Digital Frontiers

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Computational Visions

The basic ideas of how computers can create graphics inspired Ricardo Montesa, CEO of Brainstorm. In the mid 1980s, when he was a student, computers could only generate text, not even a straight line. Then he saw a computer that could render a graphic, a black background with green lines. Soon after that, a visitor to the university gave a demonstration of the very earliest versions of computer graphics. “I fell in love with the technology,” says Montesa.

Today, Brainstorm, born from Montesa’s early efforts, creates graphics-building software that is key to European and American televised election coverage, rapidly integrating all new data and transforming it into visuals.

As the votes for Obama and McCain were counted at the close of the 2008 American presidential elections, audiences turned rapt attention to the red-and-blue tallies of votes and percentages that inched higher as the night wore on. Brainstorm created the graphics for NBC and has also created all the BBC’s election graphics; the NASDAQ graphics displayed in Times Square; and all the virtual graphics for ESPN. ILM, a George Lucas company, bought the company‘s virtual set software for the movie Artificial Intelligence, and the software has since been used in other movies including I Robot and X-Men Origins. Today, Brainstorm is participating in European projects to develop games that will help marginalized youth and the elderly.

Victor González, one of the founders of Next Limit Technologies, describes creating his company with Ignacio Vargas when the two were students. They both enjoyed computer graphics and animation, and both were programmers. González and Vargas also noticed that a relatively easy and realistic rendering of fluid, as when waves crash, was missing from animation. “We thought there was a gap that we could fill in fluid simulation, that we could create those effects within a computer,” says González.

The two men started applying what they were learning in engineering, designing computer graphics that can realistically mimic fluid dynamics on a computer, television or film screen. The partners developed a prototype of the software. Then they showed up with it at a visual effects conference in Orlando, “and people were excited about what we were doing,” he says. 

Next Limit Technology’s software has assisted production companies for top-name movies such as Lord of the Rings, X-Men, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and, most recently, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. In 2008, Hollywood’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored Next Limit with a technical achievement award.

Now the designers at Next Limit are bringing their technology back to engineers. They’ve created a program called XFlow, a fluid simulation software that is scientifically much more accurate than the one designed for Hollywood. “Our targets are the engineering industry, those who need to simulate the fluid [or air] conditions around a building, plane, or car,” says González. While other products are on the marketplace, they don’t have the visual effects of XFlow, which capitalized on Next Limit’s Hollywood experience and provides engineers a realistic visualization of their tests or designs. “We’re excited to be at the top of a new technology,” says González. “Our vision is that we can bring visualization and science together to create new paradigms for design and engineering.”

The two brothers behind the company Zed founded the first Internet service provider in Spain, but they sold the original company to Telefónica. Instead, they focused on the content that major companies such as Telefónica could by then provide to customers.

In 1998, Zed’s subsidiary Pyro Studios released Commandos, Spain’s first internationally popular video game. At the same time, the company turned its sights on the growth of mobile technology, in 2002 creating a studio solely for mobile video games. Today the company offers 200 games on a variety of platforms through major international players such as Nokia Ovi Store and Apple’s iPhone. “Right now we have contracts with 130 telecom operators around the world, reaching more than two billion mobile subscribers,” says Miguel López-Quesada, Zed’s manager of corporate communications.

The company’s latest graphic offering builds on the success of their video games and mobile offerings, and on the recognition, according to López-Quesada, that “with digital entertainment, a video game with a ninja or a spaceship becomes incredibly popular in both India and Peru; it really is a universal language,” he says. In response the company created a subsidiary called Ilion, dedicated to creating animated movies.
This year, Ilion is releasing Spain’s largest production ever, an animated movie called Planet 51, with a Thanksgiving weekend release planned for more than 3,000 movie theaters in the U.S.

Zed also provides services. These include mobile services for banks and governments, such as mobile alerts the company developed for the health department in its home region of Valencia or the technological platform for mobile voting in Russia. They’re also furnishing mobile content for the US National Basketball Association (NBA).

Zed’s mobile phone content is also used by Telefónica, Spain’s leading phone provider and one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies. In order to foster innovation within the company, Telefónica has its own R&D company, which operates in five centers in Spain and two in Latin America and partners with more than 150 universities. In 2008 Telefónica started rolling out an optical fiber network in Spain to provide increasingly rapid connectivity, along with innovations in the digital television and mobile networks.

Current Telefónica research projects include the use of mobile technology to develop tele-education and e-health, including remote storage and reading of x-rays; remote diagnosis and rehabilitation; and applications to facilitate physician focus on patients.

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