Looking through Google Glass: Real Life Example

Nice walkthrough of the basics of Google Glass as it is today from phandroid.com.

This video shows EXACTLY what you see when you look through Google Glass. For more, visit http://phandroid.com

Zachary Quinto vs. Leonard Nimoy: "The Challenge"

"to boldly advertise in ways no man has done before":

What happens when old school goes head to head with new school in a battle of speed and wits? Leonard Nimoy takes on newbie Zachary Quinto and his all-new Audi S7. Get more information on the S7 at http://audi.us/18SEJtQ.

Duarte Remote Presenting Webinar

Nancy Duarte of Silicon Valley presentation fame has a video here discussing how to effectively present webinars. 

Animating Atoms

IBM has made a stop motion animation by moving individual molecules. Ars Technica has an article about it here.

You're about to see the movie that holds the Guinness World Records™ record for the World's Smallest Stop-Motion Film (see how it was made at http://youtu.be/xA4QWwaweWA). The ability to move single atoms - the smallest particles of any element in the universe - is crucial to IBM's research in the field of atomic memory.

Caine's Arcade

A 9 year old boy's imagination runs wild.

The story of 9 year old Caine, who spent his summer building an elaborate cardboard arcade inside his dad's used auto part store, and a community that came together to make his day. Caine's Arcade has inspired millions, and launched a movement to foster creativity and entrepreneurship in kids, via the Imagination Foundation: http://www.imagination.is Help Caine's Scholarship Fund*: http://cainesarcade.com *$250,000 Goal, donations to Caine's Scholarship are being matched dollar-for-dollar to support the Imagination Foundation! Watch Caine's Arcade 2: http://www.vimeo.com/nirvan/cainesarcade2 Get an Official Caine's Arcade STAFF shirt: http://www.cainesarcade.com/store Get the Caine's Arcade Theme Song: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/caines-arcade-single/id518928144 Caine's Arcade Online: http://facebook.com/cainesarcade http://twitter.com/cainesarcade Imagination Foundation: http://imagination.is http://twitter.com/imagination http://facebook.com/imaginationfoundation Directed by Nirvan http://twitter.com/nirvan http://facebook.com/nirvan.mullick Produced by Interconnected http://facebook.com/interconnected.is

Caine's Arcade from Nirvan Mullick.

The website for this and a worldwide project is here. The project goes from September until October 5th. Their goal this year is to engage 1 Million Kids in 70 Countries in Creative Play.

Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle

Bio: Bret Victor invents tools that enable people to understand and create. He has designed experimental UI concepts at Apple, interactive data graphics for Al Gore, and musical instruments at Alesis. For more on Bret, see http://worrydream.com. This talk was given at CUSEC 2012 (http://2012.cusec.net).

Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle from CUSEC. 

Bret Victor invents tools that enable people to understand and create. He has designed experimental UI concepts at Apple, interactive data graphics for Al Gore, and musical instruments at Alesis.

This is an inspirational video. There are many good ideas and demonstrations in this video. At around 29:25, Bret shows the creation of an animation sequence both with Flash and an iPad app that shows some remarkable insights into a possible animation UI.

Bret's personal site is here.

Kahn Academy Opens Computer Science Section

Kahn Academy has opened a new section of the educational website to teach computer science here. It is reminiscent of the instructional approach of Seymour Paper's Logo language teaching from 1967. The key here is the use of generated animation to teach programming skills. The fact that Kahn Academy's system used JavaScript is brilliant in that the programming and display environment is available in any web browser. 

Fly Ball

As seen in a Mashable article here, the Japanese Ministry of Defense has invented a spherical flying machine. It is a beatiful concept.

DigInfo TV - http://diginfo.tv 20/10/2011 TRDI Spherical flying machine

Real or Not?

