Thanks to a pointer from Daring Fireball (great site, especially for Mac heads), today's article on the evolution of graphics is not actually from our favorite author on the subject, Edward Tufte, but from Anil Dash, for his article on Pixels are the new Pies, which covers the apparent move …

Microsoft announced at the PMA 07 conference the beta release of their new image file format HD Photo. The company says that it creates smaller file sizes, while producing better output than JPEG and can offer lossless and lossy image compression while retaining full dynamic range and color gamut data …

No, it's not a world map of the news (I can't find that site right now, but I did stumble across one a while ago), it's a visual map that shows ranked data graphically. More after the jump. In the case of NewsMaps, it is an effort by NewsIsFree (an …

MacWorld has an excerpt of an article from MDJ about Adobe's attempt to take the confusion out of the raw formats from various digital cameras by creating a standard. The proposed standard, called DNG (for Digital Negative) is an add-on to the TIFF and TIFF-EP formats that Adobe owns (courtesy …

It has been a dirty little secret for years that there are all sorts of pornographic computer games available. However, it appears based on an article from The Sun (in London) that the sheets are being pulled off of a game that will have strong marketing and explicit sexual content …

In exciting typographical news today, ABC News is reporting that the US State Department has issued an edict that Courier New 12 be replaced by Times New Roman 12 as the official font in all documents issued by the State Department (with a few exceptions, such as treaties).

For those interested in such things, the folks who do Cheetah3D for the Macintosh just came out with a version that includes a hardware renderer. It's a fairly nice package in terms of features and it's hard to beat the $59 price.

So, you want a high resolution photo of Bryce Canyon? Here it is. May Lyons of Tawbaware (he appears to make mostly digital camera support software) has created what is believed to be the largest stitched image ever created. Weighing in at just over a gigapixel, this image required almost …

The final paper session at SIGGRAPH 2003 was on Meshes. Frankly, I don't know if I will do this set of talks justice, as I took every few notes through most of them, partially because the speakers were getting a little dry and partially because my brain was completely saturated …

The Dynamics section contained a number of papers on dealing with rigid and soft body dynamics. Because most of the papers deals with the math involved in simulating physics for these mechanisms, I won't provide a lot of detail, but there were a couple of talks that were particularly interesting …

The Design and Depiction papers contained some very different applications, from creating effective assembly instructions to automatic magazine and web layout and finally two methods for creating effective non-photorealistic renderings. Designing Step By Step Assembly Instructions This paper was an interesting collaboration between cognitive psychologists and computer graphics researchers. The …

I came in half way through this paper session, because I had started the day in Fluids and Smoke. The two papers that I witnessed in this session concentrated on lighting and reflections in human tissues and hair, and both had some interesting insights. Image-based Skin Color Simulation by Extracting …

The last day of SIGGRAPH 2003 (Thursday) was the only day during the week that forced paper-goers to choose between multiple sets of papers. The first and last sessions provided this problem, giving way to five paper write-ups with a few fewer papers each than the previous days. As usual …

The OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) and SGI have announced that version 1.5 of the international graphics standard will be released including the OpenGL Shading Language. Key improvements: OpenGL Shading Language (OGLSL), which provides a vendor-neutral method for high-performance vertex and fragment shaders as well as shader objects. These …

This paper session seemed to be a bit of a catch-all, covering everything from a new UI for editing 3D objects to machine-created architecture and then finally the simulation of complex environments with texture depth maps. Twister: A Space Warp Operator for the Two-Handed Editing of 3D Objects Twister is …

There were four papers presented on points at the conference, each of which dealt with handling large numbers of points or re-sampling polygonal data for representation with points. Considering the use of large scanned data sets, this area of study is very important to current practice in film. Combining Edges …

Light fields and visibility papers concentrated mostly on shadows , light source acquisition, and the fast determination of visibility for real-time culling and rendering. Ray Space Factorization for From-Region Visibility The technique described in this paper concentrated on determining which parts of the scene are visible from a region (as opposed …

The human bodies papers covered a variety of topics, from reconstructing heads from skull data, to building character skins from metrics, to capturing skin deformation using video cameras. Reanimating the Dead: Reconstruction of Expressive Faces from Skull Data If you've ever seen a modern forensic TV show, they are pretty …

There is definitely such thing as too much of a good thing. After four days of fascinating papers, I had to skip out on what looked like a really interesting panel discussion on robotics tonight to just vegetate a little. Today's paper sessions (covered elsewhere) were great, starting with Human …

The first paper session on Tuesday covered character animation of the human form. The papers in this section were quite good and may lead to some interesting technologies for folks such as Alias (formerly Alias|Wavefront) and others to consider in new products for topics such as synthetic dance and …