Fujifilm to offer retailers 3D printing system
Fujifilm will be showcasing 3D printing technology at The Digital Show, with potential for retailers to offer 3D printing ‘in the near future’.
Michael Mostyn, Fujifilm key account manager, Commercial Division, said this would provide a business opportunity that would enable retailers to customise products such as jewellery, toys and interior decor for consumers.
‘Fujifilm is also looking to make 3D printers available for consumer purchase from retailers in the near future, enabling the family and do-it-yourself enthusiasts to produce low cost, high quality finished parts for their projects at home.’ ...
See the full story here:
‘ParaNorman’ Set Visit Teases What May Be the Year’s Most Impressive Animated Movie
LAIKA is the studio behind 2009′s critical and commercial hit, Coraline, a film that utilized creepy but beautiful stop-motion puppetry to tell Neil Gaiman’s dark childhood fable. Their follow-up feature is an original work called ParaNorman. ...
Keep reading for a peek behind the scenes of LAIKA Studios’ upcoming production, ParaNorman, and their secret, high-tech weapon… Rapid Prototype 3D printers. ...
Thanks to the speed and ease of use afforded by the 3D printers each of the lead puppets has an incredibly wide variety of upper and lower halves of their face. They’re held in place with magnets so they can be easily swapped out to change expressions on the fly. ...
- It took 60 puppet makers to create 178 individual puppets for ParaNorman. Thanks to the face replacement technology created by the 3D Color Printer, Norman has about 8,000 faces with a range of individual pieces of brows and mouths allowing him to have approximately 1.5 million possible facial expressions. ...
See the full story here:
Primal Pictures Launches 3D Anatomy for Physical Therapies
“3D Anatomy for Manual Therapies is both comprehensive and interactive, offering virtual immersion into anatomical structures,” said Judith DeLany, LMT, the lead author and Director of the NMT Center. “By exploring the interrelationship of anatomic structures and critical trigger points, students and practitioners alike gain a true understanding of the results of manual therapy approaches.”
To purchase 3D Anatomy for Manual Therapies go to http://primalpictures.com/3D-anatomy-manual-therapies.aspx
See the original post here:
David Attenborough interview on 3D, flowers and Bono’s iPod
... Are there any problems shooting in 3D?
Sir David: "The technical possibilities are huge, but it also creates restrictions. One stems from the sheer size of the apparatus. The other one, which is quite a profound difficulty: you can't use long-focus lenses. You can't use a 150mm lens, or 100mm, or if you did, you'd have to go to a heck of a lot of trouble to sort it out.
"If you said to a top-grade wildlife cameraman, 'I want to you go wild and shoot a really sensational film that's going into the IMAX and knock them out, but you can only use a 75mm lens,' he would say, 'Forgive me, but you're nuts. How am I supposed to compete? I can't.' ...
Are there some aspects of wildlife you can't film in 3D?
Sir David: "3D causes yourself a lot of problems, and I don't think 3D is as natural as 2D was. Maybe we'll solve them. If someone had said 100 years ago, 'I'm going to invent a way that sends pictures over the air and you'll have a little box that picks them up,' I would have said, 'Grow up,' so it's dangerous to say they won't solve the difficulties, they may. They are already solving some of the problems of size, dimensions and so on. It hasn't happened yet, but I hope it does." ...
Sir David: "Underwater 3D, which we will be doing, is just marvelous. Underwater cameras... with the creatures moving in 3D. There should be sea lions cavorting about and penguins and marine iguanas sitting at the bottom of the ocean nibbling seaweed." ...
Have you looked at 3D without glasses?
Geffen: "There is definitely an iPad [or other types of tablet] on its way for 3D without glasses. I don't think television is quite there yet because of the ghosting when you move your head. That's the game changer, because you don't need to worry about the glasses."
Sir David: "I was responsible for BBC Two when we introduced colour. For various technical reasons we didn't have the cameras, we didn't have the studios, we didn't have the OB unit to colourise everything immediately. Some programmes were in colour, some were in black and white and I can imagine that happening for 3D. Because after all, do you want to go to all that trouble to have a quiz game in 3D? Why would you bother? There will be gala occasions where you will say, 'Hooray it's in 3D!'" ...
Geffen: "You have the danger of the high-end and the low-end programmes. ...
See the full interview here:
Electric sunglasses record life through your eyes
There is a bandwagon just starting to roll containing various pairs of video-capable and augmented reality glasses. Google is currently in the driver's seat, but it's far from the only company working on ways to allow us all to record video from a first-person perspective and integrate what we see into our online lives. A case in point is Vergence Labs' Social Video Electric Eyewear, a project that aims to raise US$50K via crowdfunding site Kickstarter. ...
The Social Video Electric Eyewear, as they're ominously named, are firstly a pair of electric-powered sunglasses that utilize "chromatic shifting conductive glass" to enable the lenses to be lightened or darkened with the press of a button. Secondly they contain a tiny camera capable of recording 720p video through the eyes of the wearer. The camera faces the world through a pinhole set between the two lenses, meaning the recorded images should be as close as possible to capturing the world as the wearer sees it. The video is saved to a microSD card, but the disappointing battery life of two hours means you won't be able to capture every moment of every day.
