Time Treasure

"Time Treasure: They have returned" is a location based augmented reality game that overlays game characters over objects in the real world. This awesome idea along with augmented reality applications like Layar and SixthSense, demonstrates the great potential of augmented reality applications.

Frozen Time and Speed of Thoughts

Here is a simple proof that thoughts are traveling at the speed of 2000 miles/hour or 3233 km/hour.

So, yesterday evening at about 11pm we've been wondering with Jorge about the making of Time-Freeze effect of Heroes, for which the Stargate Films actually won the 2009 Emmy Award for Outstanding Special Visual Effects for a Series:



At 1:53am, without me asking or communicating to him in any way our conversation with Jorge, my lil brother, who is in Kyiv, Ukraine, sends me this awesome reel about special effects done at Stargate Studios:



While watching this video, I obviously saw the first one among related videos :-)

Now the distance between College Station, TX and Kyiv, Ukraine is approximately 6000 miles or 9700 kilometers and it took around 3 hours for my thoughts to travel from me to my brother, which makes the speed of thoughts be around 2000 miles/hour or 3233 km/hour.

Q.E.D.

Panic Attack!

An Uruguayan producer who uploaded a short film to YouTube has been offered a £18.5m contract to make a Hollywood movie.



Fede Alvarez's short film, Ataque de Pánico, featured giant robots invading and destroying Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay.

It is 4 mins 48 seconds long and was made on a budget of less than £200 but has notched up more than 1.5m hits on YouTube in less than a month.

Alvarez said: "I uploaded Panic Attack! on a Thursday and on Monday my inbox was totally full of e-mails from Hollywood studios. It was amazing, we were all shocked."

"If some director from some country can achieve this just uploading a video to YouTube, it obviously means that anyone could do it," he added.

Source: Ananova: From YouTube to Hollywood
See also: Aparato Post and Murdoc Films

Youscope

An amazing idea of using an oscilloscope to display something that won:
- third place in assembly 2007 shortfilm compo
- most original entry at assembly 2007
- most original concept, breakthrough performance and best animation at scene.org



The oscilloscope is in X/Y-mode, with right channel connected to X and left to Y input. Z (brightness) input is not used. Most soundcards (and other players) seem to have a lowpass filter at about half of the samplerate, making some effects here look quite strange. The soundcard used in this video just didn't have proper filters so it happens to be suitable for these effects.

Try it on your oscilloscope: .flac | .wav

See also: Youscope author's web-page

Touchable Holography

Great research presented a couple of days ago at SIGGRAPH'2009. Two researchers from the University of Tokyo created a tactile device capable of producing stress fields in 3D space. Combined with 3D stereoscopic displays, this device provides high-fidelity tactile feedback for the interaction with 3D visual objects.



See also:

• Authors' description of the idea
• SIGGRAPH'09: Non-contact Method for Producing Tactile Sensation Using Airborne Ultrasound
• Компьюлента: Продемонстрирована осязаемая голограмма

Film Colorization

I've always thought of film colorization as a visual effect that would be too costly to do on movies besides proving the point it is possible. I changed my mind recently when I saw the two probably most famous soviet black-and-white movies colorized.

The first one is "Seventeen Moments of Spring" (by Tatyana Lioznova, 1973)



and the second one is "Only Old Men Are Going to Battle" (by Leonid Bykov, 1973)



This last one shows a bit of the original movie at the beginning to give you a feel of the effect.

See also:

• Wikipedia's article on Film colorization
  
• HowStuffWorks: How do they color old black-and-white movies?
  

Videoprojection

An amazing idea of turning boring buildings into live creatures came into minds of people form http://www.easyweb.fr/...



Yep, that's how buildings of the future are going to look like!

Durex: Get It On!

This is a pretty horny but absolutely funny viral ad created by Superfad for Durex :-)

NOTE: This is NOT OFFICE SAFE, so don't watch it at work, especially when you have loudspeakers ;-)



And to make it even funnier here are some scenes that were cut off by the censorship :-)

Outtake 1
Outtake 2
Outtake 3

See also: Superfad Finds New Durex Viral Project Stimulating

Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen

You've never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called "developing world" using extraordinary animation software developed by his Gapminder Foundation. The Trendalyzer software (recently acquired by Google) turns complex global trends into lively animations, making decades of data pop. Asian countries, as colorful bubbles, float across the grid -- toward better national health and wealth. Animated bell curves representing national income distribution squish and flatten. In Rosling's hands, global trends -- life expectancy, child mortality, poverty rates -- become clear, intuitive and even playful.


See also:

• Gapminder World
  
• Download Hans Rosling's talk in full SD resolution
  

  

Mission to Mars

Simply amasing visualisation of the mission to Mars...



P.S. And don't miss this cut scene that shows how it was in reality ;-)

Planets and Stars in Scale

A nice visualisation that demonstrates the relative sizes of planets and stars...

Imperial March by Darth Vader

One minute Imperial March conducted by Darth Vader...

Head Tracking

Using the infrared camera in the Wii remote and a head mounted sensor bar (two IR LEDs), you can accurately track the location of your head and render view dependent images on the screen. This effectively transforms your display into a portal to a virtual environment. The display properly reacts to head and body movement as if it were a real window creating a realistic illusion of depth and space. By Johnny Chung Lee, Carnegie Mellon University.



For more information and software visit http://johnnylee.net/

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

May joy and happiness snow on you,

May the bells jingle for wishes come true,

May the Santa be extra good to you,

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year to you!

Möbius transformation

Nice visualization that explains the math behind the Möbius transformation.

Flight patterns

An incredibly visual representation of the daily airtrafic in the US. A must see!



The Flight Patterns visualizations are the result of experiments leading to the project Celestial Mechanics by Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne. FAA data was parsed and plotted using the Processing programming environment. The frames were composited with Adobe After Effects and/or Maya.

Source: http://users.design.ucla.edu/~akoblin/work/faa/index.html

Everything You See Is Fake

See what they can do with video these days...

Futuristic RenderBee

Here is some video rendered by my Futuristic RenderBee^®, which was a set of homeworks we did for the Image Synthesis class.

High-precision cake throwing

Millimetres Matter - Watch a funny movie here

Rendering with Natural Light