Hill.

Graphics museum, pixar

Information Aesthetics tips us off to a great interactive treemap visualization of the huge dataset from the Barcelona Natural Science Museum (which we discussed earlier) from design firm Bestiario.

Beginning with a broad view of all “Animalia”, you can click to zoom in through Phylum, class, and further on down until you find a single organism.  Once you’ve found your one organism, they provide records with maps and links to other databases (including Flickr) for more information.

Interactive Treemap Visualization of the Natural Science Museum of Barcelona, via Information Aesthetics

Science biodiversity, biological, interactive, museum, treemap

Canon has partnered with a museum in Japan to create an augmented reality exhibit of dinosaurs as part of the “Dinosaurs-Miracle of the Desert”.

Visitors will be allowed to don a pair of virtual reality glasses that will display nearly life-sized three-dimensional images of various dinosaurs right there on the museum floor. Displaying over 260 dinosaur specimens, some of the virtual creatures in the exhibit will also move, adding to their realistic effect.

via Canon launches virtual reality dinosaur exhibit in Japan | DVICE.

Hardware, Science augmented reality, canon, exhibit, museum

A new exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York uses computer simulations and visualization to show what Manhattan island looked like when it was first discovered back in 1609.

The show’s imagery, created by Markley Boyer, even allows us to envision Manhattan as it might have looked in 1609, when Henry Hudson and his men sailed past. It was a verdant paradise. Its temperate climate and its location atop an estuary, where freshwater and saltwater meet, created, Mr. Sanderson suggests, a habitat of extraordinary diversity.

via Exhibition Review – ‘Mannahatta/Manhattan – A Natural History of New York City’ – Manhattan – An Island Always Diverse, at the Museum of the City of New York – NYTimes.com.

Graphics, Science exhibit, museum, newyork, simulation

This week is the VizaGoGo Exhibition at the Rudder Exhibit Hall at Texas A&M.  This is the 16th annual exhibition, but the first since visualization became a department within the university.  Stop by all this week to see stereo images, animated videos, games, and interactive simulations.

Aside from looking at and appreciating the work of the visual artists spectators will be given an opportunity to participate the games and interactive programs such as an adaptation of ping pong – body pong. “Some games you play with your whole body and some games you play by sitting at a computer and working with an interface ” Hillier said. Huebel said that each year s VizaGoGo has a different theme and this year s is Superheroes vs. Supervillians. They have developed a story line that will be revealed piece by piece over the course of the exhibit.

via Don’t forego VizaGoGo – Features.

Graphics exhibition, museum, texasa&m, vizagogo

I’ve gotta thank Joel Martin for sending this in.  He recently visited the Computer History Museum, and was amazed to find “the” teapot that has permeated computer graphics for decades.

See a closer picture after the break.

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Graphics, Science history, museum, teapot

At the Allard Pierson Museum in  Amsterdam, they’ve setup a simple “Augmented Reality” setup to allow visitors to view paintings and photographs, and see overlays of specific data appear in the augmented display.

There are two types of hardware on hand — both the MovableScreen-packin’ iMac stationary display and the UMPC devices allow the user to seemingly view through the photos, exploring specific points of interest

I’m not seeing any particularly fascinating technology.  From the supplied video, it looks almost like it’s simply a stepper motor controlling what’s displayed to the user, so no image recognition and processing work. An astute site-visitor pointed out that they have a decent Writeup of the project that claims they are using video overlays, with a camera mounted on the back of the displays.  Orientation within the poster is done with technology from a product called iTACITUS, which can perform image matching to find the camera picture within the poster.

If anyone’s in the area, I’ld love to hear more about it.  Video after the break.

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Hardware augmented reality, museum