Sweeten Sales Center Grand Urban / InOrder StudioSave this picture!Courtesy of InOrder StudioRetailTaichung, TaiwanArchitects: InOrder StudioAreaArea of this architecture projectArea:555 mYearCompletion year of this architecture project Year: 2024 More SpecsLess SpecsSave this picture!Text description provided by the architects. Perched along the embankment of Han River in Taichung's East District, the sales center turns its back on the city's bustle and looks out upon a rarely found tranquility. Stepping inside to purchase one's first home is a long-cherished dream for many, and for that dream we pass day after day without rest, weaving our reveries in broad daylight.Save this picture!Save this picture!By day, in the dream, we stroll along the lengthy stone embankment, taking in the extended vistas and brushing our fingers across materials we often see but rarely notice. By night, we make our way down a corridor where the walls are washed with blooming patterns of light, counting the silent passersby who venture through. This is the every day, turned extraordinarya waking daydream.Save this picture!The sales center draws on humble, everyday materials: stones from the nearby riverbank, the plastic grates commonly found in pigpens and the trusses one might see in a factory, all supporting a sweeping expanse of floor-to-ceiling glass. Stone slabs, arranged in sequence from the front yard to the raised platform, continue inward to the walls, blurring the lines between the exterior and interior.Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!Within this space, one's view gradually filters through layer upon layer of grid-like screens, while slender steel cable track lights gently and unobtrusively illuminate each partition. In the soft glow of these lightseach forming its own tiny bloomevery visitor finds a guiding companion on their journey through.Save this picture!Project gallerySee allShow lessProject locationAddress:Taichung, TaiwanLocation to be used only as a reference. It could indicate city/country but not exact address.About this officeInOrder StudioOfficePublished on January 27, 2025Cite: "Sweeten Sales Center Grand Urban / InOrder Studio" 26 Jan 2025. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://www.archdaily.com/1026024/sweeten-sales-center-grand-urban-inorder-studio&gt ISSN 0719-8884Save!ArchDaily?You've started following your first account!Did you know?You'll now receive updates based on what you follow! Personalize your stream and start following your favorite authors, offices and users.Go to my stream

A genetic investigation has finally tracked down the source of the pathogen that caused the Irish potato famine, closing a case that has been up in the air for years. Researchers nailed down the Andes Mountains in South America as the birthplace of Phtytophthora infestans, otherwise known as potato blight or late blight.The pathogen, taking the form of a fungus-like microorganism (oomycete/water mold), has devastated potato and tomato plants throughout history. A new study published in the journal PLOS One settled the debate on the spread of P. infestans, delivering insight on its progression throughout the centuries.Conflicting Pathogen Hypotheses Previously, the debate on the origins of P. infestans was solidly split into two camps; many scientists believed the pathogen first cropped up in central Mexico, a widely accepted view. Others, however, maintained that it instead arose farther down in South America. The new study lends strong support to the South American hypothesis due to genetic likeness among P. infestans and certain related pathogens.Researchers compared whole genomes of P. infestans with Phytophthora andina and Phytophthora betacei, close relative pathogens that are only found in South America. The results indicated that these three species were very similar.It's one of the largest whole-genome studies of not only P. infestans, but also the sister lineages, said Jean Ristaino, a professor of plant pathology at North Carolina State University and corresponding author of the study, in a press release. By sequencing these genomes and accounting for evolutionary relationships and migration patterns, we show that the whole Andean region is a hot spot for speciation, or where a species splits into two or more distinct species.Conversely, the study found that P. infestans showed distinct differences from two Mexican pathogen species, P. mirabilis and P. ipomoea. Read More: The Domino Effects of a Global Food ShortageHow Did the Pathogen Cause Famine? The study seemingly confirmed that P. infestans moved from South America to North America. In 1843, reports of the disease in the United States were first recorded around the ports of Philadelphia and New York. Soon after, it was transported to Europe on a cargo of potatoes, and by 1845, it ruined potato crops across Belgium, the Netherlands, and southern England. P. infestans made its way to Ireland, which heavily depended on potatoes they were a staple food for at least two-thirds of the population, including many agricultural laborers. The pathogen struck a major blow to the nation's potato crop, leaving widespread poverty and disease in its wake. The Great Famine that ensued, lasting from 1845 to 1852, marked a major crisis in Irish history that depleted the population due to death and emigration; around one million people died during this period, and closer to two million left the country.Potato blight continues to threaten potatoes and tomatoes globally, as it causes an estimated annual loss of $6.7 billion worldwide.Throughout the years, researchers have looked to potato species that offer some level of resistance against P. infestans. The primary focus in the past has been on Solanum demissum, a wild potato species native to Mexico and Guatemala containing alleles that provide pathogen resistance. However, a pressing concern is the ability for the pathogen to mutate into variants that can breach the defenses of a potato that was previously resistant. As a result, the need to find new sources of resistance is key. Resistance in the AndesThe realization that the pathogen first came out of the Andes Mountains has brought attention to the possibility of pathogen resistance existing in the region.Climate change is bringing more drought to higher Andean elevations, so we could be losing some of these potatoes before we learn if they could provide resistance to late-blight disease, Ristaino said in the release.Understanding the evolution of P. infestans up until this point may now help researchers discern where they'll need to look next to potentially find new sources of resistance. Historic P. infestans the samples collected from 1845-1889 were the first to diverge from all other P. infestans populations, with modern South American and Mexican populations both showing shared ancestry derived from historic P. infestans, Ristaino said in the release. Modern global trade appears to contribute to mixing together the pathogen populations in South America and Mexico.Article SourcesOur writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:Ireland's Great Hunger Museum. Learn About the Great HungerRHS. Potato blightU.S. Department of Agriculture. Wild Potatoes Tapped for Late Blight Guard DutyJack Knudson is an assistant editor at Discover with a strong interest in environmental science and history. Before joining Discover in 2023, he studied journalism at the Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University and previously interned at Recycling Today magazine.

