Even if you’re not really into Formula 1 racing, the video is yet another nice, slick and well-explained production, going through some of the changes to the race format in order to reduce costs for teams involved and to make the race more interesting.
Perhaps this is how music playlists should’ve been all along – visual and much more spontaneous and interactive in how you’d listen to and choose songs, created by MIT lab’s Anita Lillie (as part of her master thesis):
My Master’s thesis is focused on the problem of finding music you like, both inside your own collection (to match a particular mood, for example), or outside of your own collection. I don’t like the hugely text-dependent ways of searching for music in traditional media players like iTunes and Windows Media Player. My thesis work will depart from that interface, and will present your music collection in a space, organized by similarity. I will be calculating similarity both from audio features (straight from the audio signal) and textual descriptions (gathered from tags on the web).
It’s also great that she’s decided to share it out openly and early – hopefully this’d turn into a mature (free and open?) software soon too – I’d certainly dig this over iTunes and Windows Media Player.
This guy’s old, but he’s accurate with his slingshot. Really accurate. After losing quite a few trees and plants to Japanese Beetles, I especially enjoyed his aim on those.
Thought this was pretty funny – I’m always partial to these ‘feel-good-motivation’ movies. The speeches and the background music usually raises goosebumps on my skin. But put together, they’ve concocted a rather different (more amusing) tone to it…
The trailer for the film “Objectified” (a documentary about industrial design by Gary Hustwit, the same guy who directed “Helvetica“) is certainly making the rounds around design blogs today – so here you go in case you haven’t seen it yet:
There is quite a bit of user involvement before he/she can ‘get’ the ad – but the concept is an interesting one. The steps are as follows:
[via designboom]
Awesome piece of clay stop-motion video depicting a chess battle…
A big warehouse.
A whole bunch of power cables.
A whole bunch of microwave ovens.
To make the most intimate and interesting Xmas greetings video I’ve seen (so far). Doesn’t quite correlate? See it here:
[by AKQA]
Vincent Chai, a Malaysian(?) animator did the above trailer as his degree project at University of Hertfordshire. Wow, is this the level of work students are capable of nowadays?
Absolutely Amazing!
I was somewhat surprised that Microsoft has decided to launch for free (for the first time) Seadragon Mobile, a very interesting zooming-user-interface, on Apple’s iPhone. Check it out:
I was first captivated by Seadragon some years ago when it was shown in a demo – the way it can (infinitely) zoom down smoothly and still be sharp (without first opening a gigazillion-byte file), the way it has almost zero UI element on screen for it to work (so nothing is blocking you from the things you actually do want to see) – is something inherently suitable for mobile application, IMHO.
Wonder if this’d take off to one day become a dominant way of accessing information. While currently it’s very much just browsing through static images, some day it may be interactive elements: links, bookmarks, videos, opened and running applications, etc.
