Tuesday 16 November 2010

XBOX Kinect hacked for 3D hologram.... ish.

Secondly and on a completely different plane of reality, heres YouTube user Okreylos who has hacked the Microsoft Kinect already, after it only being on the market for a matter of hours, to create a "3D" image by combining the color and depth from the camera's sensors. Essentially he has managed to take what the sensor records and put the image back together.


Obviously, as he says, the camera is only looking in one POV, so the shadowy dark parts of the image are what the sensor cannot pick up. This is just the tip of the iceberg of something that is apparently just $56 dollars worth of parts & that is only a few geek steps away from producing full holographic pictures and real Minority Report moments. The opportunities are endless...


Monday 15 November 2010

Merapi Volcano - Yogjakarta, Indonesia - Eruption Timelapse

My buddy Robin Fenlon, a photographer and current botherer of pro-ladies tennis players, (he films them for the WTA) travelled for 2 days to get to Yogjakarta in Indonesia to film the eruption of the Merapi volcanoe. He had originally planned to do a 4 day time lapse, but due to airport closures he had to resort to car, train and cow. OK. Not cow, but he put the hard miles in and managed a 1 day shoot and boy was it worth it.

Saturday 6 November 2010

Augmented Reality allows you to defend your city from the Empire

Heres some impressive test footage of a new game due for release soon on the iPhone 4. Developed by Vertigore Games, the software uses the phones camera and gyroscope to give the impression that the Empire's TIE-Fighters are attacking your city. Quite how this might work when you play it on the tube, I'm not sure, and obviously the bad guys ships aren't interacting with the environment (now that would be worth playing on public transport) but so far as a entertaining aside, its a cool step forward.

Published by THQ Wireless, Star Wars Arcade: Falcon Gunner will hit the Apple Store in mid November for the iPhone 4 and iPod Touch 4th Gen. No support for the ageing 3G as the RAM and memory on that model just isn't up to scratch.

Removing my phones keyboard & 3D mapping for Vimeo

I don't class myself as being particularly huge or massive limbed, but i for one struggle to knock out a quick text reply (whilst avoiding obvious yoof speak) on my iPhone, due to my inability to hit the touch screen keys accurately. Replying that i will be 'just 5 minutes' can sometimes take me, 5 minutes or longer.

Saying all that, if someone suggested we remove the keyboard from my phone, much like that awful car on Top Gear that had a joystick instead of steering wheel, i would laugh at them and point mockingly.

This hasn't stopped a company called 8pen, doing just that, by replacing the standard QWERTY keyboard with a large, open space in which letters and phrases are constructed by a series of gesture inputs through specific sectors of the pad. The input free's up a lot of screen space, allowing for bigger Enter, Shift & Delete buttons.

The concept aims to bring back a more simple and fluent technique that better replicates actual handwriting. The video explains it much better than i can in words, so take 4 mins to look through how you might be sending texts and emails in the near future.

8pen is available on handsets running Android 2.2, would love to hear if anyone has used it and how successful it was.


You can read more about it at www.the8pen.com

Secondly and on a much larger scale is this fantastic demo of projection mapping 3D content. To help celebrate the Vimeo awards which in turn was sponsored by Honda, they used the Frank Gehry IAC HQ as a canvas in which to project this impressive light and sound display, created by the guys at Seeper.

My favourite part is @ 1:13 when things go a bit TRON, and yes, you'll have to bare with the slightly infuriating camera work too, i for one would be happy to watch the whole thing on a wide shot without it being over cut by some enthusiastic editor.


Monday 1 November 2010

Tom Lowe's TimeScapes: Rapture

This is a trailer put together from footage shot over the summer for Tom Lowes upcoming film, "TimeScapes A Modern Portrait of the American Southwest. There's some beautiful shots within this trailer, not surprisingly after Tom won the Astronomy Photographer of the Year award for this


You can follow the production of the film at: twitter.com/ timescapes