As pointed to by a tweet from @brucesharpe, automatic modification of photographs has reached an awsome level as indicated by this:

Supplementary material video for our 2011 SIGGRAPH Asia paper (see the project page here: http://kevinkarsch.com/publications/sa11.html). 3D objects are rendered using LuxRender (http://www.luxrender.net). Authors: Kevin Karsch, Varsha Hedau, David Forsyth, Derek Hoiem Abstract: We propose a method to realistically insert synthetic objects into existing photographs without requiring access to the scene or any additional scene measurements. With a single image and a small amount of annotation, our method creates a physical model of the scene that is suitable for realistically rendering synthetic objects with diffuse, specular, and even glowing materials while accounting for lighting interactions between the objects and the scene. We demonstrate in a user study that synthetic images produced by our method are confusable with real scenes, even for people who believe they are good at telling the difference. Further, our study shows that our method is competitive with other insertion methods while requiring less scene information. We also collected new illumination and reflectance datasets; renderings produced by our system compare well to ground truth. Our system has applications in the movie and gaming industry, as well as home decorating and user content creation, among others.

What an iPhone (and Talent and a Budget of $136,363) Can Do

From the Korea JoongAng Daily in association with the International Herald Tribune here comes an article about Korean film director Park Chan-wook who just won best short film in the Berlin International Film Festival for his 25 minute film "Night Fishing" which was shot on an iPhone.

The film's $136,363 budget was funded by KT, the exclusive iPhone service provider for Korea.

The Last Day of Kodachrome Processing After 74 Years

Kodak stopped making Kodachrome film last year. The last facility to process the film in the world will process the last roll today because they have run out of the chemicals. I would not know about this story except for a tweet by David Pogue here.

This was the film that recorded many moments of my family's life growing up. My father shot Kodachrome slides mostly with a Kodak 35mm camera and we spent many evenings looking at them being projected in a darkened room. He used Kodachrome all of his adult life. With my father's great skill at correctly guessing exposures it captured many fond memories. His camera did not have a light meter. He used his eye and many years of experience.

RIP Kodachrome.

Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years in 4 Minutes

In 2007 Hans Rosling appeared at TED and showed an amazing display of stats that were actually interesting. That video is here. Below is another, more beautiful example of a similar idea with higher production values.

The video is from a BBC show called "The Joy of Stats."

The iPad is Only for Consumption of Media

Don't tell David Hockney. 

He has an exhibit of his iPad work at the Pierre Berge-Yves St. Laurent Foundation in Paris.

Wonderful Flying Type

Gruber points here to a wonderful video by Jarrett Heather here that shows a mastery of kinetic typography. According to Heather's post, he used After Effects, Toon Boom Animate, Illustrator, Photoshop and Premiere to achieve this slick video.

A kinetic typography music video for Jonathan Coulton's Shop Vac. Created using After Effects, Toon Boom Animate, Illustrator, Photoshop and Premiere.

Shop Vac from Jarrett Heather.

GoogleTV Can't Win for Winning

As the GoogleTV team noted, "Google TV made it on Fox's Holiday Gift Guide: Best Gadgets for Families list!" This was linked to here. The irony is that Fox.com blocks GoogleTV as reported here.

Quartz Composer, a Flash Alternative

For some interactive installations that most people might think require Flash, some people using Macs use Quartz Composer instead. The most sophisticated example I've ever seen is shown

here

. It has 10 40" touchscreens, each run by a 27" iMac. I've used Quartz Composer to create simple graphic composites but I've never seen anything like this.

Quartz Composer 10m Installation from Rob Reid on Vimeo.

Isarithmic History of the Two-Party Vote

Gruber here points to a fantastic Isarithmic* visualization by David B. Sparks here of how the national distribution of presidential Republican and Democratic votes shifted from 1920 to 2008. The video captures the transitions in a way that illustrates the power of well designed time based media and taught me something about our political history.

 * Yeah, I had to look it up too, here.

Super-Microphone

Bruce Schneier here pointed to an item on Wired here about a microphone system that can pick out individual voices in a crowd. The audio technology is available from a company called Squarehead here.

HDR Video

From Bruce Sharpe here comes a link to an article on cnet here about HDR video. Soviet Montage Productions of San Francisco has found a way to combine video from two Canon 5D mark II's, one over exposed and one under exposed into HDR video. While we wait for true HDR imagers, maybe someone will rediscover the techniques used by Technicolor for film and older video cameras of using a prism to split an image to 3 imagers with different settings or simply use neutral density filters. Video with dynamic range that exceeds the human eye can't be far off.