Fogtown goes video game
Fogtown is a modern TV/movie puppet show – that may soon be made into a video game. I do love a good stop-motion/puppet themed game…
Amazing Trek and other movie replicas
Factory Entertainment seems to have a great selection of very high quality movie and show replicas – especially in their Star Trek section.
They even have an 11-foot long oversized cutaway print of the original series Enterprise By Matthew Cushman. Cushman took over 4 years to make the print and even appeared with Adam Savage to talk about it.
Widest street legal car
It almost looks like some kind of rendering glitch – but it’s real! Joins the flattest, shortest, and narrowest cars for cool factor.
Drift
Studio DRIFT has made some really cool installations and interactive sculptures that combine things in the natural world with technology. I enjoyed the idea of their Murmuring Minds installation which consists of a bunch of small rectangular boxes that flock around a person walking through them (I think it would be even cooler if they were perfect cubes – and perhaps were more active. Like if they were trying to herd YOU to a corner, or if they worked like a random person in a grid of o.
AI Arnold
What if Arnold Schwarzenegger was in Napoleon Dynamite? Now you can know – and see how far AI replacement has gone.
Audi ZERØ
First the Delorean’s stainless steel body. Then the boxy silver cybertruck. Now the shiny Audi ZERØ concept car. I’m not sure it’s tag line of “one sphere and four tubes” is very flattering.
70’s era kids movie viewer
We had one of these. Here’s Walt Disney’s Lonesome Ghosts on the Fisher-Price Movie Viewer
AI decodes ancient scroll without opening it
The PHerc. 1667 scroll surfaced in a villa containing other scorched scrolls in the city of Herculaneum. Herculaneum was also destroyed along with Pompeii after the Mt Vesuvius eruption. The 1800 year old scrolls were too fragile to be unfurled after three damaging attempts made between the 1800s and 1980s.
New X-ray microtomography was conducted in France and the UK and led to the first winners of the Vesuvius Challenge to read it. In October 2023, a 21-year-old student won $40,000 for decoding the scrolls’ first word. Months later, three more won the Vesuvius Challenge’s $700,000 grand prize by reading several passages from a single scroll. Efforts continue. Just last February, new words emerged.
Ori Umbrella – that never existed?
Ori had this interesting idea for an umbrella that folds up like the Miura fold in origami to fit inside a tiny wand. As someone that tried this style of folding pattern (Miura fold), I personally wondered what material they could be using to consistently get a conical version of this to work. The folding pattern is pretty amazing, but is a little fiddly and prone to crumpling if you don’t apply the collapsing force equally at the edges.
I dug deeper and there was never any video or even picture of the real product – only CG rendered versions. The store page also now appears to be down.
I guess they couldn’t figure out how to do it either.
Wild on-stage ship scene
Puy du Fou is an “insane historical theme park with no rides”. They re-create lots of historical spectacles for visitors to enjoy. And they aren’t joking. Chariot races in a Roman circus, viking adventures in real boats, and plays.
This clip is from “Le Dernier Panache”(“The Last Stand”), a spectacular show featuring groundbreaking stage technology. It was created in 2016 at Puy du Fou located outside Nantes France. This play follows the destiny of a French naval officer, a hero of the American Revolutionary War, whose life takes a dramatic turn in 1793 in a final battle for freedom.