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Visual Effects Society (VES) Announces Winners of 10th Annual VES Awards

Randall Hand — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:35:30 +0000

Last night was the 10th annual Visual Effects Society awards event, honoring dozens of visual effects people across the industry for their efforts of the past year. Hosted by Patton Oswalt and with special appearances by Marton Scorsese, Antonio Banderas, Lou Ferrigno, and others, it was an impressive event.

More than a thousand attendees — filmmakers, producers, directors and members of the visual effects community– gathered to recognize the year’s best work and the artists who created it. Rango was the evening’s most honored project with four awards, including Outstanding Visual Effects in an Animated Feature Motion Picture, Outstanding Animated Character in an Animated Feature Motion Picture, Outstanding Created Environment in an Animated Feature Motion Picture, and Outstanding Virtual Cinematography in an Animated Feature Motion Picture. Hugo, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Transformers: Dark of the Moon all took home two awards in the Feature Motion Picture categories, while Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones each garnered a pair of awards in the Television categories.

Get the full list of award winners after the break.

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Daily Viz from Visual Loop – 08/02/2012

Tiago Veloso — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:00:43 +0000

We can’t talk about smartphones without mentioning them. The great manufactors have a crucial role, obviously, in the spreading of smartphones. So, on today’s Daily Viz from Visual Loop, a lot at Apple’s iPhone, Android, Nokia and RIM, with the help of the infographics produced by Ria Novosti, Blue Stacks, Symbian, and TechCrunch.

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RealFlow 2013′s Hybrido Solver Demonstrated

Randall Hand — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 21:43:04 +0000

The folks at NextLimit have released a set of videos showcasing the new fluid solver available in RealFlow 2013. The new solver, called Hybrido 2, has been built from-scratch in the new version for speed and detail, and the videos show the amazing stuff you can do.

“For those of you interested, the new solver is an implicit solver, as opposite to the current one which is an explicit solver. Implicit solver means that just only a few simulation steps per frame are needed, and this means, of course, faster simulations. It means also that “bounciness” is totally removed. The current solver needs many many simulation steps if you want to remove ‘bounciness’, and even doing it you can’t remove it completely.”

via RealFlow 2013: Watch preview videos online now | 3D World.

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Japan Earthquakes 2011 Visualization Map

Randall Hand — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:30:32 +0000

Someone sent in this link to an interesting visualization of earthquake activity around Japan for the year of 2011. It starts off quiet, until the big earthquake that shook Japan and caused the nuclear “incident” that they are cleaning up to this day. Watch the video and it’s quite apparent that the massive earthquakes that shoot the island actually lasted for several months before quieting down.

Japan Earthquakes 2011 Visualization Map – YouTube.

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Daden release results of its Authoring Tools for Immersive Training survey

Randall Hand — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:00:47 +0000

Daden Limited has just released the results of their Immersive Training Authoring Tools survey, trying to figure out who is using immersive environments for training purposes and how they’re doing it. Not surprisingly, Education was the biggest sector but the tools they use were a bit surprising.

Nearly 47% of the respondents were from education, 15% from the health professional training sector and interestingly 19% were from the corporate sector – especially as there’s little sign of a significant uptake of immersive training in that area. Second Life, OpenSim and Unity were the top three platforms and Second Life, despite the removal of the educational discount, dominates still with 39% respondents using it.

Not all that surprised to see Second Life at the top, given it’s existing infrastructure and multiuser environment. I was surprised, however, to see Unity in there. Unity is a great tool (I’ve even started using it myself just for experience), but not one I would typically think of for immersive environments.

via Daden release results of its Authoring Tools for Immersive Training survey.

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Daily Viz from Visual Loop – 07/02/2012

Tiago Veloso — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:00:08 +0000

Today’s Daily Viz from Visual Loop begins with Mobdis‘s fun facts about smartphones, followed by the HTC Fangraphic Results, from You Mobile, and by Tatango‘s take on where are smartphones being used. After that, The shrinking price of mobile, made by Digital Trends, and The Smartphone OS Complete Comparison, provided by My Phone Deals, close the second day of the smartphones infographics round-up.

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Photoshop CS6 – Background Save & Liquify

Randall Hand — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 21:06:48 +0000

Over on YouTube, the Photoshop team has another sneak peek showing some of the great stuff you’ll see in CS6. First off they show a great feature I can’t wait for: Background Saving. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been frustrated dealing with large poster-print images (1G+) that take 30-45s to save. In addition, they show a new GPU-accelerated “Liquify” operation that eliminates lots of the lag and problems experienced in the current version.

