VizWorld.com » Science

Tracking firefly trails in the forest

Paul Adams — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 20:30:48 +0000

One of my favorite websites to visit, FlowingData, has posted a piece on Kristian Cvecek tracking firefly trails in the forest.

Physicist Kristian Cvecek hangs out in the forest sometimes to take these beautiful pictures of firefly trails, using slow shutter speeds on his camera. Even better than the long exposure shot of a Roomba.

via : Tracking firefly trails in the forest
via : If you glow down to the woods today… the moment fireflies turn woods into an enchanted forest

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New Hubble Observations of Supernova 1987A Trace Shock Wave

Paul Adams — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 20:00:33 +0000

This image shows the entire region around supernova 1987A. The most prominent feature in the image is a ring with dozens of bright spots. A shock wave of material unleashed by the stellar blast is slamming into regions along the ring’s inner regions, heating them up, and causing them to glow. The ring, about a light-year across, was probably shed by the star about 20,000 years before it exploded.
An international team of astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope reports a significant brightening of the emissions from Supernova 1987A. The results, which appear in this week’s Science magazine, are consistent with theoretical predictions about how supernovae interact with their immediate galactic environment.
The team observed the supernova remnant in optical, ultraviolet, and near-infrared light. They studied the interaction between the ejecta from the stellar explosion and a glowing 6-trillion-mile-diameter ring of gas encircling the supernova remnant. The gas ring was probably shed some 20,000 years before the supernova exploded. Shock waves resulting from the impact of the ejecta onto the ring have brightened 30 to 40 pearl-like “hot spots” in the ring. These blobs likely will grow and merge together in the coming years to form a continuous, glowing circle.
“We are seeing the effect a supernova can have in the surrounding galaxy, including how the energy deposited by these stellar explosions changes the dynamics and chemistry of the environment,” said University of Colorado at Boulder Research Associate Kevin France of the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy. “We can use these new data to understand how supernova processes regulate the evolution of galaxies.”
Discovered in 1987, Supernova 1987A is the closest exploding star to Earth to be detected since 1604 and it resides in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy adjacent to our own Milky Way Galaxy.
Credit: NASA, ESA, K. France (University of Colorado, Boulder), and P. Challis and R. Kirshner (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

via : New Hubble Observations of Supernova 1987A Trace Shock Wave

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NASA Images of the Fourmile Canyon Fire

Randall Hand — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 18:39:35 +0000

Around 10am on September 6th, the Fourmile Canyon Fire started out just west of Boulder Colorado, and continues to burn hot. NASA has released an image of the fire from their Terra satellite.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this natural-color image of the fire at 12:15 p.m. local time (18:15 UTC) on September 6, 2010. The red outline corresponds with the unusually high surface temperatures associated with an active fire. A river of thick smoke flows eastward. Over the plains northeast of Denver, the smoke plume casts a shadow to the north.

Boulder County has issued a public health alert, and so far 12 homes and 3000 acres have burnt.

via Fourmile Canyon Fire : Natural Hazards.

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Stereoscopic Challenges in Video Games, with Killzone 3

Randall Hand — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 17:00:53 +0000

Killzone 3 will be hitting shelves February 22nd, and is expected to usher in stereoscopic gaming in a big way. The developers have spent countless hours tweaking various game aspects to make the stereoscopic experiences one of the best available, and found themselves answering several odd questions about elements typically forgotten, like crosshairs.

When playing a shooting game, cross hairs often appear on the screen to help the player aim and shoot enemies. But these cross hairs aren’t supposed to be an actual physical object a game character could touch or run into. Ter Heide said the “Killzone 3″ team has had to spend time figuring out at what depth to place those cross hairs within the 3-D world and how to make them move across the varying levels of the world’s ever-changing environment in a way that isn’t jarring to the player.
The same goes for other elements of the “heads up display” – a set of menus and items that gamers often see on the screen that give them important bits of information about things like ammunition levels, directions and the state of the character’s health. Ter Heide said they’ve had to figure out where these various informational devices should “live” in the game.

via Technolog – ‘Killzone 3′ makers run into unexpected challenges going 3-D.

