Abandoned Films is back with another trippy, AI-generated movie trailer. This time, they took the 1997 sci-fi classic The Fifth Element and applied a 1950’s big-screen aesthetic.
While definitely not perfect, these AI generated trailers are amazing ways to generate and explore artistic concepts.
The house used to film Home Alone is up for sale – though it has been thoroughly modernized. I personally think the remodel was terrible, but you can make up your own mind. Only $5.25 million, and it appears to already be pending sale.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/671-Lincoln-Ave-Winnetka-IL-60093/3360197_zpid
James Sanborn created an art piece called Kryptos for the CIA headquarters. It contained a strange grid of metal letters. People have been trying to break his code ever since 1990 when he created it.
Fast forward, and a big chunk of the mystery has been solved by amateur (and professional) cryptographers. This video does a great job explaining how it was broken.
We’ve all seen the low-budget horror movie where a killer chases down their victim in their homes. Imagine if you could don some AR goggles and live that experience in your own home.
David Montecalvo has made a name for himself experimenting with mixed reality experiences. His YouTube videos explore a lot of his interesting ideas such as hoping on a real motorcycle and creating mixed reality teleportation:
He started with the Quest 3 and created experiences as Hauntify and FPS Enhanced Reality in which ghosts and soldiers appear in your home to hunt you. You run around your real-life house trying to escape them. It’s quite amazing and scary:
He recently moved onto the Vision Pro since the Quest 3 has limited augmented reality capabilities. The Vision Pro was better and now he has made an experience of creatures following you in the real world. It reminds me very much like the movie It Follows.
He’s experimented in large outdoor environments like a forest and apparently the Vision Pro does an amazing job automatically mapping the terrain and calculating occlusions and lighting. It’s pretty scary!
I’ll admit is has some really innovative, amazing, and terrifying. He recently gave an interview with Mixed about what he’s learned.
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Carnegie Mellon researchers have developed a real-time human tele-operation system. Using a simple camera, it is able to read the actions of a human person and then translate that into real-time full-body control of a robot.
Individuals can now seamlessly teleoperate full-sized humanoids to execute a myriad of actions. According to researchers, they can perform simple tasks like picking and placing objects to dynamic movements like walking, kicking, and even boxing.
Read the paper here: https://human2humanoid.com/resources/H2O_paper.pdf
There’s lots of possibilities for this kind of remotely operated humanoid robotic system. Remotely controlled humanoid robots could save countless lives operating in dangerous environments.
They could be used to go in and shut down equipment after dangerous chemical or industrial accidents. Search dangerous buildings for survivors after earthquakes. They could perform dangerous police or urban warfare operations without loss of life. Stop terrorist by defusing bombs. Another such place would be effecting repairs, shutdowns, and cleanup in highly radiated areas like Chernobyl, Fukushima, or when there are nuclear accidents. In the future, we may never need the horrors of Chernobyl’s biorobots to deal with such disasters.
Articles:
I wrote awhile back on how to crash Linux/cause a Linux kernel panic in order to test how your program can handle a crash – but can you cause a Windows blue-screen programmatically?
Raymond Chen of the New Old Thing describes a variety of methods to crash Windows purposefully. He also cautions against ad-hoc methods like killing winlogin.
Methods you can use to cause a Windows Blue-screen:
‘s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands has a canal art boat float called the Bosch Parade. Some pretty interesting, and bizarre, boats. Looks like they’ll be doing another float June 20-23 this year if you’re in the area.
Google researchers have published a new artificial intelligence model that can take a text prompt, sketch or idea and turn it into a virtual world you can interact with and play.
Named Genie, the virtual world model was trained on gameplay and other videos found online and is currently a research preview. The games are 2D platformer style games.
Genie can be prompted with images it has never seen before, such as real world photographs or sketches, enabling people to interact with their imagined virtual worlds-–essentially acting as a foundation world model. This is possible despite training without any action labels. Instead, Genie is trained from a large dataset of publicly available Internet videos. We focus on videos of 2D platformer games and robotics but our method is general and should work for any type of domain, and is scalable to ever larger Internet datasets.
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More eyes are nVidia’s GH200 Grace Superchip. The GH200 Superchip is the combination of a Grace CPU and a Hopper-based H200 GPU. While the results aren’t definitive, they should raise eyebrows.
In 39 individual Linux-based benchmark tests, Grace (the CPU side) beat the AMD Threadripper 7980X in 17 tests and the 7995WX in 15. It even stacks up well against Intel Sapphire Rapids.
Sapphire Rapids and Threadripper enjoy many advantages. Far more apps are optimized for x86 than for Arm. Threadripper has much more aggressive clock speeds than the efficiency-focused Grace chip and far more L3 cache (7980X has more than double, and the 7995WX more than triple).
But raw performance may not be the only consideration. There is speculation that Grace Hopper is more energy efficient – but there is no real data on TDP outside the whole package requirement of 500w. Also, for tasks that are more GPU bound than CPU bound, the combination may provide higher effective processing power than a faster CPU paired with a discrete GPU. Time will tell.
It shows that nVidia’s Grace entry is not to be ignored. Paired with the Hopper GPUs, it might offer a very viable alternative to x86 stacks – if your software can run on Arm.
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In Sierra Leone, there is a step in learning to drive – playing a board game. The game is called The Driver’s Way and is a “Roll and Move” type game where players to roll traffic-light-themed dice and move model cars around a board. The game aims to teach learners the rules of the road in a more entertaining way than standard textbooks.
Makes me wonder if there’s an opportunity for a board or teen-oriented video game like this for learners – even children to learn how to drive, walk, and bike in shared traffic spaces. Maybe it could be structured like the Oregon Trail or something quite fun.