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Less than a week after Electronic Arts revealed that Dragon Age: The Veilguard has engaged only about 1.5 million players indicating that the number of copies sold might be even lower and fell 50% short of the publishers expectations, it now seems BioWare is already preparing to move on, with the wording of the games recent update strongly implying it will be the last.BioWareIntroducing a single quality-of-life change the addition of recommended levels to side quests that players may receive at significantly lower levels along with several bug fixes, The Veilguards Patch 5 Release Notes open with the developers saying that with the game being in a stable place, we are moving to monitor for any game-breaking bugs should those occur, suggesting that smaller QoL patches wont be a regular occurrence moving forward and will only be released in response to critical issues that could render The Veilguard unplayable.What is even more interesting is that the updates introductory sentence ends with the words dareth shiral, which, in the in-game Elven language, means safe journey, or more commonly, farewell, making the entire paragraph feel like the closest you can get to announcing there wont be any more updates without explicitly saying so.While it is currently not 100% confirmed that Patch 5 is indeed the final one, it wouldnt be a surprise given that The Veilguard has contributed to EAs declining profits and a nearly 20% drop in the publishers stock within just a few days the lowest it has been since March 2023.Read the patch notes here and dont forget to join our80 Level Talent platformand ournew Discord server, follow us onInstagram,Twitter,LinkedIn,Telegram,TikTok, andThreads,where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.Source link The post Dragon Age: The Veilguard Says Farewell to Future Updates appeared first on CG SHARES.

Despite being a charming 2D indie game, Lost Castle 2 can be a brutal roguelike. To survive its harsh environments, you need to equip the best weapons. The problem is that the game offers over 200 weapon options, and you cant choose which specific weapon you'll receive during each adventuredrops are RNG-based. This leads many players to wonder, Which weapons in Lost Castle 2 are the best? They want to know which weapon categories are worth the time and effort.

As one of the best anime of the 2000s, Naruto continues to be praised by anime and pop culture fans around the world, having a plethora of movies and series. This is mostly due to the franchise's ability to create incredible characters that audiences relate to but also deeply care about. In particular, the Naruto anime has featured some incredible villains that not only aid in character development but also have their own evolution.

