Ever want to know how those really amazing concert productions are made? Or how the do all the lighting and special effects on TV shows like Dancing with the Stars, Britain’s Got Talent, and other major shows?
ER Productions have done a lot of award winning shows lately. Check the videos out, or check out the amazing bag of technical tricks they have available to anyone with the right amount of money.
Well, this is different. Instead of just deleting your file, why not bury it in a digital graveyard – marked with its own digital tombstone.
Ulf Schleth’s /death/null offers us – a digital graveyard where our files no longer exist as they were, but are marked with a digital gravestone.
Simply upload your file and it is marked by a 4 x 5 matrix of colored blocks that represents the file. It is registered forever in the graveyard where you can check up on it any time you like.
And now my file has it’s own (very plain) ‘tombstone’.
Ocean’s 11 is an amazing movie – one of my favorites. It has a fantastic style and creates a unique feel and atmosphere. Besides the fun, unique, energetic soundtrack by David Holmes, it has a really slick visual style that really accentuates the characters. CinemaStix shows how Steven Soderbergh uses a series of seemingly simple shot and cut decisions to enhance the actors’ unique energy to create the rhythm of the movie.
It’s surprising how much of a movie’s feel comes from simple choices in how it is cut (or not cut) . I can appreciate it because I know that a ton of the feel of my landscape photos comes during the post and editing phase.
Quantum Solar System (QSS) features miniature replica planets that float and orbit around the Sun using magnetic levitation technology.
Some of the neat features:
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.
BMW demoed a black and white e-ink paneled body at CES in 2022.
In 2023, they upped the game by creating a colored e-ink version:
Riumplus was inspired by the imagers in the game Riven (the sequel to Myst) to create his own working andotrope for Mysterium 2023.
Here’s the imager from the game:
And here’s his version:
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:
There’s a lot of small details, so it’s worth the watch.
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.
