Rocket Launch Seen from the Space Station
Pretty awesome!
Tokyo Maker Fair 2020
Some really cool ideas and projects at the Tokyo Maker Fair to get your creative juices flowing!
Barcode scratching
Scratching with Barcode Scanners at the Maker Faire Tokyo 2020
Problems of parenthood
I think anyone with kids has had the experience this momma bear is having.
Even more fun is the fact a person from the other side caught the same scene
DCS and Augmented Reality
DCS World is one of the most amazing flight simulators out there. The hyper reality and complexity of just getting your plane off the ground is well known. Modders and modelers sell hyper-realistic models for the game like the F/A-18C Hornet shown here. In the high-fidelity cockpits, literally every button/switch/knob is clickable. It’s not just for show either – people claim they can start up the real planes by learning it first in DCS.
One user has cleverly combined some augmented reality in their setup.
If you like this, you can check out some of the amazing fun folks have in this game. Check out the Youtube channel for the Grim Reapers. They have interesting, and often hilarious, skill competitions – like their AAA/SAM evasion canyon run.
Deep Nostalgia
Much like the moving pictures in Harry Potter, MyHeritage is bringing photos of departed ancestors back to life via some clever use of AI based animation technology called “Deep Nostalgia”.
Painted by a madman!
Edward Munch is most famous for his painting ‘The Scream’. He was a tortured soul by his own admission, and would struggle with alcoholism and mental illness later in life. He once wrote, “Illness, insanity, and death were the black angels that kept watch over my cradle and accompanied me all my life.” His most famous painting, The Scream, has inspired countless depictions of pain—including the famous Scream mask.
Etched into the paint of one of the most famous paintings in the world, a haunting eight-word sentence has been a mystery to art historians for over a century. The sentence reads, “Can only have been painted by a madman.” The mysterious statement—clearly added sometime after the painting’s debut in 1893—was long thought to be added either by a disgruntled onlooker or perhaps the artist himself.
The century-old debate has finally been settled by modern technology. Using infrared photography to compare handwriting to Munch’s letters and journals, experts at the National Museum of Norway claim the words are in fact the artist’s own. Read more about the discovery here.
Star Trek: Balance of Terror
Star Trek’s episode ‘Balance of Terror‘ is consistently rated in the top 5 episodes by many reviewers. In the episode, the Enterprise engages in a cat-and-mouse battle with a Romulan ship after it investigates an unidentified assailant destroying Federation’s outposts at the Neutral Zone. We are introduced to the Romulans – a race that fought a bloody war with the federation and have been silent for almost 500 years. This rich episode not only introduces us to their cloaking device, new photon torpedo graphics (still called phasers because photons weren’t invented in the series yet), but also the ugly topic of xenophobia when we get our first view of them.
I always thought the episode was a strangely rich story for Star Trek; so it wasn’t a complete shock to find out the plot is heavily lifted from the 1959 movie “The Enemy Below”. That movie is about a US ship playing cat-and-mouse with a German sub. The parallels between the two are worth a write-up in itself, but you can give it a watch yourself as it’s on Youtube:
State of visual effects
If the 90’s and 2000’s belonged to the geek – the world now, and will, belong to the designer and creator.
Even 10 years ago, convincing visual effects were relegated to super expensive, high end development houses, programmers with Phd’s, and blockbuster movie budgets. Now, you can achieve things impossible 10 years ago – using a lot of creativity and free tools like Blender. Check out this somewhat frantic talk by Ian Hubert on the crazy and almost free ways he creates effects using free software that were impossible just a few years ago.
DirectX 12 learning videos
Traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova and that’d end your trip real quick, wouldn’t it?
Han Solo – Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Moving to Vulcan and DirectX 12 isn’t like going from DX9 to DX11, or Opengl 3.0 to OpenGL 4.0. These new API’s add quite a bit of work that used to be done by the graphics driver. This gives devs more control, but it also makes things a lot more tricky.
Microsoft has generated a good set of videos to teach some of the unique and tricky parts of DirectX12 to those with some graphics background. These videos help teach a number of tricky topics and usages that aren’t immediately apparent by reading the docs.
Conservative rasterization:
Presentation modes in Windows 10
This video has terrible audio quality, but it does a great job covering the various flip modes and delays that they introduce:
Resource Barriers:
This is one of the big concepts that trips you up and causes a lot of confusion.