Any recent progress in low-poly LOD generation?I know about Simplygon, Unity's thing, UE5's system, quadric mesh reduction as done in Blender, impostor generation, and approximate convex hull decomposition. The problem is, if you want to hammer distant objects down to, say, 50-100 tris, those algorithms tend to not do well. They're much better for 100,000 tris to 10,000 tris. If you push them hard, they tend to come unglued. Looking for open source code.The basic p

Spanish designer Isern Serra has refurbished his Barcelona studio, adding curved walls, arched openings and shelves filled with inspirational objects that give the space a homely feel.The design for the studio aims to make employees feel "truly at ease, comfortable and free to create" by generating an atmosphere that promotes inspiration and reflection, Serra explained.Isern Serra has refurbished his Barcelona studio"The concept of our Estudio-Casa reflects our vision for a work environment that is deeply human, warm and inviting," Serra said."Our intention was to create a place that not only fulfils the functional needs of a studio but also speaks to who we are and what makes us feel at home."The design of the office is informed by domestic living areasThe studio, which is situated on the fourth floor of a 1960s industrial building in the Poblenou district, eschews the traditional rigid office layout in favour of spaces informed by domestic living areas.The interior is separated into two main zones by a change in floor level. Private areas and amenities are situated on a raised platform close to the entrance, with the workspace positioned close to full-height windows at the far end of the space.Arched openings provide access to the meeting room and a tunnel-like corridorArched openings on either side of the entrance provide access to a meeting room on one side and a tunnel-like corridor opposite that contains the bathroom and storage area.The meeting room features a cream-coloured lacquered table with a single cylindrical support made by carpenter Fusteria Vidal. A circular opening that looks out onto the workspace creates a feature above the adjacent sofa area.The corridor across from the meeting room features an arched opening cut into the tunnel-like wall that provides access to the bathroom. An alabaster lamp by design studio Siete Formas illuminates the space, which culminates in a storage room hidden behind a curtain.A circular opening in the meeting room looks out onto the workspaceBeyond the meeting room, a curved wall merges with a platform that forms the base for an L-shaped sofa. The raised concrete surface also accommodates a Kentia palm that adds greenery to the lounge area."The living space has a very calm and monochromatic base, making it a comfortable place and refuge in a workplace, where the objects that adorn it give it an artistic and contemporary twist," said Serra.Read: Perron squeezes all its "colourful operations" under one roof in three-storey Qubec buildingThe platform also accommodates the kitchen and dining area, organised around a rounded table with cylindrical legs made by Fusteria Vidal.The kitchen units are fabricated from dark walnut wood and topped with a Caliza stone worktop with a roughly hewn edge. A Moon lamp from Italian brand Davide Groppi provides a focal point above the dining table.A corner of the wall at the far end of the kitchen incorporates a small curved opening that glows when the light is turned on in the material library behind this wall.An L-shaped sofa sits on a platform that merges with a curved wallA single step down separates the living area from the main workspace, housing a pair of sculptural concrete tables that are each five meters long. Their tops are cantilevered from sturdy cylindrical legs, giving the impression of floating surfaces."The design of the table was very important to the project as whole as they are main pieces that hold the space together," Serra added."We wanted to give the sense of lightness and oneiric design through a material that is usually very heavy. As they are the same microcement as the rest of the space, they perfectly float at the end of the space."The kitchen features dark walnut wood units anda rounded tableFloating shelves positioned on the walls behind each of the tables are used to display books, materials, lamps and other objects.In addition to functioning as a workplace, Estudio-Casa will host a range of public events including talks and exhibitions. The interior therefore features a revolving array of artworks and design objects that add personality to the spaces.The main workspace consists of sculptural concrete tables and floating shelvesIsern Serra founded his eponymous studio in 2008. His approach combines pared-back contemporary forms with a playful Mediterranean attitude, resulting in spaces that often display a dreamlike quality.The studio's previous work includes a concept store with a monochromatic pink interior based on a computer rendering, and a minimalist office for a digital artist that won small workplace interior of the year at Dezeen Awards 2023.The photography is by Salva Lpez.The post Isern Serra completes "deeply human" interior for his own Barcelona studio appeared first on Dezeen.

