The always lovely and talented Seb Lee-Delisle has posted some updates on his work with lasers.
Lauren McCarthy has made a hat that gives you electric shocks if you aren’t smiling.
How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets from the New York Times.
From Beyond the Coming Age of Networked Matter by Bruce Sterling.
The Wikipedia definition of Umwelt, and xkcd’s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umwelt
Elon Musk has announced his Hyperloop.
A company in London has been tracking peoples mobile phones through sensors hidden in bins.
Instead of trying to emulate older painting techniques, Black Ink has gone completely digital and harnesses a bit of generative magic to allow for new creations that could only be made digitally.
HTML5 rollovers. You can always tell when a web technology is mature.
A brilliant use of mobile phone battery consumption to work out the temperature of a city.
The ever amazing Mike Harrison has posted the above amazing video on acoustic levitation. Mike’s business is called White Wing Logic – he’s done consulting work for companies like UnitedVisualArtists, Cinimod Studio and Jason Bruges Studio.
How to make a Procedural City in 100 lines of code – from Jerome Etienne, based on code by the ever awesome Mr. Doob.
A recent trip to London Zoo left me fascinated by the processes behind coral formation. My old favourite, Cellular Automata are perfect for the job. Horrible enclosures for the Gorillas though.
Not Cart Analysis – Kart Analysis!
Dave Pacheco posted a fascinating article on how he analysed many hours of Mario Kart 64 playing at his office to gain some insight into such a classic game.
The most interesting thing for me wasn’t the subject matter, but rather the thought of doing large scale Computer Vision based analysis in the cloud.
In the new BBC News 24 countdown video that they use on the hour, half hour and quarter hour, I noticed an email to an strange address – “Quickfire”. What is Quickfire? Turns out it’s an application made by a company called Media219 Ltd:
“Media219 was involved in producing the flagship BBC Quickfire application for filing and displaying text from mobile devices.
News is filed via email or text and the system enables much of the information to go live with little or no production process.
It was used very successfully during the Chilean Miner’s Rescue and provided depth to the story that would not have been achieved otherwise.”
Meta seems to be the augmented reality company that many people think Google Glass is. Space Glasses are available for pre order now.
Via Barry Threw – the amazing Funk Logic make the perfect studio gear to impress people with – lots of knobs and buttons, but no actual effect.
Gödel is awesome – part of a wider essay about Gödel for startups.
“Any … formal system capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete”
Vol Libre from Loren Carpenter.
I found “Von Libre” from Loren Carpenter after watching “The Pixar Story“. I love how everyone was recruited in such a relaxed way. Who is the Pixar of today?
Her is from the always interesting Spike Jonze – I remember seeing his photographs back in the 90’s in the best magazine of all time, Grand Royal.
Robert Reich on the problem of inequality, and how to speak truth to power.
Only God Forgives is upcoming from the director of Drive – Nicholas Refn.
Omni, the classic SF magazine, has been rebooted. Arc is a peer – from the makers of New Scientist.
How much planning do you do before you start to shoot a scene?
As much as there are hours in the day, and days in the week. I think about a film almost continuously.
Eitan Grinspun does a lot of work on Physical Modelling – adding physical properties to three dimensional geometry in order to simulate them more effectively. Don’t fake it, make it! Via Tim Greatrex.
Oculus have made the greatest CTO hire ever – John Carmack. Cue hilarious PR battling between the companies he left. I love how he summed up his time now:
“My time division is now Oculus over Id over Armadillo. Busy busy busy!”
Hawken is a completley free to play game. We’ll be seeing more of these. I’d love to try it with an Oculus.
Manything are a very interesting UK startup for turning your old iPhone or iPad into a CCTV device. A small step to broadcast I’m sure.
Another kind of broadcast, “Writtle Calling: 2emmatoc“:
“Writtle Calling: 2emmatoc is a temporary radio station and structure that will be sited in the Essex landscape during September 2012. The station will host a series of broadcasts by artists, writers, musicians and scientists, culminating in a live public event on the 15th September. The structure will be sited in the grounds of Writtle College, Essex, near the site of the first regular public radio broadcasts by Marconi Engineers in 1922. Transmitting under the call sign ‘2EmmaToc’, the original station broadcast live performances every Tuesday evening from an ex-army hut in the fields around Writtle.”
A guide to ‘Pataphysics.
“The London Institute of ‘Pataphysics has more than 100 fee-paying members, if no formal premises. Mostly artists, they engage in regular activities that can only be described as outrageously pretentious. There’s a Committee of Hirsutism and Pogonotrophy determined on fertilising their beards, a Department of Reconstructive Archaeology building model time machines based on Jarry’s writing and, best of all, the Department of Pottasons whose project is to satirise the other projects.”
Industrial Perception are an interesting company:
Industrial Perception, Inc. (IPI) is a leader in 3D vision-guided robot technology and enables industrial robots to assume challenging logistical tasks such as truck and container unloading, e-commerce fulfillment and package sorting.
IPI is home to some of the world’s foremost authorities and pioneers in machine vision and artificial intelligence, working with a team of industrial automation experts to deliver cutting-edge logistics solutions.
The company’s patented software and advanced sensor technologies provide the capability to scan and model a dynamic 3D environment, identify and precisely locate objects, and optimize (sic) the robot’s trajectory to safely pick and deliver each object to its destination.
Astro Teller‘s talk at SXSW Interactive 2013 – all about Google [x].
| Elliot Woods (@elliotwoods) | |
| 09/04/2013 08:46 Mirror API demo makes Google Glass seem like a @bergcloud Little Printer for your always-on peripheral vision fastcodesign.com/1672314/first-… |
“Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers have teamed up to form the Glass Collective.
We’re excited by the promise of the Glass platform. Developers are already dreaming up new experiences for Glass, and we want to help bring those ideas to life.
The Glass Collective investment syndicate will provide financing and support to entrepreneurs shaping the future through Glass.”
Wavelet Trees – an introduction.
“If you are willing to build your business on expertise, you can make a living instead of making a fortune — and occasionally the fortune comes anyway.”
So says Kevin Kelly reviewing the “The Incredible Secret Money Making Machine” by Don Lancaster. Keeping small, keeping nimble and spreading your activities seems to be a wise way to go.
I was reminded of my friend Lise Hansen of AHO telling the story of her friend Douglas Bevans. He advised never having any one skill or task or occupation that took up more than half of your time. “What would Douglas do?” is a useful tool.
“I gained a BFA in Printmaking (1970) from San Francisco Art Institute. I pursued a career as an illustrator, first in the US, and from 1985 in London, with clients such as BBC Education, EMI, Harpers magazine, OUP, and Warner Bros. Since the mid 1990s I have combined my freelance practice with part-time teaching at a number of colleges including CSM and ENSAD Paris before taking on my present role at CSM in 2002. I also lecture at the Royal College of Art. A member of Designer Bookbinders, I am a regular presence at London Artist’s Book Fair.”
Zach Gage is someone who has been doing interesting things for a while. I met him at Eyebeam at an OF knitting circle. He is the creator of Spell Tower and part of the team that produced the frankly genius Ridiculous Fishing – the latter being undoubtedly my most played game of recent times.
A pair of choice tweets from Zach:
| Zach Gage (@helvetica) | |
| 24/03/2013 03:28how did i ever do palettes before this? RT @golan: Beautifully minimal color picker & scheme designer: bit.ly/11wnVGN (big thx@_vade |
| Zach Gage (@helvetica) | |
| 19/02/2013 06:16everyone should read Sol Lewitt’s sentences on conceptual art. I think they’re my religion. altx.com/vizarts/concep… |