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How a Small Studio Pulled Off a Major 3-D Film Using Energy-Saving Technology
Traditionally, only the mammoth Hollywood studios could afford to work with 3D—it’s too expensive to build the necessary, air-conditioned 24 hours a day, server farms. The company behind Despicable Me decided to try something new, and cut the AC.
Illumination Entertainment, the company behind Despicable Me, decided to try something new. Instead of using air-conditioned server farms to render images, the company asked IBM to built a customized server farm using the iDataPlex system, a processing system that cuts down on energy use by 40% compared to traditional server farms.
The iDataPlex has two key advantages: a flexible configuration that doubles the amount of systems that can run in a single IBM rack and the ability to run an ambient temperature room (no costly air-conditioning required). The system has been on the market for over a year, but Illumination is the first studio to use it for animated film.
This doesn’t mean that any scrappy studio with a dream can now produce a high-end 3-D animated film. Illumination used a 330-person team of artists, producers, and support staff to produce 142 terabytes of data. And the rendering farm, which processed up to 500,000 frames per week, was built in conjunction with Mac Guff Ligne, a French digital production studio.
But the iDataPlex gives Illumination a leg up in the graphics rendering process. Illumination Entertainment’s server farm, for example, is the size of four parking spots. That’s half the amount of space the company initially allotted to the farm. “Oftentimes a small studio like Illumination really wants to put their energy behind creating as compelling of content as possible,” explains Steve Canepa, Vice President, Media & Entertainment Industry at IBM. “By minimizing the technological issues associated with building and managing the [rendering] environment, we allow studios to reduce the amount of time, energy, and resources necessary to create an underlying technological platform.”
It’s a compelling idea for studios—even major ones—that want to cut costs and look environmentally conscious at the same time. IBM is already working with a number of other studios to implement similar solutions. Canepa concedes that studios could build similar systems by purchasing off-the-shelf racks and processors, but the iDataPlex’s unique configuration of servers packs a lot of processing power into a small space—and that’s not easy to replicate. Don’t expect these rigs to be appearing in suburban garages anytime soon.
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An Evolutionary Step In iPad Gaming [Ipadapps]
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5582559/osmos-for-ipad-ambient-gaming-tailor+made-for-the-tablet
When the iPad was unveiled and I started to imagine the types of games a 9″ touch screen might engender, I envisioned gorgeous, intuitive and, above all, immersive experiences. Osmos for iPad is one of the best I’ve found yet.
The game, which is adapted from a well-regarded PC version and costs $5 in the App Store, puts you in control of a tiny blue organism, a mote, which you direct around the screen, growing in size as you absorb the smaller blobs around you. Of course, all sorts of challenges, including bigger motes trying to absorb you, complicate that mission.
But what’s really special about Osmos is the experience of controlling that game play. Tapping behind your mote scoots him around the screen, predictably, but at any time you can pinch to zoom in or out, allowing you to navigate a tight passage or survey the level at a distance. Additionally, you can swipe with one finger to alter time—drag left and all the motes slow to a crawl, drag right and they shoot around like bouncy balls. Different speeds and levels of zoom have situations in which they’re uniquely useful, and these elegant controls are the perfect complement to the game’s polished visuals.
Osmos teaches you these gestures in early levels, but after that there’s little instruction. You’re given a basic goal and left to your own devices to go about achieving it. Depending on your style, the game play can be rambunctious or meditative, and often it’s both in the course of one level.
There’s not a huge variation in the game play, admittedly, and it’s so engrossing that I imagine most players will zip through the Odyssey track pretty quickly (there’s an arcade mode that lets you play levels one at a time, too). But in some ways this simplicity is the game’s biggest asset, because it allows for a remarkable cohesiveness between all of its elements, from game play and visual style down to the soundtrack and menus. It’s not only a “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” type thing; here, the whole is so dazzlingly packaged that you don’t really think of the “parts” as parts at all.
For me, Osmos on the iPad is an experience first and a game second, and it uses the iPad to achieve game play that would be impossible—or, at least, not nearly as compelling—on any other platform. At its best, the iPad isn’t just an app machine or a gaming device but a portal into some other environment all together, and I hope that developers will follow Osmos’ lead and strive not just to adapt familiar gaming experiences to the tablet but to create new ones for it entirely. [iTunes]
Sony’s New Point-and-Shoot Press Shots, Brought To You By a Canon Camera
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5582621/sonys-new-point+and+shoot-press-shots-brought-to-you-by-a-canon-camera
Look at this pleasant tableau: two square-jawed gentlemen and one of their attractive lady friends enjoying a brand new Sony point-and-shoot. And so beautifully photographed! (By a Canon 5D Mark II.)