Novel view synthesis has witnessed significant advancements recently, with Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) pioneering 3D representation techniques through neural rendering. While NeRF introduced innovative methods for reconstructing scenes by accumulating RGB values along sampling rays using multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), it encountered substantial computational challenges. The extensive ray point sampling and large neural network volumes created critical bottlenecks that impacted training and rendering performance. Moreover, the computational complexity of generating photorealistic views from limited input images continued to pose significant technical obstacles, demanding more efficient and computationally lightweight approaches to 3D scene reconstruction and rendering.Existing research attempts to address novel view synthesis challenges have focused on two main approaches for neural rendering compression. First, Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) compression techniques have evolved through explicit grid-based representations and parameter reduction strategies. These methods include Instant-NGP, TensoRF, K-planes, and DVGO, which attempted to improve rendering efficiency by adopting explicit representations. Compression techniques broadly categorized into value-based and structural-relation-based approaches emerged to tackle computational limitations. Value-based methods such as pruning, codebooks, quantization, and entropy constraints aimed to reduce parameter count and streamline model architecture.Researchers from Monash University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University have proposed HAC++, an innovative compression framework for 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). The proposed method utilizes the relationships between unorganized anchors and a structured hash grid, utilizing mutual information for context modeling. By capturing intra-anchor contextual relationships and introducing an adaptive quantization module, HAC++ aims to significantly reduce the storage requirements of 3D Gaussian representations while maintaining high-fidelity rendering capabilities. It also represents a significant advancement in addressing the computational and storage challenges inherent in current novel view synthesis techniques.The HAC++ architecture is built upon the Scaffold-GS framework and comprises three key components: Hash-grid Assisted Context (HAC), Intra-Anchor Context, and Adaptive Offset Masking. The Hash-grid Assisted Context module introduces a structured compact hash grid that can be queried at any anchor location to obtain an interpolated hash feature. The intra-anchor context model addresses internal anchor redundancies, providing auxiliary information to enhance prediction accuracy. The Adaptive Offset Masking module prunes redundant Gaussians and anchors by integrating the masking process directly into rate calculations. The architecture combines these components to achieve comprehensive, and efficient compression of 3D Gaussian Splatting representations.The experimental results demonstrate HAC++s remarkable performance in 3D Gaussian Splatting compression. It achieves unprecedented size reductions, outperforming 100 times compared to vanilla 3DGS across multiple datasets while maintaining and improving image fidelity. Compared to the base Scaffold-GS model, HAC++ delivers over 20 times size reduction with enhanced performance metrics. While alternative approaches like SOG and ContextGS introduced context models, HAC++ outperforms them through more complex context modeling and adaptive masking strategies. Moreover, its bitstream contains carefully encoded components, with anchor attributes being entropy-encoded using Arithmetic Encoding, representing the primary storage component.In this paper, researchers introduced HAC++, a novel approach to address the critical challenge of storage requirements in 3D Gaussian Splatting representations. By exploring the relationship between unorganized, sparse Gaussians and structured hash grids, HAC++ introduces an innovative compression methodology that uses mutual information to achieve state-of-the-art compression performance. Extensive experimental validation highlights the effectiveness of this method, enabling the deployment of 3D Gaussian Splatting in large-scale scene representations. While acknowledging limitations such as increased training time and indirect anchor relationship modeling, the research opens promising avenues for future investigations in computational efficiency and compression techniques for neural rendering technologies.Check out the Paper and GitHub Page. All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Also,dont forget to follow us onTwitter and join ourTelegram Channel andLinkedIn Group. Dont Forget to join our70k+ ML SubReddit. Sajjad Ansari+ postsSajjad Ansari is a final year undergraduate from IIT Kharagpur. As a Tech enthusiast, he delves into the practical applications of AI with a focus on understanding the impact of AI technologies and their real-world implications. He aims to articulate complex AI concepts in a clear and accessible manner. Meet 'Height':The only autonomous project management tool (Sponsored)