Archive for the ‘Wow!’ Category
Amazing Gear Heart
Comments (1)Wow, this is simply an incredible motion sculpture. Initially it looks like it’s simply a heart composed of carved gears of various proportions coming together to form a shape – but when the motion starts magic happens, as gears of various ratios engage each other in a most harmonious way.
If you look closely enough you’d also notice that on each gear the spacing between the teeth are also varying to accommodate for the variation due to turning. It must have taken gazillion tries (or, genius mathematical calculation) before the gears can be totally in sync – and even reform back to the heart shape after a few cycles.
Magnificent!
Touchscreen moves out of the Screen
While the world’s ooh-ing and ah-ing with Microsoft Surface some time ago for its engaging and intuitve interaction, researchers within the campus are moving on to yet another interesting interface – touch control but out of the screen.
Called SideSight, the interface allows you to control a phone placed on a table by wiggling your fingers in the space around it. This helps to solve the problem that a touch screen is limited by the need for fingers to touch it – thereby limiting how small the screen can go.
Personally I see application of this more outside of the phone though – how often do you place a phone down on the table? But think about things like ultramobile laptops and stuff – a virtual trackpad if you wil – and things start getting more interesting.
[via New Scientist]
3D Sketching
This, I think is one of the holy grails of 3D-design, be it product, character or others. ILoveSketch is an absolutely awesome program that straddles the sweet spot between sketching and 3D-modeling – sketching in 3D plane and turning those sketches into curves on 3D space on-the-fly, giving the quickness and agility of sketches, while also delivering multi-view perspectived capabilities in 3D models.
Of course, nothing will replace a pair of good hands. No matter what software it is, if you can’t throw a line the way you want it, or even conjure aesthetically pleasing designs in your mind before sketching (proportion, form, weight, curves, etc.), software alone isn’t going to help. What it does though is to increase the sweet spot, and to reduce the turnaround time between a sketch-idea and a 3D-representation.
Now I’m just waiting for it to have a ‘paint’ function where you can render the views, and have it turn out 3D surfaces based on the shading (now I’m thinking too much). That’d be the holy grail.
Am I asking too much?
Singapore Formula 1 Photos
The Formula 1 Grand Prix in Singapore last Sunday was the first of the republic – it was also the first time it takes place at night. I’ve always been partial to street circuits as I feel they give a raw and yet romantic sense of speed – perhaps something that is easier to relate to for the average fan.
Anyway, it was a magnificient night with the flood lights gracing the track with the Singapore downtown skyline as a backdrop. Most Singaporeans probably haven’t watched a single F1 race in their lives (“too boring!”) – but last weekend droves turned up to check it out and I’m sure many have found new appreciation in the sport. I was down near the track too as the cars zipped around on practice days – and certainly for me it felt quite a bit different from what I’ve seen: the noise, the smell and the sense of proximity (that the cars aren’t just doing overhyped roundabouts in some circuits far away) gave me a different perception of the sports.
As seen from the examples above, Boston.com seems to be getting into a habit of amassing great events-reportage pictures (see their Olympics coverage too).
[Full set of Singapore F1 Grand Prix pictures from Boston.com]
F1 in Singapore Simulation
Singapore will be hosting the first ever night-race in the Formula One in a few weeks time, and AixSponza has an excellent animated reel showing the road-track that will bring F1 drivers around iconic architectures in downtown Singapore. I’ve always thought that street tracks are a lot more romantic than purpose-built racing tracks – typical track racing gives me a much more sterile impression, while street races feel a lot more immersive (and I comment from my very qualified experience founded upon years of video arcade & racing simulation games).
The pictures above are just some stills from the reel, showing its quality quite impressively. No further ado:
[via Hannisms]
Instant Mona Lisa
Well the Mythbusters point was to illustrate the difference between CPU and GPU processing (graphics hardware terminology) and how GPU being parallel-processing would be much faster. But that doesn’t really matter, because all you need to see in this video is how they INSTANTLY painted with a massive array of paintball barrels all lined up and programmed to shoot a colored ball at specific locations.
Jump to 1:30 if you’re impatient:
Beijing Olympics
Spotted these cool earmuffs worn during the Beijing Olympics shooting event – pretty cute huh?
Some other great moments:
Over 200 more high-quality photos of the Beijing Olympics like these right here.
Photorealistic Animation
I think we are on the verge of surpassing the what animators term as the ‘uncanny valley’:
For many years now, animators have come up against a barrier known as “uncanny valley”, which refers to how, as a computer-generated face approaches human likeness, it begins take on a corpse-like appearance similar to that in some horror films.
As a result, computer game animators have purposely simplified their creations so that the players realise immediately that the figures are not real.
The animation above is being done by Image Metrics (who are behind popular computer/video game Grand Theft Auto). We’re still not able to do this on-the-fly. Massive amounts of computations are required to calculate and control every little movement – every little twitch of the eye, the sneer, the muscles that contracts under the skin, etc.
But with chip technologies and architecture developing, it’s certainly not a pipe-dream to envision some day in the very near future where this becomes common place. What does it mean for us in the real world when we cannot distinguish the real from the fake? At a massive, ubiquitous level?
Really amazing animation – check out Times Online for a more comprehensive article.
Shadow Signage
The sign is discreet – not too common for a marque bearing the name of a tourist-attracting business like a hotel. But that’s how this hotel in Florence, Italy roll. A faint spotlight at the top of the wall casts light upon what we usually see as an awkward ensemble of wires and voila – the name of the hotel is spelled out in the shadows on the stucco facade.
Subtle art!
[via hyperexperience]
Jenga on Buildings
Wow, that’s way cool – demolishing a building from the lowest level first:
How do they do it? First they replace the support pillars at ground level with computer-controlled metal columns. Then, a crew carefully demolishes the entire floor by hand, leaving the structure resting on the mechanical pillars, which then go down slowly until the next floor is at ground level. They replace the support pillars again with the mechanical ones, destroy that floor, and repeat the operation until they get rid of all the floors. This makes it look as if the building is shrinking in front of you, or being swallowed by the street.
According to the company, this method greatly reduces the environmental impact of the demolition, as well as the time. Kajima says that it speeds up the task by 20%, while making it easier to separate materials for recycling, as well as reducing the amount of products released into the air.
I suppose a method like this would also work very well in a congested urbanscape like Tokyo. The marvels of engineering!
[via Gizmodo]