OK, ok, it’s not that damning—did anyone really think that companies exclusively used their own products?—but it’s hard not to be amused by this little bit of EXIF sleuthing that popped up over at Photography Bay. Basically, all the shots Sony sent out this morning of handsome people enjoying their new Cyber-shot cameras were taken with a Canon 5D Mark II.
The takeaway here? Life looks pretty swell when you’re using a Sony camera. Especially when someone’s shooting you using that camera with a much more expensive Canon camera. [Photography Bay]
Twitter’s Earlybird Account Will Pump You Full of Time-Sensitive Deals
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5581208/twitters-earlybird-account-will-pump-you-full-of-time+sensitive-deals
Twitter last night launched its Earlybird promotional account, which is an attempt to make a bit of money by offering time-limited, sponsored deals from advertisers to all its followers. We know you need to start making money, Twitter—but affiliate sales? Is there really no better plan than pumping out Amazon links?
And will people purposefully follow an advertising account? Those deals had better be good. [Twitter Support]
Vapor4 May Be the First Bumper Worthy of the iPhone 4
The ecosystem for the iPhone4 has begun in earnest.
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5576923/vapor4-may-be-the-first-bumper-worthy-of-the-iphone-4
The iPhone 4 shatters easily, and its tiny plastic bezel offers no protection. On top of that, touching its metal rim causes interferences. The Vapor4 bumper—made of aluminum—may solve most of these design problems. And it looks great:
Of course, nothing looks as cool as the iPhone 4 on its own, but if you want to avoid the antenna problems and the shattering, you are going to need one of these. They are made of aluminum, and they have an interior liner that separates the metal from the antenna, insulating it. The manufacturer—the same who makes the beautiful Joule iPad stand—told me that their tests showed no interference whatsoever across all models of iPhone:
We basically wrapped it in an inch thick of anodized aluminum all around with our special secret liner inside, nothing impacted the reception.
We will have to test this, but it definitely is the first bumper that actually looks cool. Especially the way you put it together, with those hex screws.
The Vapor4 is not cheap, although not as expensive as the beautiful exotic wood back replacement: The Vapor4 is $80. For $100 you also get the V4Carbon, a carbon fiber back plate that will further protect the iPhone 4 fragile glass back. [Elementcase]
YouTube Gets It, Will Allow Ad Skipping
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5576453/youtube-gets-it-will-allow-ad-skipping
There’s nothing worse than watching a 30-second ad to watch some 30-second clip of something the world inevitably finds funnier than you do. Google/YouTube are acknowledging this phenomenon of the consumer psyche and will introduce an ad-skip button this year.
The idea is as simple as this: If an advertiser’s commercial isn’t captivating enough to watch in its own right, it’ll be skipped by viewers. If viewers don’t watch the ad, Google doesn’t charge the advertiser.
Now I know what you’re thinking: Why would anyone watch an ad voluntarily? See exhibit A, the lead video in which the god of the infomercial, Ron Popeil, does his thing. The only way that 9-minute clip could be more captivating is to put ANOTHER 9-minute Ron Popeil clip in front of it.
This skippable ad model will inevitably lead to better ads—at least in terms of catering the online attention span—and, for those of us* with the libidinal fortitude to turn a blind eye on GoDaddy-esque BOOBIES BOOBIES BOOBIES teasers, a lot more free time. [WSJ via Fast Company]
* OK, maybe I don’t skip every such commercial. But I only** watch them to be educated enough to write about them on Giz.
** This is a flat-out fabrication***.
*** What sort of monster have I become?
Android App Tells You If Your Fruit Loops Are Safe To Eat
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5576191/android-app-tells-you-if-your-fruit-loops-are-safe-to-eat
Kellog’s [sic] Recalled Products is a new Android app. It lets you scan the barcodes on Kellogg’s items, with the results compared against a recalled products database—so you know what’s edible and what may contain traces of glass/metal/human skin.
It exists because Kellogg’s recently released a product recall for a wide range of its cereal products, thanks to buyers reporting an “uncharacteristic off-flavor and smell coming from the liner”—this app will help you avoid such instances of breakfast unease. App developers think of everything. [Android Pit]
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5574937/starbucks-is-slowly-reviving-the-coffee-nerding-of-america
The Clover was a nerd’s way to make coffee. Every parameter precisely, digitally controlled, for the most of tweaky of experimentation—or you can make the exact same cup over and over. Then Starbucks bought the company.
What happened next: Waves of independent coffee shops ditched their $10,000 Clover machines, for practical and philosophical reasons. Starbucks rolled them out to 50ish stores across the Northeast, Seattle and San Francisco. Then expansion stopped. That was almost two years ago.
Starbucks’ first Clover showed up in New York around two months ago, in a nearly 20-year-old location that’s been converted into a concept store. The thaw is beginning. Starbucks plans to finally expand the Clover’s footprint gradually over the next 6-8 months, as they figure out how to integrate the machine into the natural rhythm of stores—which is basically dominated by Frappuccinos these days, not coffee.