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GPU Technology Conference Highlights: Visualization and Imaging

Randall Hand — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:00:07 +0000

The NVidia GTC is only 2 weeks away (I’m going, are you?) and the details are firming up as to what will be happening when. Over at the NVidia Ntersect blog, they’ve got a great list of some talks to check out if you’re into video processing, editing, image processing, or other special areas:

If you’re in the business of developing breakthroughs in visualization and imaging, then you won’t want to miss the GPU Technology Conference next month. With over 250 technology sessions presented by industry luminaries, there’s a wealth of information being shared, including tracks devoted to exploring new techniques in the graphics and visualization space involving ray tracing, image processing, video processing and medical imaging.
For content production, attendees can learn about how mental images’ iray interactive ray tracing is being leveraged in applications to streamline product development, and how the OptiX application acceleration engine can be integrated into your own application. There are several great sessions on ray tracing and other rendering techniques, including:

via The NVIDIA Blog – GPU Technology Conference Highlights: Visualization and Imaging.

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Rebuilding DirectDraw with OpenGL

Randall Hand — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 13:45:06 +0000

One enterprising programmer came into possession of some classic windows games, the original 4-part Wing Commander saga, but found himself unable to play them as they were all based on the (now deprecated) DirectDraw API. While many would whine about the dangers of proprietary API’s (I would be one of them), he took it upon himself to resolve the problem.

It all started about a month ago, when one friend of mine had decided to follow his dreams and was moving to the states, and he had to get rid of a lot of stuff. Among his discard pile was a bunch of Wing Commander games, which I bought off him, figuring they might be interesting research material, as I’m planning on a game with similar game play structure (as in story combined with game play, not a 3d space shooter).
So, I found myself in the possession of Wing Commanders 1, 2, 3 and 4, all Windows versions – the Kilrathi Saga and WC4CD to be specific. I installed the first and tried it out. My Win7 switched to 256 colors at a 640×480 resolution, but the game ran.. with completely wrong palette.

His solution was to completely re-implement the DirectDraw DLL (ddraw.dll) with OpenGL calls, turning it into a simple translation layer, with remarkable results. His source code and binaries are available for download (and extension), along with a list of features to add next:

Next up would have been WC4DVD version, but that adds MCI, DirectShow, mpeg2, DirectDraw7, and all sorts of headaches to the mix, so I figured it’s time for this project to end. I’m releasing the sources, so anyone who wants to pick them up and continue hacking can feel free to do so; with Wing Commanders or other old DirectDraw games.

I love how he’s managed to “fix” some of the ugliness of DirectDraw and adding in improved antialiasing and sync technologies to his implementation. The fact that on Windows7, OpenGL is actually a translation layer to DirectX, isn’t lost on him either.

Yes, I know, I’m using OpenGL to fix a DirectX problem. Some find this rather ironic. To make things even more fun, vista and Win7 solve OpenGL problems by rendering OpenGL with DirectX. That is, if you’re not using ATI or Nvidia drivers..

via www.iki.fi/sol – Code – DirectDraw Hack.

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Daily Viz from Visual Loop – 07/09/2010

Tiago Veloso — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 12:00:55 +0000

The smartphone’s battle for market dominance has been increasingly intensified, with RIM, Apple and Google (and Nokia, and Samsung and Microsoft…) disputing the leadership. Today, the world still prefers RIM’s Blackberry, and Cellphones.org brings some facts about the reigning smartphone. We then move on to Hollywood, to look at another everlasting star, Steven Spielberg, with a graphic made by Personal Loans, and ChaCha answers to those who wondered about the perils of being a Lefty. From Slosh Spot comes a nice explanation about the science behind the formation of waves, and, finally, it looks like the U.S. Government is putting Edward Tufte for work, as we see in Mines SF‘s post.

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Read the rest of Daily Viz from Visual Loop – 07/09/2010 (51 words)

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EnSight Graphing and Plotting Tutorials

Randall Hand — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 21:45:47 +0000

CEI has completely revamped their Ensight website, and the new site contains several tutorials on some of the more advanced functions. In addition to simply offering screenshots and instructions, they offer macros to download and videos to follow along.

CEI – Creators of EnSight Visualization Software – Graphing and Plotting Tutorials.

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Daily Viz from Visual Loop – 06/09/2010

Tiago Veloso — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 12:00:17 +0000

We begin this week with some Labor Day stats form The Washington Post. Even in this times of crisis, with some of the highest unemployment rates ever, it’s a date always worth remembering. German designer Stefaner Moritz created a great interactive graphic, mapping the immigration fluxes, and from College Scholarships comes the overview on the Student Loans scheme. The FICO frenzy, by Focus, and Mint‘s economy of Human waste infographic close today’s round-up.

