VizWorld.com

An article in BusinessWeek backs up my predictions of 3D In the Home not making much of a splash in 2010, due to the high costs and lack of options.

But as much as consumers demand 3D in theaters, they may not quickly usher it into their homes. Making a living room theater 3D-capable can cost upwards of $4,000, a hurdle that even the most ardent 3D backers say may slow adoption. “We don't expect to see an explosion of 3D in the home until the 2012 time frame,” says Mike Fasulo, chief marketing officer for Sony Electronics, which nevertheless is betting its future on the technology. Sony is among the electronics makers that plan to introduce 3D-friendly TVs and DVD players at the Consumer Electronics Show, due to begin Jan. 7 in Las Vegas.

2012 seems realistic for what most people would call “successfull” deployment of 3D in the home, but only time will tell if consumer demand will last that long.  We had a 3D “Fad” back in the 50′s, remember?

via 3D TV: Not So Fast – BusinessWeek.

Hardware 3d, popular, stereoscopic

Dreamworks Animation has published a pair of trailers for their newest CG Animated feature film, “How to Train Your Dragon”.

The adventure comedy is set in the mythical world of burly Vikings and wild dragons, based on the book by Cressida Cowell. The story centers around a Viking teenager, who lives on the island of Berk, where fighting dragons is a way of life. Initiation is coming, and this is his one chance to prove his worthiness to his tribe and father. But when he encounters, and ultimately befriends, an injured dragon, his world is turned upside down.

See the two trailers after the break.

Read more…

Graphics dreamworks, movie, popular, trailer

SemiAccurate is reporting that NVidia will be releasing Fermi with 448 cores instead of 512 cores because it is too hot to handle. In the past, SemiAccurate has lived up to its name with the false rumor that ORNL canceled its Fermi Supercomputer. This time, however, they link to a TESLA C2050 and TESLA C2070 Computing Processor Board PDF. The Tesla C2050 and C2070 are both based on the Fermi chip. The document shows that the Tesla C2050 will likely come with 448 cores, running at 1.25 GHz, and have 3 GB of RAM. The Tesla C2070 will likely come with 448 cores, running at 1.4 GHz, and have 6 GB of RAM.

Back on September 30, 2009, Nvidia released a white paper describing the Fermi architecture. Fermi was to have 16 streaming multiprocessors. Each streaming multiprocessor had 32 cores. In total, Fermi would then have 512 cores.

However, this PDF document is more recent, with a release date of November 16, 2009. It states that Fermi will have 14 streaming multiprocessors. In total, Fermi would then have 448 cores.

It is also important to note that NVidia does include the disclaimer in the Fermi Compute Architecture Whitepaper that:

The first Fermi based GPU … features up to 512 CUDA cores.

It was originally thought that the top-of-the-line Fermi card would have 512 cores, while a variant might have fewer cores. For example, the 280 GTX has 240 cores, while the 260 has 216 cores, which itself is up from an initial 192 cores. It is still possible that NVidia might release a 512 core variant, perhaps once the manufacturing process improves.

It is also possible that the gaming card will have 512 cores, while the Tesla will have fewer cores. It has often been the case that NVidia releases a gaming card that has higher clock speeds and memory capacity than the equivalent Quadro or Tesla. However, one would think that since a Tesla costs more than the gaming card equivalent, that NVidia would rather earn a higher profit margin on the Tesla rather than put it in the gaming card. Either way, the debate will rage on until NVidia actually starts selling the product, which should be in March 2010.

Via SemiAccurate: Nvidia castrates Fermi to 448SPs

Hardware ferni, nvidia, popular

A recent picture featured on Victoria Secret’s website was pointed out by PhotoshopDisasters for it’s reckless retouching, leaving a model holding only the handbag straps. However, Neal Krawetz believed the digital manipulator didn’t stop there and performed some in-depth analysis using principal component analysis, luminace diagrams, and details of JPEG compression to find that the entire image had been retouched and edited.

The large squares at the bottom of her dress and in the background are from a JPEG resave. (They also exist on her face, but that was washed out when I applied the histogram.) So those areas were modified and then saved as a JPEG. However, the rest of her dress contains no rectangular artifacts — those were touched up.

And speaking of touched up… notice the round dark artifact on her chest. JPEG artifacts are rectangular, not round. That is where the artist removed her nipple. (My gal friends tell me that she should have worn a padded bra.)

The min/max values of the image identify one other manipulation. Normally these dots should should look like random noise. There should be no visible patterns in real images. In this case, her face, hair, arms, and dress all have different noise patterns. This matches the other findings that indicate that her dress, face, and limbs were all digitally modified.

Body By Victoria – Secure Computing: Sec-C.

Science analysis, bad, photoshop, popular

People have scoured the exposed CRU emails and compiled all of them into a massive timeline covering 30 years of information contained within, presenting it as a huge PDF.

You have to see this to believe it. Look up close and admire the detail while you despair at how long science has been going off the rails. To better appreciate the past and what was exposed by the CRU emails, the time-line chart consolidates and chronologically organizes the information uncovered and published about the CRU emails by many researchers along with some related contextual events. That the chart exists at all is yet another example of how skilled experts are flocking in to the skeptics position and dedicating hours of time pro bono because they are passionately motivated to fight against those who try to deceive us.

via The Climategate Timeline: 30 years visualized « Watts Up With That?.

Science climate, climategate, infographic, popular, timeline

Information Management has some new information to add to yesterday’s data about the power of Weta, including details of the cooling, queue management, and frame render times involved in Avatar.

The queueing system is a Pixar product called Alfred, which creates a hierarchical job structure or tree of multiple tasks that have to run in a certain order. In any single job, there might be thousands of interdependent tasks. As soon as CPUs on the render wall are freed up, new tasks are fired at idle processors.

At the peak of AVATAR, Wilkie was wrangling more than 10,000 jobs and an estimated 1.3 to 1.4 million tasks per day. Each frame of the 24 frame-per-second movie saw multiple iterations of back and forth between directors and artists and took multiple hours to render.

via Processing AVATAR.

Graphics avatar, movie, popular, vfx, weta