In a way, it’s a hard sell. The kind of people who would be most interested in coffee made via Clover, designed to pull the most out of a coffee—so shitty coffee would taste shittier—don’t go to Starbucks. Starbucks is so reviled by people who actually like coffee that they’ve experimented with burying the Starbucks name two pilot stores in Seattle which are designed to look more like the kind of place that serves Intelligentsia or Stumptown coffee. So it’s heartening to see them try to live up a bit more to the ideals of caring about coffee and how it’s served.
For instance, while 30 days is what Starbucks considers the expiration date on beans in a store—16 days longer than any self-conscious shop would serve them—if you order a cup made with Clover, you’re far more likely to get beans roasted within the 2-week mark. (In part because there are limited quantities of some coffees served using Clover, like the Jamaica Blue Mountain they’re offering starting tomorrow.)
They’re also making use of their spin on Clovernet, which was one of the big hype points of the machine: Shops and their baristas could share, upload and download recipes for coffees made via Clover. Starbucks pushes recipes for each coffee it serves on the Clover—around 4-6—to stores via a similar network, so there are custom parameters for each coffee. African coffees get a different treatment versus South American ones, as they should.
For all the technology in the Clover, though, it ultimately comes down to the guy (or girl) handling it. Hopefully, it’s someone nerdy enough to know what the Clover was before it landed in front of them at Starbucks.
More and more tools to block ads and other “distractions”
As more and more users adopt tools to de-clutter web pages and remove all distractions (such as ads) the effectiveness of display ads will continue to decline, despite innovations and advancements in targeting technologies.
Source: http://lifehacker.com/5568752/add-safari-reader+like-powers-to-firefox-and-chrome
The Safari 5 feature that’s caught the web’s attention is the Reader button, which strips down articles and blog posts into an ad-free, highly readable format. Two add-ons for Firefox and Chrome do a good job of recreating that convenience.
If you missed our round-up of what’s new in Safari 5, the short explanation of Reader is that, while many bookmarklets have come along to offer a simplified, less-cluttered reading experience, Safari is the first major browser to go ahead and offer that kind of feature by default, as an address bar button. If you’re a fan of bookmarklets, and your bookmarks aren’t too cluttered to lose them in, we recommend the tools from arc90′s Readability, the Instapaper Text bookmarklet, and the Readable app for highly customized formatting.
But maybe you want your Firefox or Chrome rig to offer that kind of button-click functionality. You’re in luck. First off, here’s the Top 10 feature we’ll try our reading tools out on—click the image for a larger view:
Now here are two add-ons for Firefox and Chrome, and a look at how they do at getting all minimalist with the text and pics. Click any of the images below, too, for a larger view
Readability (Firefox)
Baris Derin rolled the Readability bookmarklet into a full-fledged add-on for Firefox, but also added in a pretty neat auto-scrolling feature for the true lean-back-and-read experience. Readability tends to keep more of the text and formatting in and around the page, but strips out all the marketing and navigation material. It places an “R” button in the lower-right status area of Firefox, which isn’t the most convenient spot for our use, but some may prefer having it hidden away until needed. Notice the transparent icons, too, that provide printing, email, and refresh functions for live-updating posts.
iReader (Chrome)
Mhd Hejazi’s iReader is directly inspired by Safari’s Reader function, offering the same kind of pop-out white box that darkens the rest of the page, a button right in the address bar, and very, very minimal decoration—as you can see, it pared down our Top 10 feature quite a bit. There are also keyboard shortcuts for Windows and Mac to activate iReader, and options to change the background opacity, font and formatting, and add a “Send with Gmail” link to your articles. Neat stuff.
Both add-ons are free downloads. Know of another reading/simplifying extension that gets the job done? Tell us about it in the comments. Thanks to emmikkelsen for the inspiration!
When ads invade license plates, you know the end is near
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5568729/california-license-plates-to-become-electronic-billboards
You probably paid a bit too much for your car, but you know what would really be the cherry on top of that upgraded paint job? A mini electronic advertisement that’s completely out of your control!
The California Legislature is considering a bill that would begin the research process of digital license plates—license plates that would replace age-old stamped metals. From what we can tell, the system would display your normal license plate number whenever your car was in motion. But stop for four seconds, and the plate switches over to advertise a service or product.
Of course, politicians are quick to remind the public, the ad revenue for a state that’s $19 billion in debt is only a small reason for turning every citizen’s car into a cheesy mobile billboard. Drivers will also be able to further customize the plates with personalized messages and support for their favorite sports teams.
It’ll be a tragedy when California eventually falls into the ocean, but I’ll tell you, the state is really taking proactive steps in shortening the mandatory 3-week mourning period. [MercuryNews]
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