The American Museum of Natural History used OpenSpace to create this new 360º version of The Known Universe. Start the journey from the Himalayas, out of the Milky Way, and into the darkness of space.
The immersive view lets you look around as you travel – just click the screen and turn the camera while you travel in 4K.
Nikolaj Juhlsen hits the downhill mountain bike trails in the Austrian forest in this GoPro awarded video.
Twitch now has a whole channel now dedicated to AI generated content. These are channels that have completely auto-generated content. They started with simple, and very rough shows about nothing, proceeded on to Spongebob, and finally an AI Jesus.
These are programs that autogenerate EVERYTHING you see and here. They generate the dialog they say, they generate the actors voices, they generate the actors, movements, visuals, and scenes. Everything is automatically generated by AI.
One of the more interesting and new ones I’ve seen is Interactive AI Generated Star Trek. Created by just 4 people, this is one of the highest quality AI generated episodic content I’ve seen so far. It runs 24/7. There’s a more or less consistent story based on user submissions, moving (but fixed location) camera angles, autogenerated characters with movement, auto-generated voice audio, and good scene transitions between some fixed scene locations. Not only that, it’s interactive and you can help direct the action via chat commands like:
Is this the future of TV shows? The end of actors?
There is also a Youtube channel from Ray Creations.
There’s a growing list of distressed commercial office buildings in Portland – some of the most iconic and largest ones. In the second half of 2023, this situation has finally come to a head. How bad is it? The numbers are almost twice as bad as they have ever been in 50 years, and some say Portland is facing at least a decade of downturn.
3 months ago, the Willamette Week made a list of 16 buildings that were at serious risk of foreclosure. Since then, the story has been playing out with dramatic forecloses and auctiones on a nearly weekly basis (Montgomery Park, Commonwealth Building, J.K. Gill Building, Field Office, etc). Sometimes they are bought back by the very firms that are defaulting, for a fraction of their original price because nobody else is interested in bidding. They’re also walking away from multi-million dollar re-payments to construction companies that remodeled them.
Nearly a third of Portland’s downtown office space now stands empty – and it’s a situation that’s growing worse in 2023. Many of these buildings, bought at top dollar during the time when Portland was one of the fastest growing cities in the country, now have too much debt and not enough income from rent to cover it. Owners aren’t just selling, they’re decided the situation isn’t going to get better and are now actively defaulting and walking away – just like homeowners did in the 2008 financial crisis.
The commercial vacancy rate in Portland currently sits at 31.5%. Hard-hit San Francisco is 31.9%, Seattle 27.9%, Los Angeles 30.9%, Salt Lake City 19.9% and Denver 23.4%. Even during the great recession of 2008-2009, the commercial vacancy rate never broke 15% in Portland.
But things will get better right? “The Portland office market continues to face a bleak outlook at the midway point of 2023,” say analysts at Colliers – a Toronto-based firm that tracks global real estate. “Over the next two quarters, more than 500,000 square feet of leased space [in Portland] is set to expire market wide. Should these tenants maintain office space following the expiration of their leases, they will likely look to downsize their real estate footprints.” This means that as the leases expire, it’s highly probable the vacancy rate will go up even more – maybe to the highest levels in the country. This means even more foreclosures.
Meanwhile, a few miles away over the West Hills, just outside the Portland border in Beaverton and Hillsboro, companies are doing multi-billion dollar expansions. Companies such as Analog Devices and Intel. Beaverton is becoming the new foodie mecca. Why is Portland doing so bad just a few miles away?
Bob Ames, former president of First Interstate Bank of Oregon and a longtime investor in commercial property says this is the worst situation he’s seen in 50 years. He says Portland is still suffering as plywood covered windows from the 2020 riots and subsequent crime are still quite prevalent on 2023 downtown storefronts. Homeless camps have continued to grow. On some downtown blocks, you’re ‘just as likely to see someone smoking fentanyl as sipping a Frappuccino’.
Steadily increasing and expanding business taxes and regulation far beyond neighboring metro areas has also been discouraging businesses from Portland. Besides stifling new businesses, successful businesses are increasingly moving out too.
His assessment? “The problem with downtown Portland is that you don’t want to be in downtown Portland. We’ve driven a lot of capital out of here, and a lot of tenants. You’re not going to book another major employer into this city for a decade.”
Some locals are already drawing parallels to the same economic decline (Oregon has had a 2.2% drop in median income in 2022), population loss (Oregon AND Portland’s net populations have decreased for second year in a row), and urban decay (already called a humanitarian crisis in Portland) that caused the Rust Belt.
One thing is clear, the collapse has begun. Things in Portland are likely to get worse before they get better. Serious and long-term damage has been done by leadership and Portland is almost certainly looking at a continued decline for a good while before things have a chance of turning around. That’s if Portland can recover from the destruction of it’s business tax base – at the same time they are also experiencing a disturbing income tax reduction due to a growing multi-year population decline.
Camillemormal creates some incredible web design effects. Some of which are incredibly cool; but also incredibly straightforward. It’s a great example of how art and engineering work together in really interesting ways – and those that can do both cleanly and simply are able to come up with mind-blowing stuff.
Not unlike the coding artistry of early video game programmers that squeeze crazy effects out of woefully inadequate hardware.
Here’s another example:
I wrote about the e-ink based color changing features on some BMW concept cars a while back. This video has a little more overview of the different features in the BMW Dee concept car – such as augmented reality directions and driving experiences.
Here’s the official videos:
And a kind of ridiculous one with Arnold Schwarzenegger and David Hasselhoff (though the Germans do love the Hoff after he did a little singing gig in 1989 that made him popular in Germany)
The Sphere in Los Vegas has captured the world’s attention. Inspired by it, DrZzs & GrZzs made a replica in their backyard. Their 8-foot diameter mini-sphere has 20,028 RGB LED pixels and is driven by a Kulp 32 controller and xLights software.
world_of_engineering_75 shares this experience of 5D theatre. It has real fire effects that make you feel like the theater’s on fire. There’s very little information about where this highly dangerous attraction is located – but it is supposedly somewhere in China.
While somewhat cool – it’s realistic enough to be terrifying as fire often flashes over like this right before almost certain death for anyone in the room.
Fascinating Horror is a YouTube channel that tells the true stories behind real life disasters. It’s not a channel for the faint of heart as he covers some of history’s greatest disasters that often resulted in tremendous, and often terrifying, loss of life. If you ever wanted to know why OSHA exists, concert and sporting arena designs and safety crews are present, fire regulations, occupancy limits, building codes, and other government controls are in place at any place where people gather – this channel will show you why they say “Safety regulations are written in blood”
Alex Le Guillou made a clip for the documentary film “THE GIANTS, the story of Bob Brown and the forest. The project started in 2021 when he had the chance to illustrate the trees of Tasmania using Lidar data captured from the ground and by drone.
MakeMKV offers regular beta keys that usually last about a month if you want to try out the latest builds. You can find the updated beta keys here; or using this script.