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Category: Ideas

LED floor

LED floor

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People have done a lot with projection mapping onto floors, but what if you made a giant LED display as your floor? BMW paired with ASB GlassFloor to create a full-LED video sports floor. It was installed in Munich at BMW Park at the home venue of FC Bayern Basketball.

This does offer advantages over pure projection mapping since there are no issues with occlusion shadows (though that’s a problem largely solved already by using multiple projectors in multiple locations).

Personally, it seems terribly distracting if you’re trying to actually play on it or watch live play – but seems to have has possibilities for live entertainment/concert events or possibly new kinds of games. One could imagine games in which the floor changes configuration/boundaries. Color could be used to mark out 2 and 3 point regions. Perhaps colors could indicate different bonus scoring is in effect, or to pulse to count down the last 10 seconds of gameplay, or perhaps indicate a penalty is in effect (though this would be best only indicated as changes to the perimeter colors).

Quantum Computer hooked to AI

Quantum Computer hooked to AI

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“The results reported here constitute, to our knowledge, the first demonstration of end-to-end quantum enhancement of a production-scale, widely-deployed LLM on real superconducting quantum hardware for autoregressive language generation,” the scientists wrote in the study. “Their significance lies not in the magnitude of the perplexity improvements — which will grow with hardware fidelity and qubit count — but in the fact that they exist at all.”

IBM researchers have demonstrated a new way of using a quantum computer to fine-tune a pretrained large language models (LLM) and have achieved measurable improvements in the model’s ability to forecast text.

It did this by a quantum-assisted optimization technique that reduced the model’s “perplexity” (the metric for how well an AI predicts the next word). The model became more accurate at answering questions — including some it previously got wrong.

This is an amazing development not only for the possibility of quantum-enhanced LLM’s – but is probably the first real demonstration of quantum computing demonstrating a clear advantage of classical computing. Quantum computing has struggled to demonstrate its advantages in real-world applications. This appears to be the first real-world application that showed clear improvements.

It makes me wonder if this works so well because LLMs and AI rely on the fuzzy statistical domains that quantum computing’s big issue of stability matches well with. Perhaps it could even flip things on it’s head. Perhaps an specially trained AI system might turn out to be the perfect API (if you will) for determining outcomes from fuzzy quantum computations.

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Impossible Architecture in The Shining

Impossible Architecture in The Shining

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A Quiet Side points out the set and hotel layout was intentionally impossible in some places. The hotel was a combination of 3 different real hotels. He suggests that was to make the hotel seem like a maze you couldn’t escape.

Even more interesting is he’s created probably the most architecturally accurate fully navigable 3D model of the Overlook Hotel in Enscape (download here). In doing so, he really shows off the impossible architectures the hotel has.

More than just confusion or giving the sense of a maze, I almost took it as a dream. I have occasionally had dreams in which you walk through a door from one place to a completely other place, or impossible switches from one place to another.

Kubrick does a good job of keeping this subtle enough that most people don’t notice these details even on re-watching.
But what if it were just a little bit more overt. What if you made a movie about being trapped in a hotel/place in which the past and future blend much more seamlessly forward and backwards in time, as well geometry that was arranged by locations where some horror or another happened more than just a logical layout. Where it’s much more dream-like and areas are connected by associations instead of physical layout? You would have to keep it very subtle to avoid it becoming the movie Inception or overdoing it; but it is and interesting idea to explore…

Moving wall art

Moving wall art

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Pikazo creates 3D art that appears to move. It made me wonder if we could do with lcd displays and subtly moving imagery or head tracking to change the POV/reflections. Of course, if more than one person is watching, one must stay sticky on the same person when head tracking but POV effects might still look odd.

90’s computing nightmares – as a game

90’s computing nightmares – as a game

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Do you miss computing from the 90’s? Innocuous little programs that turn out to install hordes of malware?

Odd Games has released a nifty little game called Malware that lets you relive those glory days with rogue software and malicious installers – can you spot them all and keep your computer clean? (Review)

It does raise the interesting question: would it be worth making a modern version of this as an educational aid for people and kids learning to use computers. It could teach them about common scams, malware, bitcoin theft, and many other interesting topics. Could it be as interesting as the Oregon Trail?

Photorealism for a Photography Simulator

Photorealism for a Photography Simulator

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Don’t like hiking but want to get lots of instagram-ready shot to impress everyone? Want to try practicing your photography skills without hours of walking or waiting for lighting conditions?

Matt Newell used Unreal Engine 5 to create a photography-themed game in which you walk trails and then take photos – getting to experiment with all the different camera settings. It’s turned into a sleeper hit – all from a guy that said during an interview for the Unreal Engine blog, he admits he learned Unreal Engine from scratch by using resources from the UE website and engaging with the development community. To create his effects, he utilized UE5 distance fields, contact shadows, and virtual textures. He also utilized free Quixel’s megascans.

You can read how he used each of the techniques in his interview on the UE blog.

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Goodyear’s Glowing Tires

Goodyear’s Glowing Tires

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In the 1950’s, Goodyear was playing around with Neothane as a replacement for polyurethane used in tires. What’s wild is that neothane is transparent. This allowed customers to put tiny colored lights in them and you had tires that matched the color of your car. You could even use them as turn signals or brake lights.

Unfortunately Neothane was more expensive than polyurethane, didn’t last as long, and performed poorly on wet surfaces and under heavy braking.

It was demonstrated on a custom built Golden Sahara II car.

Honestly, I don’t see why these absolutely couldn’t make a comeback for blinged out cars today. Line them with LED’s and you’d have quite the head turner.

Ray cast audio

Ray cast audio

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Audio in games has always been a bit of a cheat. In the earliest days of games, a simple pre-recorded sound was replayed when a gun was shot or step taken. Bit rates went up and the quality increased. Audio could be played in stereo to help isolate location of the sound. Games then added full 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound and binaural sound. They now even take into account the material of object collisions such as metal on concrete vs metal on carpet – but it’s not fully dynamic.

Moving forward, what if we could fully simulate sound in a dynamic virtual location? We could take into account how sound reacts with different materials, walls, and shapes in the environment automatically. The idea is not new – but the compute required was far too high for realtime games.

Vercidium has tried to re-create the idea using modern hardware. What is unique is the idea of using this system for visually impaired people. This isn’t an idea that is limited to virtual worlds, but what if alarms in real life had such visual projection (lasers, lights, etc). Interesting.

There’s also some interesting comments in the video discussion that can lead you down different implementations and ideas.

Experience history in real time

Experience history in real time

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We often forget that major historical events were not instantanous with neat summaries and conclusions. They were messy and evolved. It took time to absorb what happened and make sense of it – especially tragedies.

Enter a quiet trend of re-living things in real-time. Some examples I’ve run across were NASA’s realtime Apollo lunar landing missions. Another, even more somber, would be the sinking of the Titanic. I think it’s important to realize that the sinking happened at 2am when people were asleep and were caught off guard. It only took 2 hours and 40 minutes from being fine to the deaths of the majority of the passengers. Experiencing it in realtime was surprising to me. It’s amazing how just about nothing seems really bad until the very end – something that financial markets often mimic. The signs of trouble are there for a long time before a very quick, shockingly violent end.