Quantum Solar System (QSS) features miniature replica planets that float and orbit around the Sun using magnetic levitation technology.
Some of the neat features:
The positions of the planets are in real time, synchronized with NASA.
You can position the planets at any date: Past, Present or Future. For example, you could observe the position of the planets at any historical date in the past or in any astronomical event of the future.
You can observe the evolution of the orbits in a shortened time. Ex: you can convert 6 days into 1 second to speed up the movement of the planets.
If you want to relax watching the movement of the planets, you can move all the planets at the same time and at the same speed, in this way all the planets move maintaining their position relative to each other, it is as if the platform rotated on itself.
The Sun is a lamp. Sunlight will illuminate the planets.
Import any location in the world into Unreal Engine
Bring anyplace in the world into your game in about 5 minutes – including the 3D buildings. Using the Cesium plugin, you can bring Google Maps data into Unreal Engine in just a few minutes.
This guy is a little over-energetic, but it’s pretty clear instructions on how to do it as well as improve the look and feel of the import.
It works by rotating two tablet/phone inside a cylinder that has slits cut in it so you only see the faces of the tablet directly facing you. He has a great writeup on how he created the device, filed a patent for it, and as has a video:
I like his thinking: we already have enough computers – what we need is more personality. Where are the kind of robots we saw as kids? C3PO, R2D2, the robot from Lost in Space. So, he hacked an Alexa into an old TV with a set of eyes and gives his robot a little of the personality he was looking for.
Basically Homeless decided he wanted to make an invisible PC. What? He tried using a variety of different off-the-shelf technology so that he has just a empty desk with a piece of nano-particle film that has the desktop projected on by a digital projector.
Parts list:
Invisible gaming mouse that uses a depth sensing Intel RealSense 435i to translate my hand and finger movements into cursor actions in windows.
The keyboard is flush mounted with the desk surface and has a plastic mold that perfectly fills the space between the keys, and then is painted.
The monitor uses a nano particle film suspended from the ceiling with a projector pointed at it to appear as though it’s a floating hologram.
Dream Textures add-on for Blender by Carson Katri uses stable diffusion to generate textures for a scene. Below is an example based on the prompt “sci-fi abandoned buildings”. The AI-generated results aren’t always perfect, but the process is pretty amazing. Not to mention amazingly fast compared to creating from scratch.
Choose Your Own Adventure books – a staple of every 80’s kid’s collection. I loved these books and they definitely got me reading more – but even as a kid I could tell they weren’t the best written things. Seemingly intelligent choices would get you killed while running off against your parents wishes on the family boat across a lake during a thunderstorm would lead to high adventure.
One thing I did love, however, was the amazing illustrations in some of the books. Paul Granger’s illustrations were some of my favorites. Space And Beyond was definitely one of those books where the writing was pretty sub-par, but the pictures were fascinating to me as a kid. I remember trying to copy the ships and make my own – to reasonably good effect on the side of my notebooks and test papers.
Over time as I was exposed to more sci-fi art; and started seeing some similarities between Space and Beyond and other work. I wonder if Paul Granger got some of his inspiration from John Berkey. John Berkey was a fabulous sci-fi artist that created many futuristic works in the 70’s – including one of the most iconic Star Wars posters of the era.
As a movie lover, I’ve been unhappy with lots of modern movies. I’ve had a hard time putting my finger on it. But one of the things I’ve noticed since going back to watch some of my older favorites is how ‘clean’ and clear the action is. We can talk about the horrors of shakycam and increasingly schizophrenic cut lengths, but the poor quality of modern blocking and staging appears to be one of the major reasons things are less clear.
When you go back and look at Spielberg’s handling of framing, you start realizing why a lot of modern framing and blocking creates more confusion rather than helping be part of the exposition itself. CinemaStix does a great job showing how expertly Spielberg accomplishes this – and why he’s probably the greatest master of these techniques. He even mentions the Steven Soderbergh re-work of Raiders of the Lost Ark with different music/etc.
M.C. Escher was famous for his wonderful mind-bending images. I loved his drawings as a kid because it created a sense of wonder, playfulness, and unlocked interesting new viewpoints and possibilities simply by violating a single physical or geometric expectation.
We’re used to the world following rules. If we leave a room, we would expect to go back into that same room if we opened the door. But in rendered scenes, none of those rules needs to be followed. We can actually make M.C. Escher like worlds a reality. But how – and more importantly – how could we use them to make an interesting gaming experience?
CodeParade walks us through many interesting effects that can be created using some simple non-Euclidian rendering and movement techniques.
Other games quickly followed like Manifold Garden that added the concept of infinite world wrap-around. Hyperbolica uses hyperbolic projection mapping. Then there were forced perspective games like Superliminal. As we quickly see, there is more than one rule to break in Euclidian space.
More recently and to greater effect – non-Euclidean tricks are being used in horror games. The experience of the world shifting around you definitely can create a very unsettling emotional response. Paintings that become doorways, rooms that change when you look away. Whole games have become based on these simple effects. Non-Euclidean techniques are here to stay. The real question is, how will we think of using them next?
Learning more:
Issues Valve ran into when making the game Portal:
How to create portals and solving the most common perspective, distance, scaling, collision detection, and physics issues you’ll encounter:
