Yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day was this timelapse video of the space shuttle Endeavour in the streets of Los Angeles, being transferred from the LAX airport to the California Space Center.
GoPro, the company that makes those tiny camera you can usually spot on extreme sports footages, has just announced its last one: the GoPro HERO3. The quality seems to be jaw dropping, and yet this is a very affordable little toy (about $200 to $400 depending on the version). I don’t mean to make promotional writing here; maybe I’m just becoming a fanboy of theirs.
This is going to be a short one: I haven’t done any extensive search, but I still want to make a back of the envelope note with a couple of links.
The website Fstoppers mentions this interview explaining how Stanley Kubrick managed to shoot Barry Lyndon (1975) under natural candle light thanks to a Zeiss f/0.7 lens mounted on a specially modified Mitchell BNC camera.
Back in 2009, Iñigo Quilez was leaving everyone in awe by releasing the milestone 4kB intro, Elevated, in cooperation with the group TBC. If you haven’t seen this masterpiece, watch it, and keep in mind this was generated from only 4096 bytes worth of data (just the text of this article is already more than a third of that).
After that, news were that he was hired by Pixar, and besides some in progress screenshots from time to time and some live coding experiments, not much was heard from him.
Then a couple of months ago this interview was published, and more recently this praising article of CGW, where we could read he had been in charge of the vegetation rendering in Pixar’s Brave. Needless to say, many people were looking forward to seeing what he would do next, especially in the real-time domain.
Today the group he’s part of, BeautyPi, which seems to be focusing on interactive animations (they presented their work earlier this year at SIGGRAPH), has published the following video. Being a showcase of their last experiments, it is not entertaining like an animation, a clip or a demo are. You could even say it’s boring. But it is visually very impressive, both technically and artistically. Although this is some real-time material, the quality is not that far from movie standards. Regarding the interaction, I am suspecting they are only scratching the surface and they may come up with some very interesting things. What these folks are doing is definitely worth following.
Marshmallow Laser Feast created this 60s teaser for the new McLaren P12, “McLaren vs Aerodynamics”. Using a TV screen sliding on a rig, they bring a volumetric light painting effect revealing the shape of the car. You can read more on Creative Application Network.
This project idea is excellent on so many levels… Too bad it’s only a simulation.
More information on the Vimeo page.