Filmmaker and avid cyclist Quek Shio wowed the internet in 2023 when he shared his bike-building process in a smoothly edited video. Now he’s back with a new bicycle and a new video. Watch him conjure, duplicate, and put together parts out of thin air.
Finally – a phone case that is really interesting!
See other interesting creations on the KARAKURI (Japanese mechanical art) YouTube channel.
Voxon has been showing off it’s Voxon VX2 VLED technology to create interactive volumetric holograms. It costs $6,800 so it’s definitely not cheap.
It’s likely using a high rpm spinning panel to generate the image which means that dampening the sound of the spinning array, keeping the display carefully synced to avoid pixel drift, and are some of the primary engineering concerns. They do provide a Unity and Blender SDK which is interesting.
Here’s a version of Doom playing on the volumetric display
Reminds me of the fellow that re-created the projector from Riven using a similar method.
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Collada was an interchange file format for 3D application that started around 2004 and largely died around 2016. I actually worked in a group with Remi Arnaud when it was being used for a project at Intel.
It was a sound idea. With lots of 3d packages and engines out there, getting files from one tool or engine to another was never easy. Since every authoring tool and game uses different structures for storing mesh, material, animation data, etc – the Collada format tried to define a open-standard format to store these relationships in an XML style text file. This allowed maximum flexibility to define relationships; but had the unfortunate side effect of generating sometimes gigantic files that were extremely slow to load.
While it was an extremely flexible format for exchanging data between packages or game engines, once you got there, it was dramatically faster to use a native binary format. Trying to load or save a XML based file format to load a block of content often took 10-100x longer than a binary version. The speed alone meant that it wasn’t practical for any realtime purposes.
Additionally, supporting the entire Collada spec would mean supporting every kind of data relationship – even if the tool or game didn’t need it. It meant that loaders often only implemented the desired features – which meant that you were almost back to where you started from. Custom loaders and savers with limited features. Except Collada files were gigantic and slow to load/save. A real problem when your primary costs are the speed of your content development.
Collada’s practical use was therefore primarily in one or two time transfers between tools. As time went on, and tools and engines consolidated on a few efficient binary formats, formats such as Collada became less and less useful. By the early 2010’s, development and work on it largely died. The last loaders were apparently updated in 2018 and the github site that hosts the binary versions is kind of broken.
At any rate, if you do need to load an old Collada file (.dae, etc) then you’ll need a copy of 3D Studio Max or Maya, and a plugin loader. You can download one of the last collada loaders here.
Install the plugin (make sure Maya is closed) and then start your tool (Maya in my case).
Ensure the Collada plugin is loaded. Go to the Windows-> Settings/Preferences -> Plug-in Manager in Maya and ensure the fbxmaya, FBX, or ColladaMaya pluings are loaded and/or set to auto load:
When you want to import a Collada file, go to File->Import and select the fbx/collada file you want to load and it should load it up.
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Techmoan shows off some more oscilloscope music/art – and the problems he encountered while getting it working. This video is interesting because he shows how he debugged some issues he had.
More info at https://oscilloscopemusic.com
If you don’t happen to have hundreds of dollars in an oscilloscope and time to debug, you can watch the whole, clean version of N-SPHERES video here:
An interesting clock that displays time with light on your walls. Kickstarter here
The glowing brown paper bags that adorn Southwestern walkways, churches, and homes during the Christmas holiday season are called luminarias. They’re also sometimes called farolitos, or “little lanterns,” and date back more than 300 years. The New Mexican tradition began when Spanish villages along the Rio Grande displayed the unique and easy-to-make lanterns to welcome the Christ child into the world.
I loved seeing these when I lived in Albuquerque. They’re largely only found in the dry winters of the southwest as they would be buried in East coast snows, blow 100 miles away in Midwest winter winds and snow, or would be rained into a soggy mess in the Pacific Northwest.
Visit Albuquerque has a little write-up on them that’s pretty cool on how to make them yourself.
David Plummer re-created the classic game Breakout using Grok 3 AI. It generated a Javascript program that can be played in a browser. He even shared the prompts and code on github.
Another score for AI heavily augmenting the need for programmers.
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Twitch streamers are really getting creative. Besides completely AI generated content, others have been experimenting with viewer participation in unique ways.
Shindigs is one of the streamers really experimenting with new ideas. He’s streamed as a gun with eyes, a “biblically accurate angel McRib vtuber”, and a Costco hotdog. He also mixes real and animated footage. In one stream, Shindigs went “back in time” every time he died in Lies of P, eventually turning the broadcast into a radio play. He recently let characters play Christmas songs with chat and created music experiments live.
While playing Helldivers, he recently allowed his viewers the ability to use chat to type things in and they pop up in the stream like a helmet cam. The viewers quickly started riffing on numerous themes while he played.
He created this effect using SAMMI, a stream tool that connects Twitch chat and Channel Point redemptions to Open Broadcast Software. With it, he created his Twitch plugin called ‘Bug Twitter’ that allowed this functionality. He also created a plugin called ‘strategems’ that uses OBS’s Advanced Mask. Viewers can use Twitch channel points to activate effects like distorting the screen to make it more difficult or ‘Australia mode’ that flips the screen upside down.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2071145144
Check out his X stream here, or watch more of his videos on his Twitch channel.
He’s not the only one being creative. CardboardCowboy built a cartoon RPG world where the NPCs are played by Twitch chat with TTS (Text To Speech) complete with proximity-based audio that fades off as he moves away.
Young streamers on Twitch seem to be exploring a lot of extremely creative ideas with a more publicly interactive form of streaming. There’s likely an interesting balance between interacting with the viewers and yet maintaining some sense of cohesive sanity and avoiding trolls seeking to ruin the experience – but what they are doing and trying are wildly creative. Give it a look
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