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Read the rest of Daily Viz from Visual Loop – 06/09/2010 (45 words)

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Pre-Sim’ed and Realtime Physics in Uncharted 2

Randall Hand — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 19:30:37 +0000

Over at Develop, they have an exclusive excerpt from Ballistic Publishing’s ‘Art of Uncharted 2′, where they get very in-depth on the creation of some of the iconic scenes from Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. I really loved the opening where they discuss the marriage of presimulated physics run in Maya to real-time physics done via their in-game Havok engine.

We also wanted to increase our use of pre-simulated physics so if we had a major destruction effect like a building collapsing, we’d pre-simulate all that in Maya, bake all that animation down, and then run that through the game engine. So you’d have real-time control of the player, but the building collapsing is a pre-simulated event.
To push things further we also wanted to layer our real-time physics objects over the pre-simulated events. So in the collapsing building sequence we’ve also got computer monitors and plants that are rolling around in real-time reacting to the environment.
To add a third layer on top of that, we also added physics-driven particles, so we have sparks that are coming off the light fixtures, that are particles hitting the ground and bouncing. It’s pretty amazing that it actually works.
To complete the effect you’ve got enemies that you’re shooting while the building is collapsing, and when they’re killed they turn into rag-dolls flopping around the environment.
The overall result of all these effects is to overwhelm the player so that they don’t really have time to pick it apart and figure out: ‘Hey, that’s pre-simulated, and that’s real-time.’ We just want them to get caught up and pulled into the whole experience. All they know is they’re controlling Drake and trying to survive.

via How Uncharted 2 set the technical benchmark | Game development | Features by Develop.

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Where virtual worlds collide with real money

Randall Hand — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:12:36 +0000

Anyone familiar with virtual worlds and casual gaming knows it’s big money, although it can be a bit difficult to prove at times. An article over at the guardian takes a look at some of the big players (Project Entropia, Second Life, ‘Project X’, Twinity, Blue Mars, etc) to see how they’re progressing. While almost all of them report growth, they seem to be rapidly replacing each other as they add features, and other worlds come online.

How big is the virtual revolution? Factor in games like FarmVille, massively multiplayer online games such as Entropia Universe and World of Warcraft and other virtual services and it is a case of pick your own number. Some unofficial estimates claim that virtual products are worth $1bn in the US and $5bn in Asia. This is a woeful underestimate since one part of Facebook, FarmVille, may soon be worth a billion and it is already capitalised at more than $4bn. In the future, too, the mobile phone, is likely to be a major incubator of virtual products.

I personally hate to see FarmVille lumped in with the likes of Second Life, but it’s a good example of virtual currency easily translating into big bucks. They make a good point that the entire web is slowly transforming into a ‘Social Space’, which would then easily translate into something virtual world-like. Add in WebGL and browser ubiquity, and suddenly the 3D Internet starts to make sense.

via Where virtual worlds collide with real money | Technology | The Observer.

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Daily Viz from Visual Loop – 03/09/2010

Tiago Veloso — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 12:00:05 +0000

Well, sooner or later it had to happen: like we mentioned yesterday, the buzz around the use of web infographics for link-baiting trough Digg as been the hot topic of the last days, specially after Buzzfeed‘s infographic about the subject. Moving on, two other interesting pieces about social media: StumbleUpon’s stats by Blue Glass, and All Facebook‘s surprising facts about death on Facebook. Finally, the state of America’s dental health, brought by GOOD, and Iglu Cruise‘s guide to buying your Private Island. Nice way to close up the week, don’t you think?

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Infographics Summary for 2010-09-03

Randall Hand — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 03:30:02 +0000

Transparency: The Health of U.S. Teeth

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AMD Developer Central’s OpenCL Samples

Randall Hand — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 21:00:38 +0000

AMD has opened a new area of their website focused on hosting OpenCL code samples. While right now the offers are a bit spartan (a single Volume Rendering demo), their heart is in the right place. They claim that the demos require the ATI Stream SDK, but the Zipfile offered is source-code and a Visual Studio project so presumably it would work on NVidia systems as well (though you may need to alter a path or two).

OpenCL™ Samples | AMD Developer Central.

