visualize

Home video innovations always seem to lead back to porn.

The fingerprints of the adult-film industry can be found on the development of VHS and Blu-ray disc. Soon, the sector may teach us about the cloud.

Pink Visual, a porn studio with a history of embracing new technologies, appears to be among the first filmmakers in the United States to offer the kind of streaming-video features that Apple and Google were said to be considering last year.

Instead of storing digital movies they own on computer hard drives, Pink Visual customers will be able to store clips they buy from … Read more

Toronto artist Lisa J. Murphy believes we live in a highly sexualized world that often leaves the visually impaired behind. So she decided awhile ago to do something about it.

Last year, Murphy's book "Tactile Mind," which featured several nude, 3D pictures of men and women along with braille descriptions, gained new life in the media, two years after its release. Last week, the artist released four new images, including one featuring a woman's legs in stiletto shoes, as well as "a photograph of a woman's behind...wearing soft pink" panties.

The original book comes with the hefty price of $225, and the new set of images, titled "Tactile Atelier Bookmark," cost $100, according to Murphy's Web site. In an interview with AOL News, she says the process of creating the images takes up to 50 hours for each, and therefore the high price tag for the unusual art--or porn, depending on your point of view--is justifiable.

"I took photographs of my friends in lingerie, blew up the images, and hand-sculpted them into clay," Murphy told AOL News. "Then I made thermoform copies. I ran the plastic myself through my thermoform machine at home, so each one took awhile to make."

The hardest of the four images in her latest batch of creations, Murphy said, was the female behind. … Read more

Amazon has added a visual search component to its shoe shopping service.

Starting today, customers can now browse all the shoes available on Amazon by the design of the shoe. The online retail giant hopes that the new feature will help customers find the "styles they want easily and quickly."

Overall, the premise is quite simple. When a person chooses either men's or women's shoes, they will be presented with several different shoe categories. Upon picking the appropriate category, they will find a new filtering option called "shoe shape" that features silhouettes of different … Read more

Microsoft's latest salvo in the war for cloud relevancy has taken shape as an update to SQL server, the software giant's flagship database product.

Denali, the code name for the next SQL server release, introduces a new development tool for Visual Studio that bridges the gap between building and deploying applications that cross the borders between the enterprise and the SQL Azure cloud service.

According to The Register, Microsoft is scheduled to make the first preview of Denali available to subscribers on MSDN and TechNet. The software will be released at the annual Professional Association for SQL Server … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--When George Lucas talks about the raison d'etre of his award-winning visual effects studio, Industrial Light & Magic, his logic might strike some in the bottom line-obsessed world of Hollywood as heretical.

"I started ILM to help make great movies," Lucas told CNET recently. "That's what we're here for. We're not here as a big moneymaking organization. We're not here as a business. We're here to make great movies."

Of course, any filmmaker would probably want to say something like that, but Lucas may well be the one person … Read more

Four-buck iPad app My Friends from social-aggregation company Sobees has a new trick up its sleeve as of this morning that makes browsing through your friends' Facebook Places check-ins a more eyeball-friendly experience.

The app, which acts as a dolled-up interface for Facebook, now lets you browse Places check-ins in chronological order, as well as see them on an integrated Google Map. The feature joins other familiar Facebook mainstays like photos, chat, and events--all of which My Friends has skinned to fit within the iPad's rectangular interface.

The Places browser in My Friends offers up the same general experience … Read more

Trying to identify the differences between two text documents full of hundreds of lines of code can be time-consuming and frustrating. Fortunately, there are utilities that can do this work for you, making document comparison both faster and more accurate. AptDiff is an easy-to-use program that can compare both text and binary files and easily identify differences.

The program's interface is plain and intuitive. When AptDiff is opened, a dialog box appears asking users to select the two files that they want to compare. Users simply choose the desired files, and AptDiff will display a side-by-side or top-bottom comparison, … Read more

If you asked the average moviegoer to name George Lucas' biggest influence on the film industry, they'd probably say "Star Wars." But while there's no arguing with the massive cultural and artistic impact of that film and its five sequels, a better answer might well be Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic.

To be sure, "Star Wars" and ILM are not unrelated--Lucas started ILM to create the visual effects for his groundbreaking movie. But the visual effects house has gone on to do a great deal more, and today is probably responsible for the look … Read more

Some fonts are better suited for certain projects than others, but it's not always easy to preview and compare fonts to make the best decision. FontViewOK is a lightweight font viewer that lets you do exactly that. It's nothing fancy, but it's a great way to easily see what fonts look like in a variety of styles.

The program's interface is plain, consisting mostly of just a list of fonts. You can enter custom text with which to preview the fonts, and can also see what the fonts look like bolded, italicized, struck-through, and underlined, as … Read more