Whatever is captured can be shared via YouGen.TV, a video-sharing site which can then connect with social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Vergence Labs sees this as an opportunity to share "life memories" with other people. ...
Other products in the same field are also being developed, with an immersive reality visor already at the prototype stage. ...
ZionEyez and Pivothead are both already offering sunglasses with video cameras built in to them. And then, lest we forget, there is Project Glass. The Google effort ...
See the full story here:
Up-and-Coming Tech Jobs
...
Data Scientist
Big data is on the agenda of nearly every future-focused operation, for good reason. "Organizations are drowning in the amount of data that comes in, but it's all very siloed. People have the information, but they can't find it," says Daniel Burrus, founder and CEO of Burrus Research Associates in Hartland, Wis., and the author of Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible.
So enterprises need a new breed of worker who understands how to collect, interpret and analyze vast amounts of data in a way that's truly useful for making business decisions.
"There's a huge explosion of consumer data, and every company that's even close to a consumer market is trying to figure out what to do with all this data -- to move it from data to insight to actionable items instantaneously," says Korn/Ferry's Delattre.
Skills required: Like many of the other hot jobs in IT, this specialty requires the right combination of business and technical skills. The ideal candidate needs to be familiar with sophisticated algorithms, analytics and marketing -- and with ultra-high-speed computing, data mining, statistics and even artificial intelligence.
"IT needs to understand what questions the business [is] trying to answer so it can make better business decisions faster and cheaper," Russell explains. A data scientist "has to know where all the data is and how to push it out, but also what data is the biggest priority, where did it originate, and how to structure the business process so there's no garbage in and garbage out," she adds.
"You need process management skills and communication skills, so you can say, 'I can build this for you, but we need a partnership because a tool alone isn't going to get us what we need,'A " Russell explains.
The data scientist position goes beyond the skills generally seen in a BI analyst. These new specialists will not only find and deliver the information; they will also be the ones using it for extensive forecasting. "You want someone who can take the raw data and apply it in order to predict [customer] behavior," Delattre says.
Delattre describes the ideal candidate as someone with an undergraduate degree in computer science and a master's in marketing with some operations management expertise. It's a specialized skill set, he admits, but anyone with those credentials could step into the new positions being created under titles like chief market scientist, chief data analyst and the more creative-sounding customer sleuth.
3D advertising boosts Red Bull sales by 8.5%
A recent study conducted for Red Bull by the University of Tilburg and Dimenco Displays found that glasses free 3D ads achieved 45% more viewer attention and an 8.5% increase in sales.
Read the full story here:
Inside Disney’s new Carbon-Freeze Me experience
... I did indeed step into a carbon freezing chamber at Walt Disney World, voluntarily, as part of the newest line of custom collectibles offered during Star Wars Weekends 2012, which began yesterday.
Disney calls the experience “Carbon Freeze Me,” enabling theme park guests to have their faces scanned and 3D-printed onto a small collectible figurine featuring their likeness sculpted onto Han Solo’s body, frozen in carbonite, a la “Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.”
With the aid of my pal Kenny the Pirate, I recorded my trip into the Carbon Freeze Me experience at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, seen in the video below, including the variety of amusing faces I made while trying to act like I’d just been doomed by the Dark Lord of the Sith.
See the full story with video here:
LG and Samsung flat screen TVs market share grows to 26% worldwide
Global TV sales contracted nearly 8 percent in the first quarter of this year from a year earlier, but the market for three-dimensional (3D) TVs more than doubled, a report showed Sunday.
Overall global TV shipments amounted to 51.22 million units in the January-March period, compared with 55.54 million a year earlier, according to the report by market tracker DisplaySearch.
Samsung Electronics Co. had the highest market share of 21 percent, up 3 percentage points from a year earlier, followed by LG Electronics Inc. with 16 percent and Japan's Sony with 7 percent.
Despite the overall sales shrinkage, the 3D TV market continued to grow in the first quarter, with 7.19 million units sold, a whopping 245 percent increase from the same period last year.
Samsung claimed 25 percent of the world 3D TV market, down 9 percentage points from a year earlier and 5 percentage points from three months earlier.
LG made strides in its 3D TV sales, with its market share soaring to 16 percent from 8 percent a year earlier, while Sony's share tumbled to 12 percent from 27 percent, according to the report.
The combined market share of Samsung and LG remained in the 40-percent range in the first quarter, though it dropped from 45 percent in the previous quarter.
See the original post here: http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/business/2012/05/20/39/0501000000AEN20120520000300320F.HTML
--------------------
It seems global consumers are switching to 3D televisions from flat screen sets.
Market tracker DisplaySearch said that global TV sales shrank 8 percent in the first quarter of the year while the market for 3D TVs grew by 245 percent.
This translates into nearly 7.2 million 3D TVs sold around the world between January and March this year.
Korean companies Samsung and LG Electronics had a combined 41 percent share of the global 3D television market.
Samsung Electronics accounted for 25 percent down 9 percentage points from last yearwhile LG had a 16 percent market share a jump of 8 percent from last year.
See the full story here: http://www.arirang.co.kr/News/News_View.asp?nseq=130111&code=Ne2&category=2