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Call for Contributions to the SC10 Video

Randall Hand — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:00:43 +0000

If you looked at the SC09 Visualizations and said to yourself, “Man, I could do soo much better than that” then here’s your chance to prove it. The SC10 committee has just published the call and requirements for contributions to this years SC10 Video.

This is your platform to showcase your current projects in videos and pictures. We would especially like to encourage submissions related to the thrust areas for SC10 — Climate Simulation, Heterogeneous Computing and Data-Intensive Computing — but other themes are welcome as well. With capacity seating in the hall reaching into the thousands, this is a great opportunity to share your work with your peers and leaders in the community.

But you better move fast, the deadline for submissions (in 1080p format) is October 15th!

via SC10 – Contribute to the SC10 Video.

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Daily Viz from Visual Loop – 02/09/2010

Tiago Veloso — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 12:00:52 +0000

Yesterday, Steve Jobs unveiled a bunch of new goodies from Apple, and among them, the new iPod Nano. The guys at Dvice made an infographic on how the gadget has changed over the years. Also celebrating with a graphic is Joomla, completing 5 years of existence, and then we move on to other topics: Money Choices looks down to who’s got all the Gold – and who’s mining it -, School Grants Blog breaks down the state of School Grants in America, and GOOD shows the most dangerous cities for walking.

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Read the rest of Daily Viz from Visual Loop – 02/09/2010 (61 words)

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Infographics Summary for 2010-09-02

Randall Hand — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 03:30:02 +0000

Transparency: The Most Dangerous Cities for Walking

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Resource Of The Week 9/1/10: CUDA By Example

Randall Hand — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 21:00:59 +0000

This week’s recommended resource is for anyone gearing up for NVidia’s GPU Technology Conference at the end of this month, and comes straight from two senior developers in the CUDA software platform team, the recently released CUDA By Example.

CUDA by Example, written by two senior members of the CUDA software platform team, shows programmers how to employ this new technology. The authors introduce each area of CUDA development through working examples. After a concise introduction to the CUDA platform and architecture, as well as a quick-start guide to CUDA C, the book details the techniques and trade-offs associated with each key CUDA feature. You’ll discover when to use each CUDA C extension and how to write CUDA software that delivers truly outstanding performance.
Major topics covered include
Parallel programming
Thread cooperation
Constant memory and events
Texture memory
Graphics interoperability
Atomics
Streams
CUDA C on multiple GPUs
Advanced atomics
Additional CUDA resources
All the CUDA software tools you’ll need are freely available for download from NVIDIA.
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda-by-example.html

This book is actually the foundation (I’m told) of a recent Webinar series on CUDA, sponsored by Nvidia. This book, and many others, is available in the VizWorld store.

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Vision of Humanity Global Peace Index 2010

Randall Hand — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 19:00:10 +0000

The Vision of Humanity Project has published their interactive map of the Global Peace Index for 2010. The interactive site lets you browse the globe seeing the rankings of individual countries in relation to their neighbors, and their ranking worldwide.

The Institute for Economics and Peace, in conjunction with the Economist Intelligence Unit and with the guidance of an international team of academics and peace experts, has compiled the Global Peace Index (GPI). The Index is composed of 23 indicators, ranging from a nation’s level of military expenditure to its relations with neighbouring countries and the level of respect for human rights. The index has been tested against a range of potential “drivers” or determinants of peace—including levels of democracy and transparency, education and national wellbeing. The team has used the latest available figures from a wide range of respected sources, including the International Institute of Strategic Studies, The World Bank, various UN offices and Peace Institutes and the Economist Intelligence Unit. The Global Peace Index is intended to contribute significantly to the public debate on peace.

Sadly, the US ranks #85.

Rankings & Results « Vision of Humanity.

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Virtual Worlds Scientific Research at British Science Festival

Randall Hand — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:30:29 +0000

Daden Limited is creating an interactive map, both on the web and in Second Life, of virtual world based scientific research and educational activities in the UK as part of the upcoming British Science Festival at Aston University.

Daden Managing Director, David Burden, said; “We know that there is a lot of UK science and Higher Education activity within virtual worlds but is hard to visualise the scale and scope of activity without seeing it on a map. We hope that this map will inform people about projects they didn’t know about – and encourage them to visit. We want it to become a lasting resource for UK Science which can live on beyond this year’s British Science Festival.”

So fire up your SL viewer and go check it out, or go to their website and see it there.

Full release after the break.

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Read the rest of Virtual Worlds Scientific Research at British Science Festival (465 words)

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