Stuff that may be relevant for the Digital Media programme in Bremen.
(1977) The computer graphics for the first Star Wars film was created by Larry Cuba in the 1970s at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) (at the time known as the Circle Graphics Habitat) at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
This heavily reminds me of Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad demo, as shown in “Doing with Images Makes Symbols (1987)”.
A few years ago I saw an interface for blind people which consisted out of a camera which was recording the contours of what was in front of it and translated that to an array of little actuators inside a device which the blind person would attach between his eyes. Unfortunately, I forgot about the projects name shortly after.
Today I got to know BrainPort. It’s very similar. Instead of using the area between ones eyes it uses the tongue, which is much more sensitive and differentiating than the skin. It applies a electrotactile stimulation over an array of actuators. The composition of the signal then creates (over the course of a learning process) an “image” of the situation. See the amazing device in action in this demo video.
Our goal is to create a powerful free and open cinema camera that we as filmmakers love to use. The idea of using an Elphel camera for this particular purpose was born in 2006, found many followers over the years and ultimately resulted in this community driven project entitled “Apertus” and this website.
Check out the (early) status and some convincing footage of the camera here.
Japanese “ARTIST, DESIGNER, PROGRAMMER, DJ, VJ, COMPOSER” Daito Manabe took over the sound generation part in this amazing interface concept.
“How it would be, if a house was dreaming”
The guys from urbanscreen in Bremen did a fantastic job with this projection on the Galerie der Gegenwart in Hamburg. The tromp-l’oeil effect is convincing – I wonder if that would work at daylight.
This is definitely the most sophisticated facade projection I came across yet.
This Korean animation is in the juried film list at the SIGGRAPH 2009 in New Orleans, take a look.
It can be downloaded in HD 720P here http://www.mesai.co.kr/
The landing on the moon is one of the events in mankind I really would have liked to attend to. Well, no problem! The whole transmissions are played back in realtime, only 40 years after. Check it out here.
A new and stunning approach in anti-shake algorithms. In research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, shown at SIGGRAPH 2009. (However, they do not mention that – like with every other algorithms of this kind – a lot of the picture borders go down the drain, but it is stunning, nevertheless.)
Dialogues between two chatterbots:
J: How do you define life?
A: Life is the opposite of death.
J: So death is the absence of life?
A: Take it easy. I try not to think about such things.
J: Why not?
A: Ambiguous.
J: Yes!
Wanna try it for yourself?
Good ol’ nerdy sunday fun!
Maybe some readers will remember Big Dog from Boston Dynamics, which freaked me out and fascinated me at the same time. Well, although we all saw it coming, for me this TED Talk by PW Singer fires up the transition from the fantastic and horrible visions, like so many other forms of technical “improvements” from the past into a part of our everyday perception of the world.