Sneak Peek #2 – YouTube.

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The Cycle of Visualization & Infographic Events

Randall Hand — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:35:43 +0000

Click for Fullsize

For those who have been in the visualization space for a while, the annual cycle of conferences and events is pretty well known. Over at Infographer, a Russian site dedicated to infographics, they’ve constructed a nice circular calendar showing this trend across 2011 and 2012.

The idea to make this kind of ‘map-calendar’ of events appeared in our mind a long time ago, we started to collect data in 2011 and suddenly 2012 started. So we decided to combine both years and show the history for 2011 and actual events for 2012, which you can use for your personal planning.
November, December and January are the months without infographic activities — second year proves this tendency. But in the rest periods there are up to 4 events, which you can visit. In 2012 the most active months are Feb, March and June — you even will have no time to repack your luggage.

via Infographer » Российский сайт Инфографики..

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NVIDIA Kepler Line-up Leaked

Randall Hand — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:58:04 +0000

NVidia’s next hardware revision is code-named “Kepler”, but more than that is largely a mystery. One site claims to have gotten a copy of some Kepler specs, and if they’re true it’s pretty impressive.

As the leaked chart shown, die size of GK110 is 550mm², which is not only bigger than 365mm² of Radeon HD 7970, but also 30mm² larger than its GF110. It’s said that GK110-based GeForce GTX 680 will be up to 45% faster than AMD Radeon HD 7970. As for the price, GTX 680 is set at US$649, US$100 higher than HD 7970.

Expected to drop in April & May, they’re showing numbers around 45% over Radeons HD7970 for $650. Of course, without public confirmation it’s anybody’s guess.

via Entire NVIDIA Kepler Line-up Unearthed – Expreview.com.

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Daily Viz from Visual Loop – 06/02/2012

Tiago Veloso — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:00:03 +0000

The Mobile Web is becoming less of a “exclusive big city thing” and more a real part of our tech lifestyle. And it’s incredible that, in the age of tablets and ultra-books, the Smartphone industry is far from reaching its full potential. During this week, we’ll be featuring lots of infographics about Mobile and the Smartphone market, starting today, with works from Symbian, Companion Link, Float Mobile Learning, Mobile Inquirer and Wilson Electronics.

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Daily Viz from Visual Loop – 03/02/2012

Tiago Veloso — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:00:55 +0000

To close this week dedicated to biggest Social Media in the world – by the way, just a reminder, Facebook will be completing 8 years tomorrow -, we start with a fun, and yet impressive question: what if we printed Facebook? Cartridgesave‘s infographic gives an idea of what it would be like. Then, GroSocial shows the evolution of Facebook features, All Facebook helps defining shared media on Facebook, and after that, a look at all the profile photos posted by the users, provided by Pixable and FastCoDesign.

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DARPA Invests In Megapixel Augmented-Reality Contact Lenses

Randall Hand — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:23:18 +0000

Saw this on a few news outlets touting the amazing technology from Innovega & DARPA that puts an augmented reality display right on a contact lens on the eyeball. It’s important to get the details as that’s not actually the truth: What they’ve done is create a contact lens that allows a wearer to focus on “near to eye” displays, such as their own glasses with integrated projection displays.

For DARPA’s part, Innovega is working as part of the Soldier Centric Imaging via Computational Cameras (SCENICC) program, which aims to eliminate the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capability gap at the individual soldier level.

You can get some good details in the video below. Still neat technology, but not quite what most people think from the headline.

via DARPA Invests In Megapixel Augmented-Reality Contact Lenses | Popular Science.

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Graphs Beyond the Hairball

Randall Hand — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:18:23 +0000

Anyone who’s ever done graph visualization has at one point or another run into the dreaded “Hairball” : Where the sheer number of connections overwhelms the data leading to a giant solid blot of connecting lines, obscuring anything useful. Robert Kosara has a short discussion of the problem and a few solutions to it such as PivotGraph and Parallel Sets.

For a while now, people in visualization have talked about the graph without the graph, i.e., graph visualization without the hairballs. Networks are clearly important and challenging data, and it seems a bit myopic to only look at node-link visualization. Node quilts and the PivotGraph represent promising steps into a very different direction. While they require more work to understand and are more limited in what they can be used for, they are also much directed towards a goal than just showing all of the data. I think that this kind of thinking will lead us to much more interesting techniques in the future than trying to teach the old node-link diagram new tricks.

via Graphs Beyond the Hairball | eagereyes.

