Light is beautiful

Thoughts of a graphics programmer, demoscener and spare time photographer

The science gap

Posted on 2013-01-11 by Julien Guertault

I mentioned before the video by cartoonist Jorge Cham, illustrating the explanations of a CERN researcher on the Large Hadron Collider and the Higgs boson. This video was great and explained in layman’s terms the matter (pun intended) of this huge research project.

Today I watched a TEDx talk by Jorge Cham, tackling with what he refers to as the science gap, between the people who do science, and the general public. A part of his talk explains the story behind the Higgs Boson animation, and this story alone makes the talk worth watching.

3D animation of a nebula

Posted on 2012-12-22 by Julien Guertault

The following is an artist made animation approximating the 3D structure of IC 1396, a nebula and young stars cluster in the constellation of Cepheus. On his blog, the author, J-P Metsävainio, explains how he created this animation.

Tour of the International Space Station

Posted on 2012-11-22 by Julien Guertault

From the video description: “In her final days as Commander of the International Space Station, Sunita Williams of NASA recorded an extensive tour of the orbital laboratory […]. The tour includes scenes of each of the station’s modules and research facilities with a running narrative by Williams of the work that has taken place and which is ongoing aboard the orbital outpost.”

Making the subtle obvious

Posted on 2012-11-20 by Julien Guertault

Take a video, decompose it into several frequency components, filter and amplify each one, recompose them back to an output video, profit. Nuit-Blanche mentioned this paper presented earlier this year at SIGGRAPH. I never thought you could actually detect the blood flow from a simple video…

Update: more to see in this follow-up post.

Article on the color mixing tool of Paper for iPad

Posted on 2012-11-11 by Julien Guertault

Paper is a drawing application made by FiftyThree for the iPad, that has earned some attention. FastCompany has a story on what seems to be the central tool of Paper: The Magical Tech Behind Paper For iPad’s Color-Mixing Perfection.

The article follows the authors on their thought process, from the starting observation that linear interpolation in RGB space leads to unpleasing results, to experiments and eventually, the final tool.