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Daily Viz from Visual Loop – 02/02/2012

Tiago Veloso — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:00:08 +0000

We continue with our infographic compilation dedicated to Facebook, which will be completing 8 years next Saturday. For today’s Daily Viz from Visual Loop, we decided to take a look at some interesting facts about the behaviour of Facebook users. Things like why do people unfriend each other on Facebook, the impact on relationships, and some of the most common status updates. Infographics courtesy of Hubspot, NM Incite, Edless Origami, Online Dating University and Facebook itself.

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DataScienceCentral.com Partners With Visual.ly to Expand Big Data Ecosystem

Randall Hand — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:49:59 +0000

Visual.ly is once again proving their stuff in the visualization space through another new partnership, this time with DataScienceCentral.com. DataScienceCentral is an online resource for folks dealing with “big data”, covering everything from technology and trends to social features allowing users to discuss issues. This new partnership aims to bring Visual.ly’s capabilities to this fast-growing market.

“We are delighted to continue our pursuit of the best and brightest in the data science field in an effort to serve our members in this dynamically evolving field,” said Tim Madison, Publisher of DataScienceCentral.com. “Joining forces with Visual.ly is an honor, as we see their contribution to the field potentially representing the most important step in the process -storytelling.”

via DataScienceCentral.com Announces Content Partnership With Visual.ly to Expand Big Data Ecosystem.

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Daily Viz from Visual Loop – 01/02/2012

Tiago Veloso — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:00:47 +0000

The growth of the number of Facebook users has been nothing less than impressive. And, as we all know,advertisers go where the users go, so, it’s not surprising that the social network’s value has also increased trough the years, like we saw on yesterday’s Daily Viz from Visual Loop. Today’s selection, featuring works from Nanigans, Mashable, Single Grain, Get Satisfaction, and Social Media Today, focus on the history of advertising on Facebook, ans also on what would be like to have a world without it.

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Convert FCP7 Projects to FCPX with 7toX

Randall Hand — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:51:25 +0000

The hatred for Apple’s new Final Cut Pro X is deep and well documented for a wide variety of reasons. One of the more frequently mentioned ones is that it can’t import existing projects, essentially eliminating all your existing work and projects. Well, a new version (10.0.3) dropped today, and there’s a new tool from FCP guru Philip Hodgetts called 7tox that can finally import them.

7toX for Final Cut Pro brings your Final Cut Pro 7 projects forward to Final Cut Pro X so you can use Apple’s powerful new professional editing tools to update or finish your older projects. The lightweight application is simple to use, with drag-and-drop support and progress information. 7toX translates important metadata from your Final Cut Pro 7 Project — including bins, clips and sequences — to a new Event in Final Cut Pro X (version 10.0.3) with the highest fidelity of any translation application for Final Cut Pro. In addition, the application provides clear, detailed reporting after every transfer.

He admits it’s not perfect, there’s just too many changes in FCPX to ever make a 100% conversion. However, it’s pretty close and probably about as good as it’s going to get.

The app is available now in the for a mere $10.

via 7toX for Final Cut Pro

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Daily Viz from Visual Loop – 31/01/2012

Tiago Veloso — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:00:13 +0000

If the recent rumors are true, we’ll be seeing a whole bunch of new tech millionaires (and some billionaires, of course), in the next few weeks. That’s because the long awaited Facebook IPO will be out soon, and expectations are, obviously, very high. Today’s Daily Viz from Visual Loop brings a selection of recent infographics about Facebook’s IPO, provided by Accounting Degree Online, Giga Om, Tech Crunch and Namesake.

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Infographics Summary for 2012-01-30

Randall Hand — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 03:30:02 +0000

Infographic: Tom’s Shoes, Giving Back One-For-One

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3D CineCast: Bad Stereo aka Brain Shear

Randall Hand — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:25:45 +0000

Back in 2009, James Cameron wrote up his “10 Rules for Good Stereo” for 3D CineCast, and it’s still relevant today. Containing everything from opinions on screen depth and convergence, it also has a great “checklist” for fixing problems containing some things many people miss:

Render Errors or element drop-outs between eyes — some actual thing, object, shadow or lighting artifact is missing from one eye.
Specular Highlights — because the angle of reflection is different for glossy or mirror surfaces as viewed from left or right eyes, highlights may exist in one eye but not the other.
Lens Flare, matte box shadows — these may strike one lens, not the other.
Image Warping — this can happen at the edges of frame with certain lenses, and can happen with warped beamsplitters.
Movement or vibration which is different in L-R. This shows up in some camera systems (not ours). It takes a lot of jiggle between eyes to become apparent.

via 3D CineCast: Bad Stereo aka Brain Shear.

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